Having switched back to Linux after many years, even looking at Mac OS feels like poverty now. Not because of the UX or hardware but because of the company behind it.
Linux seems to be the only OS that makes good use of the middle mouse button, unfortunately many mice are not designed for that kind of wear on the button, so this is always the first to break :(
Poverty is not quite the right word. "Sterility" is the word I would use. My linux machine is a complex, fiddly beast, which I treat like a bonsai tree. My mac, however, gives me "dead mall vibes" in comparison. It's not all bad, I get more work done. But it certainly does not feel "alive" in the same way my linux machines feel.
The "alive" point hits the nail on the head for me, and covers the full system health spectrum - my underspec'd homelab/project laptop certainly feels alive, in the sense that only things that are alive can cough up blood.
Yeah that’s a better way to put it. I meant “poverty” in a somewhat spiritual sense, like a lack of aliveness that you’re talking about. It is weird to talk about operating systems this way I guess, but it is how it feels.
So you're saying there could be a constant number of Linux desktop users who are a larger percentage of a shrinking market. I suppose anything is possible.
Without knowing the methodology that StatCounter is using, the numbers themselves aren't especially meaningful, although a consistent upward trend in those numbers could be showing something real.
In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology).
(Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)
For numbers I did like to see absolute numbers. While I have no doubt that people are switching to Linux, but an increasing number of people are also just giving up on computers in favour of just using their phones for everything. Some of the increase in percentage Linux is seeing could also be due to Windows and Mac users dropping having a computer in general.
That's not to say that people aren't switching, I see no reason to get a new Mac next time I'm replacing my laptop. My work will be done more easily on Linux at this point.
It could also be showing that the market is consolidating towards big tech and that only those wanting to stay with their independent statistics provider are still with StatCounter. In turn, the users of services with such morals could be more likely to be Linux distribution users.
I don't have data better than StatCounter, but if we're thinking of methodology and whether it could be accurate, this is a possibility to take into account
The optimist in me wants to not leave unmentioned that Linux is more accessible than ever and information easier to come by while Windows has never been shittier (which old Windows version shipped with tracking and ads?) and macOS is still priced and protected the way it always has been: much easier to dual or live boot Mint. Come for the freedom and stay for the ease of use. It's no coincidence that Microsoft made it very easy to use Linux software within Windows now (obviously without contributing the inverse mechanism, that'd be stupid): people want it. I really hope there's more truth to this than to the first paragraph
ChromeOS uses the Linux kernel in a browser based userspace, and offers a VM for running GNU/Linux as guest OSes, isn't quite the same as being GNU/Linux, otherwise Windows with WSL is also Linux.
I've seen some technical documentation, such as readmes for source code, that assumes the user is on a Windows laptop running WSL. At this point in time if I see anything mentioning Ubuntu I just assume it's written with WSL/Azure in mind.
There are ads everywhere on Windows. And onedrive hijacks your filesystem.
Even at my fortune 20 company I see: "DNC RATINGS COMPARED TO RNC" clickbait crap. I'm amazed my company lets that garbage through. Probably because we have legacy software + some corruption with purchasing. Sharepoint... really?
I'd want to know a lot more about why macOS dropped ~5% in one month, why unknown doubled in ~1 year, why ChromeOS has more than 50% variance between halves of the school year, how ChromeOS had more users in the middle of summer '23 than the middle of spring '24, and more before I'd make any bold conclusions on how much what is changing and from where.
It's so strange. I'm an android user myself but majority of my dev friends are iPhone users. I can't see them switching because they of Apple ecosystem - mainly iMessage. So I'm really curious what's driving people from OSX to Linux
I was a long time Mac user and developer (iOS and macOS) that switched back to Linux after about ten years of using macOS.
The main reasons were mainly getting tired/frustrated at how hostile Apple has been to developers and users. Apple has been slowly turning macOS into iOS, from the UI to slowly trying to lock down the OS. There is also the Apple upgrade treadmill where they force you to upgrade your hardware through planned obsolescence.
And it's probably going to get much worse unless Apple radically change their pricing behavior. It has become very hard for most enthusiasts to justify the price of an high-end Mac...
I'm a macOS user but would be interested in getting a linux desktop, I've heard Linux Mint or PopOS are pretty good just from a ease of use perspective? I've used Ubuntu in the past and had all sorts of display graphics driver problems.
I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?
I was looking around a while last year and those two are the exact ones I landed on, with a slight lean towards Pop!_OS due to the team behind it striving for maximum "out-of-the-box" usability.
Linux Mint has a special place in my heart as it was the first distro I used back in my high school computer science class and it holds up exceptionally well today. It's also community driven compared to Pop!_OS which is developed by System76.
I think a lot of stock gets put into distros for driver issues, but a huge factor is the hardware you're running on.
Some distros like popOS intentially bundle drivers for newer graphics cards and the like, but that aside, if you don't have really hardcore requirements, picking decent hardware that's a few years old will probably smooth out your journey a lot, regardless of which distro you pick.
If you're coming from macOS you might be happy to pay a premium for a purpose built machine as well (I have a System 76 laptop which has served me really well for a good 5 years or so now with no sign of slowing down)
As an aside, Linux Mint, PopOS and Ubuntu (the three you mentioned) are all great choices for a reliable, stable desktop.
Fedora strikes a good balance between stability and being up-to-date and secure.
It's also the recommended distribution by Privacy Guides:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/
I really, really want to migrate from macOS to Fedora on my M1 MBA but Asahi isn't completely there yet.
I’ve been daily driving popos for about 5 years. I’m not an admin by any stretch and it’s worked great. Upgrades and everything mostly flawless. I came from a 13” MacBook Pro (2015), it took a little adjustment but it’s been great overall. The good thing about POP is that we’ve found ububtu software works on it.
We ended up installing popos on our work Linux (Ubuntu)dell because we had trouble installing the nvidia drivers for the card we got.
I had one hiccup 4 years ago where it wouldn’t upgrade to the next version because I did some out of band install. (It was a usb to hdmi adapter…)
It was a little to get it sorted but I never ended up with a unbootable system..
I never had any trouble using Ubuntu, but I tried Mint for a project (I needed to import video over Firewire, and apparently, the kernel support for this has been removed) and Mint worked great for this project. I was so impressed I kept Mint installed because everything just worked.
I ended up moving to Linux Mint in 2018, as I need a new laptop and was annoyed that the current generation of Mac laptops didn't come with any USB ports. It's been my daily driver since, and I've been pretty happy with it in general.
You should be able to try either distro with a live usb which will give you an indication if anything will break immediately on your system.
> I've used Ubuntu in the past and had all sorts of display graphics driver problems.
Were you by any chance using Nvidia graphics hardware?
If you play games, you'll likely have the best overall experience with AMD graphics. (Assuming the GPU model isn't too new; it can take some months for the drivers to catch up to new models.) Most desktop distros will have everything you need; no need to go downloading drivers from vendors or turning to third party software repositories.
If you don't play games, either AMD or Intel graphics ought to be good.
Nvidia drivers can be made to work well with most games, and certain distros make the setup easy, but they come with baggage and hassles. They're huge, and they have a long history of integrating poorly with the OS overall. The problems they caused me outside of games were part of what drove me to stop buying their hardware.
Get a cheap used laptop for ~$300 and run linux on it, you will be surprised at how much value you can’t get out of that. I use it as a dev machine, although I only do embedded work and some web work on it. I still drive with my Mac, but I use the linux laptop over tigervnc and it work fine over ethernet. I would suggest looking at pop_os or mint. Both are stable LTS users but do seem to keep up with drivers and kernels reasonably close to “newish”
Depends on your experience level and willingness to tinker. The bad news is that in my experience, you always end up opening a terminal and fiddling with configuration files no matter what distribution you use. The good news is that if you are OK doing that, you don't actually need that much from your distribution other than the useful trick of keeping itself up to date.
Ubuntu is alright. But you trade off up to date software for stability. And the bi-annual upgrades to the latest LTS are a bit of a PITA and don't always go that smoothly. And you end up running older kernel and whatever else was current around the time they freeze their LTS version. So, for something that is supposed to be user friendly and stable, it actually ends up having a lot of issues and not being all that stable over time.
If you want to get the best possible experience with graphics, you basically need the latest kernels, drivers, fixes, etc. as soon as they get released. Ubuntu doesn't deliver that because you get stuck on either the yearly or LTS release.
These days I prefer rolling release style distributions. It's just less hassle in the end and not really less stable for me. The opposite actually in my experience. You could go with Debian testing, fedora, and a few other options. But I ended up using Manjaro which is based on arch linux. My reason is simple: the SteamDeck uses a distribution that is based on arch linux. I wanted to run steam on my laptop. So, I figured that using what Valve themselves seem to actively support and invest in makes a whole lot of sense. I've not been disappointed with this so far (three years and counting).
Installing games is easy. Getting things like Gnome, Steam, etc installed via pac is easy. And I can install whatever via snap, flatpak, or native arch packages. More importantly, everything stays up to date and fresh. After three years I have no need to reinstall my laptop because it's fine. Every once in a while I need to deal with some minor issues after some update for which the solution usually is a Google search away. But other than that, Manjaro has been rock solid for me. And besides, I've never used a Linux distribution in 30 years that didn't have that issue.
Linux on desktop is just a solid workhorse. My 13+ years laptop is chugging along happily with Ubuntu and my Windows8 10+ years beefed up desktop takes 10 minutes to start and 5 minutes to open a browser and basically a broken mess of security holes.
Appart from LTS most distros still support the n-1 release until the n+1 is released so in reality you can always do a double upgrade once a year.
But ultimately it is a moot point as major distro upgrades are barely different than the regular security upgrades. There are just more packages upgraded at once.
It's not forced, but it's a trivial upgrade if you have a basic setup.
