Asklemmy

Games (Blizzard and Riot) I have a linux laptop that I occasionally use. It is far better than it was years before, yet there are still occasions when it just does not work, or it refuses to update.

I left windows because of the unauthorized data stealing and forced updates. linux has been a god sent and haven't look back.

For me it's mostly been visual stuff.
There are native packages, Appimages, Flatpaks, Snaps. Native packages are GTK or Qt-based, so you could potentially have five different visual styles at the same time. Everything can be fixed, except for Appimages, but it requires some degree of tinkering which isn't always guaranteed to work. For instance, I was looking for a feed reader and tried Fluent Reader: it is an Appimage based on Fluent Design, so it looks completely out of place if you don't customize your desktop to make it look like Windows. Then I tried Akgregator: I picked the Flatpak version, and it was a complete mess even when using Flatseal (some backgrounds black, others white). Also, without proper configuration, the cursor theme may change according to the aforementioned app categories.
One last thing you may not like are icons. Most distributions come with some custom icon theme, which of course cannot reasonably apply to all applications out there: those that are not supported need to provide their own icon, which could look very bad depending on the desktop environment. For example, on Cinnamon they were very jagged, like their resolution was too high. This probably also depends on the application.
Another thing I usually notice is how slow the mouse wheel works in some apps, like Appimages for instance. And in general there's no way to change the amount of lines scrolled per wheel click at OS level, while apps rarely give you the option to customize it. Firefox does though, and for me this mean I had to run Bitwarden, Telegram, WhatsApp, a feed reader all inside Firefox. Thanks but no thanks.
I'd say no particular changes are necessary to use Linux full time, you should just turn a blind eye to this stuff.
P.S. Also, everything looks way too large w.r.t. Windows. I tried Thunderbird on both systems, and for some reason the delete icon is 50% bigger on Linux (using the same density option)

Because in my experience Linux hasn’t been consistently reliable in the long term.

My computer is a tool. I need it to just work, not cause me work. I’ve tried many distros and sooner or later something random stopped working, causing me to stop what I was doing and troubleshoot the problem.

Like the time I installed Mint on my desktop and my GPU fan ran full throttle all the time. Or that time when OpenVPN stopped working from one boot up to the next. Or those times when a fresh install hung up and failed fully boot.

Contrast that with the thousands? tens of thousands? of days when Windows just started without incident, got out of my way and let me work or game or whatever.

Is Windows bloated and slow? Yes. Is it constantly spying on me? Yes. Is it annoying in dozens of little ways that Linux isn’t? Yes. But it is consistently reliable and Linux isn’t.

I’m not a Windows fan boy, and I’d love to be able to use a linux desktop on the reg but every time I forget my previous disappointment long enough to try again, I am once again disappointed.

One thing has been working well for me. I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspian running Pi Hole, MiniDLNA and a couple of other things. It’s been as solid and reliable as I could ask.

HDR support didn't work when I tried it for madvr or games. Not sure if that area has changed.

It's always something that doesn't work and I can't get working. Right now (I dual boot) it's my 4G modern in my laptop that I don't seem to understand how to activate the GPS receiver in. Even if I got it to work I wouldn't know since I have no idea on how GPS is supposed to work on Ubuntu...

Peripheral compatibility was my biggest issue. Most vendors just don’t make Linux versions. One that I couldn’t work around was my Razer Huntsman v2 Analog. While I was told about the open source Razer app alternatives, they were far from feature complete. My keyboard ended up defaulting to a profile where WASD emulated a controller instead, and the software didn’t have a way of changing it outside of windows.

Indie software is also a big miss. I play FF14. I use a Streamdeck with a custom plugin for hot keys. That is windows only. I use Teamcraft. Also windows only.

The problem is really one that I’m feeding into by going back to windows. There’s just not enough people on Linux to rationalize app development on smaller projects for it. I feel bad going to a one man Dev team and being like “Hey, you should stop everything and do this for just me, because no one else will use the Linux version”.

Could I work around some of these issues? Probably. Could I advocate for Linux software and put together my own alternatives? Probably. But by the time I’m done with work and just want to play a game…I don’t want to spend hours reinventing the wheel.

Ultimately windows is there, and I can make it do what I need it to do. While I’d love to use Linux, it’s just not a viable option for me.

Just one thing: Lightroom.

I use Linux full time now, with the exception of the Adobe suite, which runs in a VM right now and will be changed to a dual boot once I installed a second hard drive. I use GIMP and Inkscape where I can, but i need the big evil Corp software for bigger projects where the Foss software falls short.

If the software runs on Linux natively someday or a Foss alternative is on par, I will gladly make the full switch.

I’ve tried and used Linux many times. Sometimes over the course of a whole year, but I always end up going back to Windows because of my games and Adobe.

My work uses Azure Virtual Desktop and there is no Linux client for it, only the web client which seems vastly inferior. Even running in a browser on Windows the colours are terrible.