I also have a desktop where I do some hobby AI development and once in a blue moon, Nvidia drivers would break the system because of kernel upgrades.
I've been a linux desktop user for a long time now (~25 years?). I generally don't talk about it, as it's not a suitable environment for a lot of people. So I'm always surprised when I stumble upon somebody using it. Just recently I took a Google Cloud training course and the instructor used it as his daily driver. Not only was this impressive to see "out in the wild" but it was nice to see all the tools needed to lead a remote training course worked in his setup. He had a webcam working great (even focused/panned on him as he moved). He had a powerpoint/slideshow going. He had zoom/teleconferencing software working. And it all worked through the course. There was never 10-20 minute pause because something wasn't working right. Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see.
Sorry to be a downer but a cloud instructor is still a techie. I'd be way more impressed with a lawyer or an accountant using it but I've never seen one so far.
fwiw; I worked in a company that was kind of a Linux pioneer back in the 90s. We ran Linux for everyone. The accountant ran a VM for his accouting software, but except that everything was Linux. And once set up, it worked very well, for techies and non-technical alike.
If you get past installation and initial setup, using Linux in a desktop role isn't really challenging if you've got access to support.
I cannot even remember the last time I plugged in a web cam and it didn't work on Linux. Just yesterday I borrowed a USB inspection camera from a friend in order to help me run a new ethernet line to my shop. The kit came with a "WIFI dongle" that you are supposed to use with your phone and some random app, but instead I just plugged it into my laptop, fired up Cheese and it came up immediately.
To Intel's credit ipu6 packs a ton a ton a ton of super advanced capabilities in. Having a good video pipeline is a huge edge. That it took a while for upstreaming to get really into gear on Linux does not super astound me. This feels like a place where we need to expect the open source world to have to find its purchase first before traction forward can really start.
This was a super shitty experience though. It really felt unplanned & chaotic. Hopefully some of the kernel architecture carved out for ipu6 is good & useful for running other video pipelines.
Most webcammers don't knowingly think heavily on color science, but ideally our devices can.
The lack of device drivers for iOS means that manufacturers had to start getting serious about ensuring their devices follow USB class specifications, because otherwise they will not work on an iPad.
Linux (which has USB class drivers) has only benefitted from this.
While true, cameras in Linux are a bit of a hassle. Trying to get one webcam in two applications at the same time, cropping or rotating the camera in one app but not another, etc.
This is getting better/fixed with pipewire though.
Yeah, 20ish years ago I remember having to compile alsa drivers, network drivers, cups drivers, etc. I can honestly see why some left and never came back.
That hasn't been the case for a long time now. I can't remember the last time I plugged something in that didn't work. My home setup is a minipc with wireless kb and mouse on a unified USB receiver, hdmi to a large monitor, bluetooth speaker, wireless printer, and USB webcam with mic.
I didn't have to do a single thing. It all just works. And it has for years, through various distro hopping.
This comment is a bit odd to me since I don't think those basic things you mention have been difficult to get working on most distros for quite a while now.
These threads always seem to oscillate back and forth between "It's 2024 and you can't get Peripheral X working with Linux!" and "Peripheral X's have worked for 20 years now!"
That probably means that it works for some people, but not all. So if you want to use peripheral X, maybe you get lucky and you have just the right versions of hardware and software, and it works. Or maybe you're unlucky, and it doesn't work, and you can spend months trying to get it work. It's just not how I want to spend my time.
That's pretty much impossible. In a sibling thread I explained that even if a machine is Ubuntu certified, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's compatible in real world.
Assembled PCs tend to be more compatible (because of more standard components), but on the othe hand each individual component doesn't receive the coverage (testing) as laptops. There was no way for me to know that my mobo's sleep is broken on Linux, even if the previous mobos from the same producer had good compatibility.
> In a sibling thread I explained that even if a machine is Ubuntu certified, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's compatible in real world.
I've never even heard of Ubuntu certification. I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility. This always works. So it is not pretty much impossible.
> I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility
I'm not sure if you refer to friends or strangers on the internet.
In the former case, one is restricted to a very small pool of models to choose from.
In the latter case, "strangers on the internet" who say that their hardware "works perfectly", are typically completely unreliable; saying "my hardware works perfectly is treated as a badge of honor, so there's a perverse incentive.
One example, in a lot I've personally experience, is that I've read from multiple "strangers on the internet" that the wifi from the laptop I'm typing from, "works perfectly". In reality, the Linux drivers are half broken (on Linux, it has a poor signal).
I'd imagine that the Linux users who report success are probably more selective when it comes to hardware. It's been my primary OS for 25+ years and I've seldom faced compatibility issues, but I also do my research and buy accordingly.
Ok a bit flippant, but I've been running KDE on my NUC as a secondary desktop for years now. Most of the time it works fairly well, but then suddenly something breaks or needs tweaking. And when it does it's often not trivial for a non-geek to handle.
That said, if they can get Krdp working properly, I'll almost certainly switch to KDE as my main driver, and demote Windows to my secondary.
Weirdly, by compatibility is better on Linux than on Windows.
On Windows, on a clean install, I need to install the drivers from WU to get audio working, etc. And then I need to open Intel website to get the latest Bluetooth driver, go to Dell to get the latest wifi, as on Windows Update's these are not the latest.
And even after all of this, some of the drivers on Linux is better maintained, because the support for old Intel GPUs on Windows is very short. Meanwhile, on Linux, I get Vulkan support, and all recent drivers on my Broadwell.
Video perf is way better on Linux here.
I'm always befuddled by comments like this. I have been daily driving Linux (arch,btw) for quite a while, and I have never once had a driver issue, even with NVIDIA graphics cards. The only times I run into issues is when I am trying to run games with anti-cheat, but even that is being worked on by Valve. Linux mostly just works in my experience, I don't see where the idea comes from that its a huge blocker, minus the lack of specialized software.
Friend of mine got a new laptop which i recommended without looking closely on the specs, as it was listed as supported on ubuntu a lenovo yoga x 11 gen I think.
Found out afterwards that the version with windows preinstalled(that the friend bought, because of the cheap windows licence that maybe needed) comes with a special mipi camera from intel with ipu6 out-of-tree driver that only supports specific kernels and specific distros and while there are packages for ubuntu I couldn't get it to work.
Linux works if you don't buy the wrong hardware, windows works on any bought hardware.
I'm not against linux and I use it and most of the time it works out of the box, but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
> but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
I've never once looked at reviews. The only time I've been bitten in the last 20 years was when given a MBP for work (the intel model with butterfly keys).
There's definitely edge cases out there. But these days they're exactly that: edge cases.
I said that linux mostly works out of the box, but your "edge cases" where in this case:
All lenovo yoga x1 models from the 8. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 2 years
All lenovo carbon x1 models from the 10. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 3 years
I'm pretty sure it also affects all newer hp and dell models since at least ~2023
It's great that your choice of laptops are never the ones that are broken, but then again, I never said linux never works.
Even if you set aside the webcam problem, the lenovo laptops who where always called out for their good linux support had problems:
The 2016 yoga x1 model couldn't get to sleep (s3i problem which many laptops had) and if it good back from sleep it need a special command to reconnect trackpad and trackpoint.
There where some special patches to make it work and after about a year it worked, still not a possibility for non technical people
The 2016 thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 model sometimes needs a special command to reconnect the trackpad and trackpoint, think that got fixed after ~3 years.
Neither of theses devices have a working fingerprint sensor, I can't even think of one that works with linux
Neither of these devices had a supported mobile (lte) modem, as the built in modem wasn't supported and you can't change it because the bios has only whitelisted the preinstalled model.
The new s3i sleep modus also made it impossible for linux laptops to sleep for about a year until it was fixed.
Did all of this get better over time?
Yes
Will every big new hardware thing still mean that some linux things are broken for some time?
Yes
Again, linux works for most of the hardware most of the time, but this will bite you when you expect certain things or devices to work.
But you’re comparing manually installing Linux with a preinstalled Windows. Of course Windows is going to win there - it’s not a fair comparison.
Let’s take an extreme example of that same argument: If someone’s only experience of macOS was manually installing on hackintoshes then they’d say macOS was hard to use too.
And by that same token, I can tell you from experience that manually installing Windows on new hardware isn’t a piece of cake either. You have the same bullshit experience trying to locate drivers.
The common theme here is that nontechnical people wouldn’t be building their own OEM systems or wiping laptop drives and performing fresh installs. Regardless of whether that’s Linux or Windows.
I have used Linux desktop for around two decades on my laptops and never had any issues with drivers or anything else. Various distributions have worked very well out of box with different models of laptops and PCs.
"It works perfectly" statements are invariably false.
For starters, Bluetooth has been broken on Linux until recent times (a couple of years, probably, maybe less), because of the piece of crap that Bluez is. In some Ubuntu distros, Bluetooth may still have some broken functionality (I remember examining the configfiles).
Ubuntu's hibernation was broken last time I've checked, because the setup was setting a 2 GiB swapfile, which is not enough for the RAM of modern machines. My last installation, last week, still set the same size.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, and most of my machines always had some driver issues.
The laptop I'm writing from needs my mobile phone as wifi bridge, because the Linux driver is poorly written, and it causes extremely poor signal quality. I also can't workaround tearing that plagues the whole desktop environment.
My other laptop has issues with the speakers that will never be fixed. And another one or two issues that I can't remember.
I wanted to buy a certain Lenovo laptop that is officially Ubuntu certified. Lenovo doesn't offer the OEM Ubuntu that they used for the certification though, and the vanilla version doesn't work (I've stopped checking after an year or so).
My desktop has a wake from suspend problem.
To be fair though, I have no doubt that if one chooses a certain machine (laptop) based on Linux compatibility, they will be happy - but it implies a certain sacrifice upfront.
I felt taken back before mid-2000 reading this comment. I mean it's been easily 15 years since those very basic things really just works on all the major Linux distributions.
I recently tried Linux Mint, initially Cinnamon, then installed KDE Plasma. In the former fractional scaling was badly broken. In the latter, I couldn't control screen brightness.
Overall almost everything worked but not all things. And I'm used to working through technical hiccups and being patient. But ultimately there's no guarantee "Linux" will be fully functional on your unique hardware setup, and it's still challenging to choose distribution, windows manager, desktop environment, etc and there's no way to know which combo is best for your hardware without a lot of time consuming trial and error.
> I've been a linux desktop user for a long time now (~25 years?). I generally don't talk about it, as it's not a suitable environment for a lot of people.
Same: I was already using Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11) on the desktop or something like that.
But why not talk about it? I switched both my wife (she's very OK with tech) and my mother-in-law (she's not good with tech) to desktop Linux.
If my mother-in-law can use Linux, everybody can. Most people nowadays only need one app: a browser and Linux is totally for that use case, which is about 99% of all users' out there's usecase.
I switched to desktop Linux about a year ago. Fedora Sway Spin. I have done a major version upgrade without issue. None of the buttons moved. Nothing broke. Just business as usual. No complaints about the OS itself. The final straw was a Steam game that wouldn’t launch on Windows 10 but worked in Steam/Proton. I haven’t booted Windows since.
I'm not even going to say Linux, because people confuse it with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint GARBAGE. Never use that later crap for desktop. Its so outdated and buggy. You are using the terminal on a daily basis to get basic features working, if your hardware works at all.
Fedora is so good, I feel offended I didn't know about it until now. I am bitter against M$ and bitter against Canonical.
IIRC StatCounter's numbers are based on browser user-agent strings. I'm guessing most Steam Deck users are mostly using it for games as opposed to one web browsing, so probably not.
As a Linux desktop user, I installed windows in a VM to use an application that is not available for Linux (a printer app made by a vendor was available only for Windows and macOS).
Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, …
Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.
What blows me away is how poor printers still work. On a bare Debian laptop, I just walk up to it and it prints via USB with no configuration needed. Network printers I think auto-discover reliably as well, but it has been a few years since I've done that (we have a tendency to not trust printers at our small security firm so we don't hook them up to the network)
At least they've solved that you had to wait 2 minutes anymore when plugging your mouse into a different USB port before it finds the driver from Windows Update again
C'mon Adobe. Release CC for Linux. Bless a DE or ship your own. Linux's market share will only increase and your suite should be pretty platform abstracted by now, anyway.
If Google is paying Apple effectively not to make its own search engine, I would not be surprised if Apple and/or Microsoft were paying Adobe not to port CC to Linux.
I don’t think we need a conspiracy theory. Most likely they don’t bother with 5% market share, most of which probably have strong feelings about closed source in general and Adobe in specific.
Wasn't Mac OS less than or around 5% for a long time after the 90s? If they thought that was sustainable, maybe Linux should be close by now? Of course there are many other things to also take in account, so who knows.
Most apps started on the Mac, so there was no porting needed. Also, most professionals had Macs, so Adobe had a 50/50 revenue split between Macs and Windows, even though there was a huge market share difference.
I used Linux first as a 14 year old kid in the 90s who found Win$ows to become slow overtime and we couldn't afford a new computer. Fell in love with Linux instantly given the customization and efficiency. Not needing things like an AntiVirus was huge. I haven't looked back at all and its likely what drove me into CS. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. We had a few courses in Undergrad (outdated of course) that required students to run things like LAMP server and GCC and there was a good culture of running Ubuntu and other distros. I would have done 30+ installs for my classmates and ran into all sorts of issues with laptop drivers, overheating etc. Things are probably better on that front now with compatible hardware, (I only buy linux compatible hardware so I'm not sure).I really wish to see more widespread adoption especially in developing countries.
Bought $2k laptop Acer Predator Helios Neo 16. Windows 11 doesn't install at all (can't see the hard drive). Win10 installed but touchpad doesn't work (even after drivers install), network didn't work (neither ethernet nor wifi) without external USB stick, and so on. After internet connection and installing all updates touchpad and dynamics still don't work.
Mine came with no OS. I need Linux primarily, but still Windows occasionally for Mission Planner and other Windows-only apps. So I've installed a second M.2 disk and had this terrible experience with Windows installation afterwards.
Where did you manage to get one of those without Windows pre-installed? I was looking at one to replace my outdated Predator, and was hoping to save the ~$100 on the license.
Their official network drivers are called Killer and are very malware-looking ("unknown developer" blocked by windows). It's unbelievable. Looks like some weird spyware junk too.
No idea then. Maybe it's something to do with Windows 10, but it definitely was showing me tons of "software blocked" and "unknown developer" warnings.
Further tangent, but I remember seeing Killer NIC's booth at ComicCon in 2007 with that very cool, very pointy heatsink (I assume that is what it was, anyway...?).
Yeah with the wired stuff back in the day it was a little wild in that their idea was basically put a mini PC on a card which offloads work. Never really turned out that beneficial for gaming but it was at least unique. Then later in their life they just started OEMing Intel and Qualcomm NICs and sticking a driver layer for overcomplicate QoS which wasn't even offloaded anymore. The good news was if you just use the base driver it means you more or less end up with a standard e.g. Intel NIC though.
Loads better than it being "Acer ZXGT423LV" which is the trend with smartphones and many other devices today. I'll happily take an "embarrassing" name over that mess.
Eh, knowing tech companies, we will end up with the worst of both
Acer Spectral MeatGrinder RPG Bazooka 16 ZXGT423LV-2024
Which should be unique enough, but then they just reuse the name and only change the code part
I write this as I look at an ROG Zephyrus G16 (2023) GU630HE (Last part is important, I think I had to check if it was the model with one of the RAM slots soldered)
Last time I got myself a new laptop (2 years ago), I just removed the SSD (with Linux on it) from the old one and put it in the new one. (It was larger than the included one anyway, I had previously upgraded it.)
…it simply booted and continued working as before. No driver reinstall, no reconfiguring things. I don't remember but I don't think I even had to muck with BIOS/UEFI boot settings or anything.
Downside: a year later the SSD died ;D (possibly age/use related, it was 5~6 years old at that point)
I had a similar issue trying to do a Windows reinstall on a Dell laptop. The cause was due to the default setup of Intel RST for the storage. The suggested fix was injecting the RST drivers into the Windows installer. I couldn't get that to work and ended up installing it in a VM then cloning the VM hard-drive onto the laptop's via Clonezilla. Unfortunately it was for work so just using Linux wasn't an option.
I wonder if more people are using linux as a desktop or generally, people are using less desktop devices with the rise of phones and tablets. What i mean is, before even old people and the normal users would need desktop and they would prefer windows and mac, but now i feel like they are generally less probe to use desktops and dont need them so that might be contributing to the sudden market share rise of linux maybe? U know what i mean?
Semi-relevant but a few years old, a 2021 VFX industry survery found that around 60% of workstations run Linux, and that number is expected to continue growing.
What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is?
>VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is?
The deliverable of a VFX project is a video file or an artifact that goes into a video file (no complex dependency on Windows) whereas most games need to be able to run on Windows.
I don't think that's it. Games also need to run on consoles, mobile phones, and sometimes web browsers. Cross platform development isn't a new concept in game development, and all major commercial game engines work on Linux (well, they do today at least)
Most software used in the VFX industry does officially support Linux, and a lot of those tools are also used in game dev. Maybe Unity and Unreal's Linux support hasn't been great, and that's the only reason?
I guess it's easier to get into gamedev than VFX as an indie, and if you have little/no technical background then there's a good chance you're on Windows or Mac when you start looking up Unity/Unreal/etc tutorials, and then you just stick with what you know.
The market is on Windows and the engine/tools target Windows first. Visual Studio, Maya, Adobe, etc have dominated historically. Jetbrains and Blender have gained ground but run well on Windows.
I'm not even sure you can deploy to an Xbox or Playstation from Linux/Mac officially but I haven't tried this gen.
With WSL and containers etc, getting something on Linux from a Windows machine is way easier than the other way around so there's really no driving force towards Linux.
But I'm also very confused by your link. Do you mean the visual effects industry or whoever uses this VFXPlatform project that added Windows and Mac support much later?
1) If you want to sell your game, you go where the users are buying: Windows.
2) Visual Studio still offers a second-to-none developer experience. If you're targeting Windows exclusively (which you are in PC gamedev), Visual Studio is pretty much a must.
I get the impression that career Windows C++ programmers, and especially game programmers, tend to really like Visual Studio. Especially IntelliSense and the debugger. To the extent that equivalents exist on Linux, the consensus seems to be that they require way too much setup for a UX that isn't nearly as good (I vaguely recall one statement along the lines of "like going back to the 80s, and not in a good way").
I believe it's the other way around: V-Ray explicitly advertises that you can avoid those expensive Windows licenses for your render farm by using Linux. And Houdini and its Mantra renderer run natively on Linux since forever. As does Renderman, the Pixar in-house engine.
If Pixar was forced to use Windows on their render farm, they'd be looking at a roughly $24mio !!! licensing bill. That's a VERY strong incentive to use Linux as much as possible.
After all of the frustration I experienced getting Windows 11 setup in a way that was comfortable for me to use I'm ready to switch to Linux the next time I need to reinstall a operating system. So glad that SteamDeck is making Linux gaming viable. Now we just need the GPU manufactures to give Linus the same driver support Windows gets.
I had similar feelings about Windows 11, but I recently found the Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC build, and it works perfectly for me.
Debloated and no ads. You do have to do a little bit of troubleshooting, install extra components (e.g. to install the Microsoft store), etc., but it was significantly easier than debloating a regular Windows 11 install.
I just got off the phone from my aunt who was filling forms in with Adobe Reader, editing word documents sent from her solicitor.