My primary desktop is Windows 11, but literally no other computer I personally own runs Windows. Part of it is games, part of it is proprietary software (music production, dj, etc). I could probably game on Linux full time, but until the commercial software situation is improved I will always have an additional Windows or Mac computer.

I'm actively trying to switch to Linux, so it's not from a lack of effort.

The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I'm a photographer, and I'm scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There's no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.

As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I've got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn't save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.

On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.

My Xubuntu server won't let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.

Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.

Mint's settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it's back to the default size again!

The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!

Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I'm doing. They're the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?

Reading a lot of these comments I think people are under the wrong impression of the current state of Linux. I think you'll have a better experience with a bleeding edge distro like Arch or Fedora.

A lot of your productivity apps are on Linux, a higher percentage of your games work than you think, and you could see a performance boost over windows. Plus there are multiple app alternatives that are even better.

I ditched Windows three years ago. 99% of my 450 Steam library works (yes AAA games) thanks to Valve with Proton. What doesn't? Call of Duty, because of invasive kernel level anti-cheat and I'm good with that.

Steam, Zoom, Slack, Teams, Spotify, Plex, Jellyfin, Discord are all on Linux.

Edit: Also there is no "look/UI" to Linux. It's your DE, and you're free to choose one, or a Window Manager. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, i3, Awesome, Openbox, XMonad, Sway, Hyprland.

I can't use Fusion 360 on Linux, so I dual boot windows. But that's the only time I ever go back. I don't even run a bootloader with options and you'd never know Windows is on my machine unless you interrupted the boot process and checked boot drives. Getting into Windows is a manual process on my system.

My gf and I only plays valorant. I really wanted to get into linux environment but I might give it another chance tho. I just need a good distro.

So I didn't quite try it to switch, rather installed linux to dualboot specifically because one game had lag issues on windows, and ultimately there are just 2 things keeping me from making linux the main and windows the backup.

One is game compatibility, while linux has come a long way it's simply more convenient to be on windows which can effectively run everything (even if there are a few more performance issues at times).

The other is that I couldn't find a DE of which I liked the look that could handle high refresh rate monitors properly. LXDE works for my purpose and I think it looks ok, but by design it just doesn't feel as nice to use as windows.

Hated gnomes UX, liked KDE but it couldn't handle my monitor. Wouldn't wanna bother with trying many more options unless I actually know it will work with my hardware.

I didn't go back to Windows, at least not directly.

I was enjoying Linux on my old lap, but then I managed to get a MacBook Pro 2014 in that year and ditched Linux for macOS they are very alike although macOS is way more closed...

Then I discovered you can't go full macOS either, that's why I BootCamp as well with W10 installed, I barely touch it but it's still there for simple things like running .bat scripts, having a no lame NTFS support, and some light Steam gaming and local government software gore.

Windows Subsystem for Linux gives me most of what I need day to day for Linux and gaming is still just easier on Windows.

I think in a few years that may finally change, but not yet.

WSL2 and work. Firstly at work i'm force to use Windows since all the dev toolchains and deployement Tools are unfortunately Windows only... And secondly since I have be able to work from home (at night or afterwards) I need Windows on my Box as well. Thirdly, other than that my private coding projects all died since I just wanna switch off once I'm done and game a little... So there Windows also wina out. And lastly since all my Servers run Linux if i need to write a Script and test it WSL did the Job so far.

Very unfortunate since i enjoy using Linux (love i3) but i cant be bothered at the moment :( Maybe the next dev job allows for a Linux Environment :)

Arch Linux based distros (arco, Manjaro, endeavor) have my favorite package manager in the world (not pacman) but yay. I've tried every package manager and for me nothing comes close to yay. But the sad part is arch updates have completely destroyed every arch based distro I've ever had. The last one (endeavor os) literally made me hate Linux for awhile, because I put a great deal of work and love into setting up a desktop environment, configuring the hell out of my terminal and my dev environment and one update just destroyed my whole desktop. It takes me more than 2 days to completely get my Linux desktop configured to where I like it, and endeavoros just breaking my desktop environment really demoralized me from trying to set up another Linux box again for a long time, so I just went back to my super stable MacBook that wasn't as fun or ergonomic but at the end of the day it's never given me serious issues. Of course I'm back to using Linux, this time with stable old Ubuntu.

It's been a couple years since I tried maining Linux (Ubuntu). The state of Linux gaming was definitely less than today. Back then, Apex Legends that I played with friends didn't support Linux yet.

Probably the main reasons for me personally is that I was dual booting from a secondary SSD, so Windows was just always there to switch to if I ran into Linux hiccups I didn't want to deal with. Also I remember the secondary SSD was only 256gb so I ran into some problems with that.

As for what's preventing me from switching today

• I've heard Linux VR isn't quite there yet.
• Switching over is just a big task I don't want to deal with right now. It could be done, but I'm currently entrenched in Windows. I want to eventually.