No it's not all in a browser. That's a shitty assumption and one that should not be forced upon anyone.
I always wonder how many people have been fucked over by a helpful relative giving them a Linux install with a browser and telling them to get on with it ...
So a set of barely maintained applications that cannot support modern Hidpi screens that are shipped with almost every midrange laptop (except Thunderbird which is the only passable app in comparison to its alternative).
The rendering of the Office file formats by the LibreOffice is dogshit. Feature parity is a rounding error. LiberOffice UX is completely from last century. There is so many little UX things that MS added which are so out of the league (like live content update from Office 2007!) for LibreOffice and its outdated codebase.
The Office alone can maybe replaced partially in Linux-compatible environments. However the MS Office-integrated prosumer software ecosystem is the thing that keeps people on Windows. Unless Linux people redesign the whole ecosystem to be as accommodating to closed source app ecosystem and find a time machine to replace all the existing Windows ecosystem, nothing will change.
You are getting downvoted, which is sad but also a testament of how delusional the fanboys actually are. Not that I don't think doesn't have its uses cases/upsides.
The reality is that even without talking about the UI and various stability/compatibility/performance (oh god) issues there are even some very basic missing functionalities that ones will encounter regularly when doing stuff that is not just low-level administrative filler work.
If one company would decide to invest in developing a decent competitive alternative it could be worthwhile but, in the meantime, most people are better served with browser-based stuff.
Either the Google stuff, free Microsoft version or even the newer Proton offering are decent but there are some semi-commercial offerings that can be decent too.
On the surface LibreOffice is all right, but the hard reality is that it is way too much of a PITA to work with for most people to bother unless they really don't have a choice or are forced too for some reason.
The fanboys don't like that reality and would rather deny it instead of working on fixing the issue; which is precisely why it's a lost cause.
I installed Fedora on laptops of few mine friends during last years. All of them are using it till today.
One of them was really sceptical, but after while said "I though linux is more for nerds and more different than Win." Well, she is just casual user of browser, few chat apps, Kodi and occasionally libre office, but still positive with change.
However while I use linux on server and laptop, I cannot use it on workstation beacuse of Adobe that I need for professional work.
Do you provide support when they ran into issues? IMO there are a lot of variables here that boil down to Windows (and macOS) having the benefit of familiarity, widespread use, and more consistency.
Your experience with Linux will heavily depend on your experience with computers, distro, hardware (e.g. due to obscure driver issues), and workload.
Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux.
- Do you provide support when they ran into issues?
Sure, few of them are from family. They never had issue with OS, mostly it was application related.
- Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent.
I do not agree. Every system update scares me quite a bit.
- There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux.
On Fedora, I never had to install drivers manually. All drivers was installed together with first upgrade after fresh install. Even on very old ThinkPad x201 from 2011. On Windows it's mix of searching on multiple HW manufacturer sites, manually installing them and trying if they are compatible.
I disagree. I use Linux mainly because it's just simpler than Windows. MS went on a pretty dark path in recent years with anti-user behavior, dark patterns etc.
The caveat is that I don't play games on my computers. For gaming, Windows is still the best choice.
So either I can use LTSC and then do a bunch of stuff to get things reasonably working, hope that MS doesn't discontinue the edition next year with no replacement, or ... I can just use Linux. Sounds like a simple choice.
> The average person, though, still would prefer regular Windows 11 over your favorite Linux distro.
I don't know, I think it depends on their needs. Most users these days use their computers as "browser launcher" and for that Linux works just fine. I also don't think most people are enjoying those massive ads in Windows 11.
I don't know if you see the irony of stating how difficult Linux is to use just after telling which hoops to jump to make Windows usable. Modern Linux requires way less than that.
For managing SQL Server and other enterprise grade infrastructure and resource planning. And at least for now, many many other Windows based multi platform development tools that aren't yet practical on Linux desktop. Although, progress is being made in that direction, which is great to see.
I thought about going down this route, but decided not to; if Microsoft is purposefully making it challenging to make Windows usable, why should I devote resources trying to fight it?
For me, simply because I was tired of the shortcomings of Linux. I wanted something closer to a gaming console vs spending a week to get Ethernet over Thunderbolt working.
Ah you'll spend all that time trying to get Linux to do all that and then it'll hit a wall somewhere and 1-2 apps you really need won't work so you'll be ready to switch back to Windows 11 the next time you need to reinstall an operating system.
I never hit that wall you speak of. Has been so amazing I donate 20 bucks every year to the project, just because I feel it has no right being at the same time free and that good.
Apart from the bit where it didn't like the fractional scaling that still doesn't work properly, the power management issues, the absolutely terrible inconsistent user experience, the poor photo management and editing applications, the non-existent support for working with other people via the apps that they use etc etc.
It works for a narrow group of vocal people who use it for specific tasks but generic and usable, it is not.
I've shared this before but in recent years (basically Win8+) it's actually been the opposite. I've had to help companies set up Linux systems running wine because they have better compatibility with ancient "must have" applications.
These days for 90% of users, the only "must have" application is a web browser anyways.
It works until you need Excel. I have yet to find a business which doesn't use Excel in some capacity. As in proper Excel, not somewhat dubious compatibility Excel (LibreOffice).
I'd still argue large swathes of things we take for granted on other platforms don't exist or don't work either.
To be honest, probably. The vast majority of users don't need the advanced features of excel. I've seen people be awed by pivot tables. I'm sure some people need those extra features, but I'm guessing vloopup is about as fancy as it gets.
We do it for all of our quarterly planning so that's a sync with Jira as a datasource, multiple tables and pivot tables, etc. I'd say the whole thing is probably a few MB.
I don't know where you'd start to see a performance difference compared to Excel for Win32.
Eh, it depends on what you're using it for. I switched to Linux around six years ago and am quite happy about it. It's not all rainbows and sunshine of course, but at this point I much prefer it to the alternatives.
If Microsoft and Apple weren't continually making their platforms worse I might switch back to one, but they have been continuously going in the wrong direction for many years now, while Linux keeps getting incrementally better.
I actually booted up an old Windows 7 PC the other day and had forgotten how clean and nice the UX was. An OS like that is not bad, but Windows 11?! Good lord, I want nothing to do with it and would much rather deal with some occasional rough edges in Linux.
> Now we just need the GPU manufactures to give Linus the same driver support Windows gets.
We're already there: AMD has first class upstream Linux support!
I played steam games for ten hours on 6.11-rc3 last week with zero problems, on a very old userland (Debian bullseye). The amdgpu driver was built-in, not a module.
Well, if this is steam, isn't it proton, which is wine underneath?
I'm not discounting your experiences at all, btw. My 11 year old has been using Ubuntu as his main gaming rig, and the NVidia drivers work incredibly well and Steam games just work. It's still mind boggling to me that it works so well.
And, I no longer have to troubleshoot removing Windows virii from his computer.
Sure, I didn't want to belittle your experience at all. It's great that vendors think about Linux as first class citizens on desktop , too.
My understanding though, is that most of "steam games" are still windows binaries + wine + patches (proton, etc). It's well hidden behind a nice GUI, but the tech couldn't exist without the legacy of pure old wine.
Hahaha not belittling at all, I'm just old enough that "running X with Wine" means "spending hours upon hours pulling your hair out until X barely works" to me. Getting it for free feels like cheating :)
Some game developers do test under Proton. Saying that because I'm in the discord server(s) for a few, and they mention stuff they're working on/support/etc over time.
Likewise, some do write GNU/Linux games, yet that wasn't in a number relevant enough to keep the original SteamOS going as businesses, until translation of Windows APIs was added.
Unfortunately when they pulled official servers they also yanked the game off of most storefronts, and now what few community servers still exist suffer from a complete lack of new blood. Sure, you can still play it, but I'll still miss its heyday.
Can confirm. Playing Elden Ring on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Just installed the Steam flatpak, enabled proton, installed the game, works just as well if not better than my Windows install. Nothing extra to install gpu driver wise this is practically vanilla OpenSUSE install with Steam really the only extra thing, playing online with multiplayer summons, etc.
There's also the fun approach which Valve had for 10 years in CSGO until CS2 release. They just didn't run anticheat on Linux clients meaning an opensource cheat was absolutely undetected for years.
Bought an AMD GPU as my most recent graphics card for this reason. I was able to play just about all my Windows games without issue, except for multiplayer games that rely on anticheat that does not run on Linux.
When Win10 goes out of support I'll probably be using Linux as my daily driver for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad Valve put in the work.
Now ask yourself the same question but only for iGPU/dGPU compute API support from AMD on Linux and I do not think that you or anyone will come to the same conclusion on Linux!
And really Valve/Linux Community is more responsible for AMD's Opensource Radeon drivers and Gaming performance on Linux than AMD is!
Even Intel has better Blender 3D iGPU/dGPU Accelerated Cycles rendering support for Intel's ARC/Earlier iGPUs and dGPU hardware(Via OneAPI/Level-0) and iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux. And so really one must first consider what Linux Opensource applications need proper iGPU/dGPU compute API support so they do not have to use the slow and power hungry CPU rendering/whatever fallback instead.
And Blender 3D used to support OpenCL as the iGPU/dGPU compute API for AMD and Intel Graphics but even back then AMD's OpenCL component was not easy to get installed and working on Linux. And Linux/MESA had the old clover OpenCL implementation in the MESA drivers but that was not kept updated for OpenCL feature set support! And even with the newer Rusticl OpenCL Implementation in MESA that's just been created is that Rusticl/OpenCL implementation been fully enabled in any Ubuntu versions or Ubuntu derivatives currently?
Look at support for AMD's ROCm/HIP in Linux and for Consumer/Client iGPUs and dGPUs and that's rather limited and Polaris dGPUs have long since been dropped form the ROCm/HIP support matrix and Vega iGPU/dGPUs are on borrowed time for ROCm/HIP support.
So be careful there giving too much credit to AMD's iGPU/dGPU efforts on Linux as there's more to that story. And Look at Blender 3D where that works with Nvidia's CUDA and Works with Apple's Metal and iGPU compute API support there and dGPUs as well.
And I'm on Linux Mint and never going back to Windows but all my older AMD iGPU/dGPU hardware has never been properly supported for Blender 3D's iGPU/dGPU accelerated Cycles rendering. Intel's got better iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux but for ARM Based Processors Apple's the only choice there for proper Blender 3D iGPU support and no mention of Blender 3D iGPU accelerated Cycles rendering support for Qualcomm's Adreno X1 iGPUs on the Snapdragon X Elite SOC based laptops or Mini Desktop PC(Coming soon for consumers).
Sure, as long as you don’t mind hdmi 2.1 being busted because AMD blindly assumed that hdmi would open-source it for them.
Imagine spending the money for a premium laptop and the hdmi port being just permanently busted because it has an AMD apu inside, lol.
Even worse… AMD has settled on rdna 3.5 as their forever architecture for APUs (like Vega before it) so this isn’t going away anytime soon even if it’s fixed in rdna4. Same problem with av1 encoding - the bugs are present in rdna3.5 and won’t be fixed until rdna4 at earliest, and AMD won’t put rdna4 in APUs because it’s got raytracing, so these bugs are just gonna stick around forever. It’ll be probably 3 years until they launch APUs with rdna4.5 or rdna5 or whatever the next forever architecture is.
So anyone who wants plex transcoding is best advised to stay away as well. And that’s the problem - with Radeon you’ve always had to start listing off all the people who shouldn’t buy the product, and if you don’t use any of those things it’s great. (well, decent… except for x y and z…)
> Sure, as long as you don’t mind hdmi 2.1 being busted because AMD blindly assumed that hdmi would open-source it for them
That's not AMD's fault and there's nothing AMD can do here outside of releasing a proprietary driver. Which they used to do. It sucked and caused a lot of confusion and problems.
> That's not AMD's fault and there's nothing AMD can do here outside of releasing a proprietary driver.
Actually,
(1) it’s their product so yes, it is their fault, and blindly assuming HDMI would be willing to open-source their product for AMD (after release!) was an incredibly stupid decision from the get-go. You get legal approvals beforehand like any other company does. You certainly don’t release a whole second generation (or further cards in the same generation) without it fixing it, and you don’t continue advertising it on products that don’t support it.
(2) literally everyone else has figured it out, including intel, who has an open driver. They do it by implementing a LPCON onboard, which is perfectly fine and gets the job done. AMD is the only one with broken HDMI support under Linux.
(3) AMD already has a proprietary driver, amdgpu-pro, so this clearly isn’t a problem or burden. In fact it was and is their primary focus of development, per their communication with geohotz.
I will never understand why the AMD fan base engages in this kind of apologism for clearly broken features etc. like oh gosh poor lil AMD had no idea that hdmi was unwilling to open-source their shit, despite every single other vendor realizing this and implementing workarounds. It’s not their fault, they had no choice but to ship a broken feature, advertising it on the box, and spend 5 years leading people on that it was going to happen!
Like they are literally still shipping broken products today! Not just standalone cards, but laptops etc where it will never ever be fixable.
That’s shitty anti-consumer behavior and you’re enabling it.
At the end of the day it's AMD's product, the buck stops with them. Nobody is making them continue falsely advertising the product, and in fact it really is their job to make sure it works properly before release, not begging HDMI to open-source their product after the fact. Imagine if literally any other company had gone ahead and released the product before they knew they were legally allowed to release the product - "oops" would not cut it.
> And really Valve/Linux Community is more responsible for AMD's Opensource Radeon drivers and Gaming performance on Linux than AMD is!
Which is an extremely questionable business decision, probably driven by statistics like desktop market share.
But the resources need for driver development are negligible and Linux does run on most computers worldwide, so the behavior of many hardware manufacturers is quite puzzling from a business and technology standpoint.
They have an optional open-source kernel module. It's still pretty far away from being upstreamed and their userspace driver is still fully closed source
Yes, the Nvidia proprietary driver has a kernel module that must be installed separately from the kernel. Most distros that focus on desktop usage and/or gaming handle this for you in a relatively simple way, but even with that, if you use a cutting-edge kernel you'll often end up with an unbootable system due to the kernel updating before the nvidia kernel module does. If you need nvidia on Linux, either use the (much worse, but rapidly improving) open source drivers or a distro that uses consistently supported kernels like Ubuntu, Mint, or Pop!_OS
I was trying to make it clear it was built as part of the kernel source, not as an external module.
There are some subtle arguable advantages, for example on x86 static kernel text sits on 2MB hugepages while module text sits on 4K pages from vmalloc.
The kernel on my gaming machine is actually built without loadable module support at all. It's a static binary with only the exact necessary set of drivers turned on.
Naive question: Most of ML workload in a datacenter runs on Linux, for which I assume there's good driver support. Why do we say that Nvidia does not have enough driver support on linux?
As far as i know, Nvidia drivers are not stable enough. When a driver crashes in a data center the computer might reboot and continue the operation after some minutes. When a player plays a game and the graphic card crashes, he might readily switch to Windows.
It's a reasonable but naive question. There's a big difference between Nvidia offering driver/CUDA support for DC hardware vs providing driver support for desktop/gaming gear. There's also a big difference between the quality & consistency of driver support for desktop GPUs between Nvidia & AMD.
It's the very same driver. And one big selling point of NVIDIA has always been that you could run CUDA on your consumer card too - unlike AMD where their compute stack of the day would only run on a select few cards of the last generation.
It is mostly the same but the support that the DCs are getting are completely different. Nvidia can and does give them slightly tweaked drivers. Data centers ship a set of enterprise distros with tightly managed set of software that's been vetted. Since there are no binary guarantees in Linux, anything can happen with consumer hardware.
Source: once worked as an student system admin in my university HPC center.
> Why do we say that Nvidia does not have enough driver support on linux?
It's a long story.
Nvidia has provided pretty-good datacenter/CUDA support on Linux for a long time, now. The problem is desktop Linux. Nvidia wanted to focus on supporting the old x11 desktop server at a time when most distros were switching to Wayland as a replacement. Nvidia tried to fix the issue by giving Linux devs a proprietary render API to develop Wayland support on, but it was largely rejected since it required writing a lot of platform-specific code. For a few years, the only way to properly accelerate Wayland on Nvidia hardware was to use the reverse-engineered Nouveau drivers that broke most desktop software - a catch-22 for Nvidia users that wanted a more updated desktop experience.
Very recently, a few things started changing. For one, Nvidia started to shuffle around their proprietary GPU code to make their hardware more open and modular. For two, starting with 510-series drivers and continuing through 535 and 555, Nvidia has started to make Wayland support a priority. In the long-term this should resolve the issue of Nvidia GPUs requiring special workarounds to support modern desktops.
They are pretty distinct. Having good CUDA drivers didn't mean raster graphics were accelerated well, and for a while the bulk of Nvidia's efforts were focused on a depreciated backend.
The good news is that those days are mostly behind us, with the more recent Nvidia drivers. Guess the crypto/AI boom helped them find the cash to hire better Linux devs.
There’s definitely been a sea change in efforts to provide a better UX when it comes to gaming. When steamos released, it seems to motivate scattered efforts to start congregating together in a more coherent way. See also:
What about using rufus with preset settings like not have to use a Microsoft Account and so on? Just drop a Windows iso in it and it will make a nice Windows copy out of it.
I really don't think I can say enough good things about the Steam Deck. If you haven't seen it, they have even supported the device helping people install Windows on it.
I am aware that Valve has done some shady stuff in the past. Given time, I'm sure they will do more in the future. Today, though, they are such a breath of fresh air for the support they have shown.
> I am aware that Valve has done some shady stuff in the past
Oh man, what did they do in the past? I have Valve on my very short list of "good companies". Go ahead and rip off that band-aid: what are you referring to?
Worst I know of, is that they were among the early movers on loot boxes. That said, my understanding is that their were not the same as the ones people grew to hate? I don't actually know the details that heavily.
I'd wager that adding "I am aware that XYZ has done some shady stuff in the past" when praising any XYZ is starting to become a common defensive hygiene in internet forums generally, just to preempt that inevitable somebody who is "absolutely outraged" and wants to ruin your day because you could ever like XYZ.
The government in Australia literally had to take Valve to court to make them honour software warranties.
In response, Valve seems to have had a tantrum and won't release things like the Steam Deck here. I guess they're afraid they might need to honour the warranty for those too. ;)
But to backyp steam doing something right, https://www.reddit.com/r/Lutris/comments/vcnaqe/very_poor_pe... so I can see winehq not being so useful when they just say game version x wine version, while steam's Proton may be better configured & kernel version / gpu etc matter. I'm on an AMD gpu
I kind of wonder or suspect that user agents are being misidentified. I have heard that sometimes Android gets identified as Linux. (which I guess is actually not wrong, but you get the point...)
I am done with windows after issues with the quality of windows updates (even security updates!), dark patterns everywhere, pushy anti competitive nudges to Microsoft products, copilot privacy issues, and things like ads in the start menu. I want to use Linux but the main issue for me is battery life of common Linux laptops, especially since standby doesn’t work reliably.
Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer.
If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS.
Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1.
Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while.
WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually.
After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all.
I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps.
Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it.
I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI.
And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here.
Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.
Moved to Linux Mint a few months ago and 90% of the Steam games I play work the same (or better) which surprised me. Dev experience is way better and I haven't had to tinker with much at all, Bluetooth controllers connect just fine and no more bloat + spying by default.
> It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.
It's not necessary for anyone to switch to Linux to see this behavior. These are shares. I'm actually not surprised by these numbers because I've noticed Windows users use their desktops less, instead doing more with other devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see the number rise to 20% or more in the next few years even if there's no pickup in folks moving to Linux on the desktop.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2594d9f12f00ecdfbc...
Nearly 6% [4.45 + 1.41], really. Only misreported due to a certain browser [Chrome/Chromium] not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.
Decent hardware that Linux is happy with is definitely much cheaper than a decent MacBook.
In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology).
(Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)
That's not to say that people aren't switching, I see no reason to get a new Mac next time I'm replacing my laptop. My work will be done more easily on Linux at this point.
I don't have data better than StatCounter, but if we're thinking of methodology and whether it could be accurate, this is a possibility to take into account
The optimist in me wants to not leave unmentioned that Linux is more accessible than ever and information easier to come by while Windows has never been shittier (which old Windows version shipped with tracking and ads?) and macOS is still priced and protected the way it always has been: much easier to dual or live boot Mint. Come for the freedom and stay for the ease of use. It's no coincidence that Microsoft made it very easy to use Linux software within Windows now (obviously without contributing the inverse mechanism, that'd be stupid): people want it. I really hope there's more truth to this than to the first paragraph
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I've seen some technical documentation, such as readmes for source code, that assumes the user is on a Windows laptop running WSL. At this point in time if I see anything mentioning Ubuntu I just assume it's written with WSL/Azure in mind.
Even at my fortune 20 company I see: "DNC RATINGS COMPARED TO RNC" clickbait crap. I'm amazed my company lets that garbage through. Probably because we have legacy software + some corruption with purchasing. Sharepoint... really?
I don’t use or plan to use Windows outside of VMs. But I think WSL made a difference to a lot of developers.
The main reasons were mainly getting tired/frustrated at how hostile Apple has been to developers and users. Apple has been slowly turning macOS into iOS, from the UI to slowly trying to lock down the OS. There is also the Apple upgrade treadmill where they force you to upgrade your hardware through planned obsolescence.
I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?
Linux Mint has a special place in my heart as it was the first distro I used back in my high school computer science class and it holds up exceptionally well today. It's also community driven compared to Pop!_OS which is developed by System76.
But over the last few years I haven't had significant problems.
Some distros like popOS intentially bundle drivers for newer graphics cards and the like, but that aside, if you don't have really hardcore requirements, picking decent hardware that's a few years old will probably smooth out your journey a lot, regardless of which distro you pick.
If you're coming from macOS you might be happy to pay a premium for a purpose built machine as well (I have a System 76 laptop which has served me really well for a good 5 years or so now with no sign of slowing down)
As an aside, Linux Mint, PopOS and Ubuntu (the three you mentioned) are all great choices for a reliable, stable desktop.
I really, really want to migrate from macOS to Fedora on my M1 MBA but Asahi isn't completely there yet.
We ended up installing popos on our work Linux (Ubuntu)dell because we had trouble installing the nvidia drivers for the card we got.
I had one hiccup 4 years ago where it wouldn’t upgrade to the next version because I did some out of band install. (It was a usb to hdmi adapter…) It was a little to get it sorted but I never ended up with a unbootable system..
I don’t like the PopOS name though..
You should be able to try either distro with a live usb which will give you an indication if anything will break immediately on your system.
Were you by any chance using Nvidia graphics hardware?
If you play games, you'll likely have the best overall experience with AMD graphics. (Assuming the GPU model isn't too new; it can take some months for the drivers to catch up to new models.) Most desktop distros will have everything you need; no need to go downloading drivers from vendors or turning to third party software repositories.
If you don't play games, either AMD or Intel graphics ought to be good.
Nvidia drivers can be made to work well with most games, and certain distros make the setup easy, but they come with baggage and hassles. They're huge, and they have a long history of integrating poorly with the OS overall. The problems they caused me outside of games were part of what drove me to stop buying their hardware.
Ubuntu is alright. But you trade off up to date software for stability. And the bi-annual upgrades to the latest LTS are a bit of a PITA and don't always go that smoothly. And you end up running older kernel and whatever else was current around the time they freeze their LTS version. So, for something that is supposed to be user friendly and stable, it actually ends up having a lot of issues and not being all that stable over time.
If you want to get the best possible experience with graphics, you basically need the latest kernels, drivers, fixes, etc. as soon as they get released. Ubuntu doesn't deliver that because you get stuck on either the yearly or LTS release.
These days I prefer rolling release style distributions. It's just less hassle in the end and not really less stable for me. The opposite actually in my experience. You could go with Debian testing, fedora, and a few other options. But I ended up using Manjaro which is based on arch linux. My reason is simple: the SteamDeck uses a distribution that is based on arch linux. I wanted to run steam on my laptop. So, I figured that using what Valve themselves seem to actively support and invest in makes a whole lot of sense. I've not been disappointed with this so far (three years and counting).
Installing games is easy. Getting things like Gnome, Steam, etc installed via pac is easy. And I can install whatever via snap, flatpak, or native arch packages. More importantly, everything stays up to date and fresh. After three years I have no need to reinstall my laptop because it's fine. Every once in a while I need to deal with some minor issues after some update for which the solution usually is a Google search away. But other than that, Manjaro has been rock solid for me. And besides, I've never used a Linux distribution in 30 years that didn't have that issue.
https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle
But ultimately it is a moot point as major distro upgrades are barely different than the regular security upgrades. There are just more packages upgraded at once.
It’s unexpected even in the case of techies.
If you get past installation and initial setup, using Linux in a desktop role isn't really challenging if you've got access to support.
Funny how that changed.
New-ish laptops with intel tiger lake procesors use MIPI cameras with ipu6 and don't work out of the box or only on specific kernel/distro combos.
There are efforts to mainline the driver and it is better than 2 years ago but still a big step backwards[1]
[1]https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers
This was a super shitty experience though. It really felt unplanned & chaotic. Hopefully some of the kernel architecture carved out for ipu6 is good & useful for running other video pipelines.
Most webcammers don't knowingly think heavily on color science, but ideally our devices can.
The lack of device drivers for iOS means that manufacturers had to start getting serious about ensuring their devices follow USB class specifications, because otherwise they will not work on an iPad.
Linux (which has USB class drivers) has only benefitted from this.
This is getting better/fixed with pipewire though.
That hasn't been the case for a long time now. I can't remember the last time I plugged something in that didn't work. My home setup is a minipc with wireless kb and mouse on a unified USB receiver, hdmi to a large monitor, bluetooth speaker, wireless printer, and USB webcam with mic.
I didn't have to do a single thing. It all just works. And it has for years, through various distro hopping.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407494/screen-share-not-wor...
Assembled PCs tend to be more compatible (because of more standard components), but on the othe hand each individual component doesn't receive the coverage (testing) as laptops. There was no way for me to know that my mobo's sleep is broken on Linux, even if the previous mobos from the same producer had good compatibility.
I've never even heard of Ubuntu certification. I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility. This always works. So it is not pretty much impossible.
I'm not sure if you refer to friends or strangers on the internet.
In the former case, one is restricted to a very small pool of models to choose from.
In the latter case, "strangers on the internet" who say that their hardware "works perfectly", are typically completely unreliable; saying "my hardware works perfectly is treated as a badge of honor, so there's a perverse incentive.
One example, in a lot I've personally experience, is that I've read from multiple "strangers on the internet" that the wifi from the laptop I'm typing from, "works perfectly". In reality, the Linux drivers are half broken (on Linux, it has a poor signal).
Ok a bit flippant, but I've been running KDE on my NUC as a secondary desktop for years now. Most of the time it works fairly well, but then suddenly something breaks or needs tweaking. And when it does it's often not trivial for a non-geek to handle.
That said, if they can get Krdp working properly, I'll almost certainly switch to KDE as my main driver, and demote Windows to my secondary.
On Windows, on a clean install, I need to install the drivers from WU to get audio working, etc. And then I need to open Intel website to get the latest Bluetooth driver, go to Dell to get the latest wifi, as on Windows Update's these are not the latest.
And even after all of this, some of the drivers on Linux is better maintained, because the support for old Intel GPUs on Windows is very short. Meanwhile, on Linux, I get Vulkan support, and all recent drivers on my Broadwell. Video perf is way better on Linux here.
Found out afterwards that the version with windows preinstalled(that the friend bought, because of the cheap windows licence that maybe needed) comes with a special mipi camera from intel with ipu6 out-of-tree driver that only supports specific kernels and specific distros and while there are packages for ubuntu I couldn't get it to work.
Linux works if you don't buy the wrong hardware, windows works on any bought hardware.
I'm not against linux and I use it and most of the time it works out of the box, but this "most of the time" will bite you when you stop looking at specific reviews and driver support and just buy a laptop.
I've never once looked at reviews. The only time I've been bitten in the last 20 years was when given a MBP for work (the intel model with butterfly keys).
There's definitely edge cases out there. But these days they're exactly that: edge cases.
All lenovo yoga x1 models from the 8. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 2 years
All lenovo carbon x1 models from the 10. gen onwards with windows preinstalled e.g. over 3 years
I'm pretty sure it also affects all newer hp and dell models since at least ~2023
It's great that your choice of laptops are never the ones that are broken, but then again, I never said linux never works.
Even if you set aside the webcam problem, the lenovo laptops who where always called out for their good linux support had problems:
The 2016 yoga x1 model couldn't get to sleep (s3i problem which many laptops had) and if it good back from sleep it need a special command to reconnect trackpad and trackpoint.
There where some special patches to make it work and after about a year it worked, still not a possibility for non technical people
The 2016 thinkpad x1 carbon gen. 6 model sometimes needs a special command to reconnect the trackpad and trackpoint, think that got fixed after ~3 years.
Neither of theses devices have a working fingerprint sensor, I can't even think of one that works with linux
Neither of these devices had a supported mobile (lte) modem, as the built in modem wasn't supported and you can't change it because the bios has only whitelisted the preinstalled model.
The new s3i sleep modus also made it impossible for linux laptops to sleep for about a year until it was fixed.
Did all of this get better over time?
Yes
Will every big new hardware thing still mean that some linux things are broken for some time?
Yes
Again, linux works for most of the hardware most of the time, but this will bite you when you expect certain things or devices to work.
Let’s take an extreme example of that same argument: If someone’s only experience of macOS was manually installing on hackintoshes then they’d say macOS was hard to use too.
And by that same token, I can tell you from experience that manually installing Windows on new hardware isn’t a piece of cake either. You have the same bullshit experience trying to locate drivers.
The common theme here is that nontechnical people wouldn’t be building their own OEM systems or wiping laptop drives and performing fresh installs. Regardless of whether that’s Linux or Windows.
For starters, Bluetooth has been broken on Linux until recent times (a couple of years, probably, maybe less), because of the piece of crap that Bluez is. In some Ubuntu distros, Bluetooth may still have some broken functionality (I remember examining the configfiles).
Ubuntu's hibernation was broken last time I've checked, because the setup was setting a 2 GiB swapfile, which is not enough for the RAM of modern machines. My last installation, last week, still set the same size.
So there you go.
The laptop I'm writing from needs my mobile phone as wifi bridge, because the Linux driver is poorly written, and it causes extremely poor signal quality. I also can't workaround tearing that plagues the whole desktop environment.
My other laptop has issues with the speakers that will never be fixed. And another one or two issues that I can't remember.
I wanted to buy a certain Lenovo laptop that is officially Ubuntu certified. Lenovo doesn't offer the OEM Ubuntu that they used for the certification though, and the vanilla version doesn't work (I've stopped checking after an year or so).
My desktop has a wake from suspend problem.
To be fair though, I have no doubt that if one chooses a certain machine (laptop) based on Linux compatibility, they will be happy - but it implies a certain sacrifice upfront.
The solution was to buy a $40 Intel Wifi card and swap it out. I haven't thought about Wifi since, it "just works".
Overall almost everything worked but not all things. And I'm used to working through technical hiccups and being patient. But ultimately there's no guarantee "Linux" will be fully functional on your unique hardware setup, and it's still challenging to choose distribution, windows manager, desktop environment, etc and there's no way to know which combo is best for your hardware without a lot of time consuming trial and error.
He uses linux, has done for years, he just wants something that works.
Same: I was already using Debian 1.1 (1.1, not 11) on the desktop or something like that.
But why not talk about it? I switched both my wife (she's very OK with tech) and my mother-in-law (she's not good with tech) to desktop Linux.
If my mother-in-law can use Linux, everybody can. Most people nowadays only need one app: a browser and Linux is totally for that use case, which is about 99% of all users' out there's usecase.
I'm not even going to say Linux, because people confuse it with Ubuntu/Debian/Mint GARBAGE. Never use that later crap for desktop. Its so outdated and buggy. You are using the terminal on a daily basis to get basic features working, if your hardware works at all.
Fedora is so good, I feel offended I didn't know about it until now. I am bitter against M$ and bitter against Canonical.
Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, …
Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.
At least they've solved that you had to wait 2 minutes anymore when plugging your mouse into a different USB port before it finds the driver from Windows Update again
But if/when Linux reaches 10/15% that may change.
Pop OS works near-perfectly.
Looks like this https://imgur.com/xelfxZB
The drivers are definitely signed by Intel e.g. https://i.imgur.com/yMr1bD5.png
https://pcper.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a3d4-card-front...
"Hey so what laptop did you buy?"
"Well I went for the ACER MEATGRINDER Z980 JUGULAR MOSH RAZOR in the end. The keyboard is 100% sRGB!"
I write this as I look at an ROG Zephyrus G16 (2023) GU630HE (Last part is important, I think I had to check if it was the model with one of the RAM slots soldered)
…it simply booted and continued working as before. No driver reinstall, no reconfiguring things. I don't remember but I don't think I even had to muck with BIOS/UEFI boot settings or anything.
Downside: a year later the SSD died ;D (possibly age/use related, it was 5~6 years old at that point)
What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is?
Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...
(From https://vfxplatform.com/linux/)
The deliverable of a VFX project is a video file or an artifact that goes into a video file (no complex dependency on Windows) whereas most games need to be able to run on Windows.
Most software used in the VFX industry does officially support Linux, and a lot of those tools are also used in game dev. Maybe Unity and Unreal's Linux support hasn't been great, and that's the only reason?
I guess it's easier to get into gamedev than VFX as an indie, and if you have little/no technical background then there's a good chance you're on Windows or Mac when you start looking up Unity/Unreal/etc tutorials, and then you just stick with what you know.
I'm not even sure you can deploy to an Xbox or Playstation from Linux/Mac officially but I haven't tried this gen.
With WSL and containers etc, getting something on Linux from a Windows machine is way easier than the other way around so there's really no driving force towards Linux.
But I'm also very confused by your link. Do you mean the visual effects industry or whoever uses this VFXPlatform project that added Windows and Mac support much later?
2) Visual Studio still offers a second-to-none developer experience. If you're targeting Windows exclusively (which you are in PC gamedev), Visual Studio is pretty much a must.
If Pixar was forced to use Windows on their render farm, they'd be looking at a roughly $24mio !!! licensing bill. That's a VERY strong incentive to use Linux as much as possible.
They also don't have any issues with FOSS religion, they will gladly use proprietary drivers and UNIX software on GNU/Linux.
> Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever dealt with. So, Nvidia: [angrily for moment, wags a middle finger to the camera] fuck you.
Debloated and no ads. You do have to do a little bit of troubleshooting, install extra components (e.g. to install the Microsoft store), etc., but it was significantly easier than debloating a regular Windows 11 install.
https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
https://massgrave.dev/genuine-installation-media#verify-auth...
> instead of just using Linux (and possibly making it work better?)
I want a PC that can play games without hassle. I love Linux, computing, and complexity, but sometimes I want something that just works consistently.
Linux has gotten better over the years, especially as far as compatibility goes, but it's still _much_ harder to use than Windows.
I dispute that notion
I was a Windows user from 95 all the way to 10. Yearly formats with fresh installs were a constant through the whole time.
Ever since I switched to Linux things are surprisingly stable. My laptop is running as well as my fresh install from more than 2 years ago.
No it's not all in a browser. That's a shitty assumption and one that should not be forced upon anyone.
I always wonder how many people have been fucked over by a helpful relative giving them a Linux install with a browser and telling them to get on with it ...
But, if we're talking desktops, I suspect most desktop users want much more than just a browser. Either for gaming, office use, creative use, etc.
The keyboards are really bad for a developer, though. Otherwise, I might use them a bit more.
The rendering of the Office file formats by the LibreOffice is dogshit. Feature parity is a rounding error. LiberOffice UX is completely from last century. There is so many little UX things that MS added which are so out of the league (like live content update from Office 2007!) for LibreOffice and its outdated codebase.
The Office alone can maybe replaced partially in Linux-compatible environments. However the MS Office-integrated prosumer software ecosystem is the thing that keeps people on Windows. Unless Linux people redesign the whole ecosystem to be as accommodating to closed source app ecosystem and find a time machine to replace all the existing Windows ecosystem, nothing will change.
The reality is that even without talking about the UI and various stability/compatibility/performance (oh god) issues there are even some very basic missing functionalities that ones will encounter regularly when doing stuff that is not just low-level administrative filler work.
If one company would decide to invest in developing a decent competitive alternative it could be worthwhile but, in the meantime, most people are better served with browser-based stuff. Either the Google stuff, free Microsoft version or even the newer Proton offering are decent but there are some semi-commercial offerings that can be decent too.
On the surface LibreOffice is all right, but the hard reality is that it is way too much of a PITA to work with for most people to bother unless they really don't have a choice or are forced too for some reason.
The fanboys don't like that reality and would rather deny it instead of working on fixing the issue; which is precisely why it's a lost cause.
One of them was really sceptical, but after while said "I though linux is more for nerds and more different than Win." Well, she is just casual user of browser, few chat apps, Kodi and occasionally libre office, but still positive with change.
However while I use linux on server and laptop, I cannot use it on workstation beacuse of Adobe that I need for professional work.
Your experience with Linux will heavily depend on your experience with computers, distro, hardware (e.g. due to obscure driver issues), and workload.
Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux.
- Your experience with macOS/Windows will be fairly consistent. I do not agree. Every system update scares me quite a bit.
- There are still driver issues with Windows, but they're less common than Linux. On Fedora, I never had to install drivers manually. All drivers was installed together with first upgrade after fresh install. Even on very old ThinkPad x201 from 2011. On Windows it's mix of searching on multiple HW manufacturer sites, manually installing them and trying if they are compatible.
The caveat is that I don't play games on my computers. For gaming, Windows is still the best choice.
The average person, though, still would prefer regular Windows 11 over your favorite Linux distro.
> The average person, though, still would prefer regular Windows 11 over your favorite Linux distro.
I don't know, I think it depends on their needs. Most users these days use their computers as "browser launcher" and for that Linux works just fine. I also don't think most people are enjoying those massive ads in Windows 11.
They all suck the same. In different ways.
I never hit that wall you speak of. Has been so amazing I donate 20 bucks every year to the project, just because I feel it has no right being at the same time free and that good.
That did not work for me. Once in the last 25 years of trying apart from a small bit between 2003-2004 when Fedora worked.
It works for a narrow group of vocal people who use it for specific tasks but generic and usable, it is not.
> the absolutely terrible inconsistent user experience
really? That would make sense as an argument for MacOS, but Windows is an absolute dumpster fire when it comes to consistent UX.
These days for 90% of users, the only "must have" application is a web browser anyways.
I'd still argue large swathes of things we take for granted on other platforms don't exist or don't work either.
I don't know where you'd start to see a performance difference compared to Excel for Win32.
If Microsoft and Apple weren't continually making their platforms worse I might switch back to one, but they have been continuously going in the wrong direction for many years now, while Linux keeps getting incrementally better.
I actually booted up an old Windows 7 PC the other day and had forgotten how clean and nice the UX was. An OS like that is not bad, but Windows 11?! Good lord, I want nothing to do with it and would much rather deal with some occasional rough edges in Linux.
Google, Facebook, Valve, Red Hat, the French Gendarmerie, the Munich city hall...
I contend that if they can do it, others can too.
We're already there: AMD has first class upstream Linux support!
I played steam games for ten hours on 6.11-rc3 last week with zero problems, on a very old userland (Debian bullseye). The amdgpu driver was built-in, not a module.
I thought we were already there, 19years ago
I'm not discounting your experiences at all, btw. My 11 year old has been using Ubuntu as his main gaming rig, and the NVidia drivers work incredibly well and Steam games just work. It's still mind boggling to me that it works so well.
And, I no longer have to troubleshoot removing Windows virii from his computer.
My understanding though, is that most of "steam games" are still windows binaries + wine + patches (proton, etc). It's well hidden behind a nice GUI, but the tech couldn't exist without the legacy of pure old wine.
Will we ever get UT2k2X?
Fortunately UT2k4 is still fun and plays well, even on an ancient PC, and looks decent enough.
I’ve heard there’s still some folks on some self-hosted servers playing it, maybe I’ll have to look into that.
Website is still up, but only partially functional. Check out the character design for Samael.
https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament/en-US/
https://www.youtube.com/unrealtournament
Yeah, I guess I was always holding out some futile hope that they may reboot it at some point.
Just a couple of months ago, yet another motherboard where UEFI and Linux distributions don't get along without some gimmicks.
When Win10 goes out of support I'll probably be using Linux as my daily driver for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad Valve put in the work.
And really Valve/Linux Community is more responsible for AMD's Opensource Radeon drivers and Gaming performance on Linux than AMD is!
Even Intel has better Blender 3D iGPU/dGPU Accelerated Cycles rendering support for Intel's ARC/Earlier iGPUs and dGPU hardware(Via OneAPI/Level-0) and iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux. And so really one must first consider what Linux Opensource applications need proper iGPU/dGPU compute API support so they do not have to use the slow and power hungry CPU rendering/whatever fallback instead.
And Blender 3D used to support OpenCL as the iGPU/dGPU compute API for AMD and Intel Graphics but even back then AMD's OpenCL component was not easy to get installed and working on Linux. And Linux/MESA had the old clover OpenCL implementation in the MESA drivers but that was not kept updated for OpenCL feature set support! And even with the newer Rusticl OpenCL Implementation in MESA that's just been created is that Rusticl/OpenCL implementation been fully enabled in any Ubuntu versions or Ubuntu derivatives currently?
Look at support for AMD's ROCm/HIP in Linux and for Consumer/Client iGPUs and dGPUs and that's rather limited and Polaris dGPUs have long since been dropped form the ROCm/HIP support matrix and Vega iGPU/dGPUs are on borrowed time for ROCm/HIP support.
So be careful there giving too much credit to AMD's iGPU/dGPU efforts on Linux as there's more to that story. And Look at Blender 3D where that works with Nvidia's CUDA and Works with Apple's Metal and iGPU compute API support there and dGPUs as well.
And I'm on Linux Mint and never going back to Windows but all my older AMD iGPU/dGPU hardware has never been properly supported for Blender 3D's iGPU/dGPU accelerated Cycles rendering. Intel's got better iGPU/dGPU compute API support on Linux but for ARM Based Processors Apple's the only choice there for proper Blender 3D iGPU support and no mention of Blender 3D iGPU accelerated Cycles rendering support for Qualcomm's Adreno X1 iGPUs on the Snapdragon X Elite SOC based laptops or Mini Desktop PC(Coming soon for consumers).
Imagine spending the money for a premium laptop and the hdmi port being just permanently busted because it has an AMD apu inside, lol.
Even worse… AMD has settled on rdna 3.5 as their forever architecture for APUs (like Vega before it) so this isn’t going away anytime soon even if it’s fixed in rdna4. Same problem with av1 encoding - the bugs are present in rdna3.5 and won’t be fixed until rdna4 at earliest, and AMD won’t put rdna4 in APUs because it’s got raytracing, so these bugs are just gonna stick around forever. It’ll be probably 3 years until they launch APUs with rdna4.5 or rdna5 or whatever the next forever architecture is.
So anyone who wants plex transcoding is best advised to stay away as well. And that’s the problem - with Radeon you’ve always had to start listing off all the people who shouldn’t buy the product, and if you don’t use any of those things it’s great. (well, decent… except for x y and z…)
Hardware transcoding is unnecessary, I don't care if it works and I never will.
That's not AMD's fault and there's nothing AMD can do here outside of releasing a proprietary driver. Which they used to do. It sucked and caused a lot of confusion and problems.
Actually,
(1) it’s their product so yes, it is their fault, and blindly assuming HDMI would be willing to open-source their product for AMD (after release!) was an incredibly stupid decision from the get-go. You get legal approvals beforehand like any other company does. You certainly don’t release a whole second generation (or further cards in the same generation) without it fixing it, and you don’t continue advertising it on products that don’t support it.
(2) literally everyone else has figured it out, including intel, who has an open driver. They do it by implementing a LPCON onboard, which is perfectly fine and gets the job done. AMD is the only one with broken HDMI support under Linux.
(3) AMD already has a proprietary driver, amdgpu-pro, so this clearly isn’t a problem or burden. In fact it was and is their primary focus of development, per their communication with geohotz.
I will never understand why the AMD fan base engages in this kind of apologism for clearly broken features etc. like oh gosh poor lil AMD had no idea that hdmi was unwilling to open-source their shit, despite every single other vendor realizing this and implementing workarounds. It’s not their fault, they had no choice but to ship a broken feature, advertising it on the box, and spend 5 years leading people on that it was going to happen!
Like they are literally still shipping broken products today! Not just standalone cards, but laptops etc where it will never ever be fixable.
That’s shitty anti-consumer behavior and you’re enabling it.
At the end of the day it's AMD's product, the buck stops with them. Nobody is making them continue falsely advertising the product, and in fact it really is their job to make sure it works properly before release, not begging HDMI to open-source their product after the fact. Imagine if literally any other company had gone ahead and released the product before they knew they were legally allowed to release the product - "oops" would not cut it.
Which is an extremely questionable business decision, probably driven by statistics like desktop market share.
But the resources need for driver development are negligible and Linux does run on most computers worldwide, so the behavior of many hardware manufacturers is quite puzzling from a business and technology standpoint.
It’s a matter of time.
I strongly believe that AMD's driver is superior because the open source process makes it better. NVIDIA does not participate in that process.
Aside from source availability and maybe the risk of version mismatch, I mean.
There are some subtle arguable advantages, for example on x86 static kernel text sits on 2MB hugepages while module text sits on 4K pages from vmalloc.
The kernel on my gaming machine is actually built without loadable module support at all. It's a static binary with only the exact necessary set of drivers turned on.
Naive question: Most of ML workload in a datacenter runs on Linux, for which I assume there's good driver support. Why do we say that Nvidia does not have enough driver support on linux?
Source: once worked as an student system admin in my university HPC center.
It's a long story.
Nvidia has provided pretty-good datacenter/CUDA support on Linux for a long time, now. The problem is desktop Linux. Nvidia wanted to focus on supporting the old x11 desktop server at a time when most distros were switching to Wayland as a replacement. Nvidia tried to fix the issue by giving Linux devs a proprietary render API to develop Wayland support on, but it was largely rejected since it required writing a lot of platform-specific code. For a few years, the only way to properly accelerate Wayland on Nvidia hardware was to use the reverse-engineered Nouveau drivers that broke most desktop software - a catch-22 for Nvidia users that wanted a more updated desktop experience.
Very recently, a few things started changing. For one, Nvidia started to shuffle around their proprietary GPU code to make their hardware more open and modular. For two, starting with 510-series drivers and continuing through 535 and 555, Nvidia has started to make Wayland support a priority. In the long-term this should resolve the issue of Nvidia GPUs requiring special workarounds to support modern desktops.
The good news is that those days are mostly behind us, with the more recent Nvidia drivers. Guess the crypto/AI boom helped them find the cash to hire better Linux devs.
https://bazzite.gg/
https://chimeraos.org/
I am aware that Valve has done some shady stuff in the past. Given time, I'm sure they will do more in the future. Today, though, they are such a breath of fresh air for the support they have shown.
Link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/6121-ECCD-D643-BA...
Oh man, what did they do in the past? I have Valve on my very short list of "good companies". Go ahead and rip off that band-aid: what are you referring to?
But any day now.
In response, Valve seems to have had a tantrum and won't release things like the Steam Deck here. I guess they're afraid they might need to honour the warranty for those too. ;)
Steam still has Linux at only 2%, but agreed, I've been playing most Windows games fine through Proton
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/17h6kwt/do_we...
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
But to backyp steam doing something right, https://www.reddit.com/r/Lutris/comments/vcnaqe/very_poor_pe... so I can see winehq not being so useful when they just say game version x wine version, while steam's Proton may be better configured & kernel version / gpu etc matter. I'm on an AMD gpu
Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer.
If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS.
Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1.
Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while.
WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually.
After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all.
I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps.
Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it.
I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI.
And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here.
Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.
It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.
It's not necessary for anyone to switch to Linux to see this behavior. These are shares. I'm actually not surprised by these numbers because I've noticed Windows users use their desktops less, instead doing more with other devices. I wouldn't be surprised to see the number rise to 20% or more in the next few years even if there's no pickup in folks moving to Linux on the desktop.