I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
I bought myself a copy of NT 4.0 back in the day.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
yeah, thankfully I can go a bit more basic than that, I just need to figure out what hub, or even cable, I wanna get.
I have been using this hub. Works fine in Linux and windows.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0871ZHCKK?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
I also use this usb dongle for my Xbox controller. It works fine in Linux. I really should try playing a few games on Linux.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0785SFKYF?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
Game compatibility
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
Onshape web based CAD from former SW employees. or if work is paying licenses you can run Siemens NX12 on linux (REL, SUSE, or OpenSUSE)
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Idk is it CAD software? I know there are webapps for that now
Windows: “We dropped support for that thing you bought brand new 5 years ago”
Linux: “We are considering dropping support for something that has existed for longer than you had”
Linux: “We’re dropping support for this device because we’re fairly sure we had the last one in existence and it just died.”
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Hell, I can get a 30 year old HP LaserJet 4 printer working just fine on almost any version of Linux with the official HPLIP CLI software provided by (shockingly) HP, which was updated 2 months ago with support for over 50 new printers and the following OSes:
- LinuxMint 21.1
- MxLinux 21.3
- Elementary OS 7
- Ubuntu 22.10
- RHEL 8.6
- RHEL 8.7
- RHEL 9.1
- Fedora 37
I HATE HP and their printers (PC LOAD LETTER WTF FOR LIFE) but I will admit that this is impressive support.
Still can’t believe they dropped support for i386 😤
True, but getting that thing that’s older than you to actually work is going to require recompiling your kernel with some specific options, downloading a driver from an obscure git repo, running a tool to generate a config file, manually editing that config, and then running another tool to install the driver and then troubleshooting what went wrong.
Oh, wait, that was me trying to use my relatively new Sound Blaster sound card when experimenting with Linux 20 years ago. Linux had terrible support for ISA Plug and Play cards for some reason.
By comparison my solution to windows dropping support for a thing was to grab the cheapest PC I could find that might hypothetically work and stick an old version of windows on it that still had support and just not connect it to the Internet.
20 years ago? Try installing Linux on that same hardware now. Now try installing Windows?
Try the same experiment with any hardware 5 years old or older. Linux wins every time.
People will say that on newer hardware, Windows is better. Partially true. New hardware that was designed to ship with Windows will work better. A fair comparison would be hardware that ships with Linux.
Proprietary firmware has always been an issue ( like Broadcom and like NVIDIA ), especially on distros like Debian that could not ship non-free firmware. The situation has improved though. Even NVIDIA will ship out of the box soon. And Debian will shop non-free firmware now so those old Broadcom cards should work.
One of my favourite things about Linux is how much easier it is to get it running on random hardware, especially “out of the box” without having to track down drivers or install stuff after. With older Apple hardware, it is not just easier but it may be the only way to use modern software at all. I confess though that I am mostly speaking about older hardware.
I’ve worked exclusively with Linux servers since 2002 and exclusively Linux desktop since 2004 and I’ve come to the point where I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
I know most people don’t know any better but it’s insanity to me that anyone still pays money for windows. It’s a scam, no other words for it.
Don’t even get me started on Windows servers. It’s just sad to see how much money is spent on a company that has so litte focus on quality.
Even the online services suck. Dear God Microsoft, would it kill you to understand that people might have gasp TWO tabs open with your teams “app”?
I’ve used Linux since about 2004 for personal use. On my homer server(s) and desktop. 95% of them Gentoo (stable). For my relatives I’ve installed some EL workstation distro. Especially my father needs a install-and-forget system, which Windows isn’t.
But I do install and fix Windows PCs at my work. It’s because how Windows works (or rather not work) I get paid. That said, the more I use Windows the more I get frustrated with it.
One of the worst things lately was the accidental activation of BitLocker. It got activated even when the user didn’t have Microsoft account (from where he/she would retrieve the encryption key to decrypt the data if Windows decides to lock the drive). “Oh I’m sorry, but because M$ fuckup your data is gone. Do you have backups? 😇” To avoid any BitLocker issues the secure boot should be disabled. BitLocker shouldn’t then be available for activation.
Some of the frustrating sides of Windows can be avoided by using Pro version of Windows. But that’s simply not enough.
IMO the only reason to use (suffer from) Windows is if you play some games that require it.
My personal solution to that problem ist to not play those games. There’s plenty of stuff to play on Steam that runs fine on Linux.
not play those games
My tactic as well. 😉
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it started all with knowing a little bit of linux and applying for every position with linux in the description.
Thanks. Gives me hope for the better.
My job description may change soon. However, if it doesn’t, I may start doing exactly that - looking for a better job.
I prettyuch refuse to touch windows for fear it will infect me somehow.
Don’t worry. It won’t. It’ll just frustrate you. Windows has gone seriously downhill since 7.
It was alret horrible at 95. I used windows for about a good 2 years in my life. I’ve been on Amiga is before, Unix osses for a while and over 21 years now on Linux. Windows, any version, compared to any of those is a joke
It’s the professional software that’s lacking in Linux, and that’s the only reason I keep a Windows machine around. For music production, video production, design work, photography and so on, Windows has good commercial software that is well established in these professions.
But for most people, including gamers, Linux is a very good option right now.
I recently setup a Windows vm for my mum because she also needs photo and video editing sw and isn’t happy with the Linux alternatives. This works astonishingly well. Virtualbox even has a mode now to fully integrate the vm into the existing desktop, so basically she just gets the windows status bar in addition to the Linux one when she starts the vm. Windows programs open as if they were running natively. Might be worth a try for you.
Even azure runs Linux
To think that even daedric prince would do that.
carefully select hardware
lmao, i’ve exclusively run linux on franken pcs cobbled together out of mostly second hand parts
The first thing I installed windows on was an discarded office tower that I had to put new memory And hard drives in. Shit was ancient and specifically did not want anything but windows installed on it. Installed Linux anyway. Works great. No specific hardware
Pop OS has native drivers for nVidia GPUs even 😎🐧
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I think this is a bit misleading.
Most or at least the majority of distros offer the proprietary nvidia driver.
Pop, Zorin, Ubuntu, Garuda, etc just bundle it in the install media as an option.
I definitely had much less issues with my Nvidia card on pop os than I did with any of the other like 5 distros I tried.
have been using various distros over the years and never had issues with the nvidia driver on any of them 🤷♂️
Elementary OS didn’t work for me (broke during install – people online said it was video drivers), and on mint and Ubuntu gaming wasn’t working exactly right. In pop os 85% of my games run though
Do you game?
I did back then. Not such much these days.
Linux has always been my go to for that specific use case as well, and I honestly have very little Linux experience. Linux just makes bizarre half broken hardware, like bad ram, work.
I have a Jellyfin server running in the office. The video card is about 6 months old. The CPU, case, and motherboard are going on 12 years old.
That’s much easier grounds then… checks notes… a modern laptop straight from the factory.
There’s this thing I notice. If windows asks you to learn something or put up with some BS it’s seen as the cost of business, reasonable, or simply not even noticed. If Linux requires you to learn something, like read one article about which distro might work best for you, it’s seen as an insurmountable difficulty or an absurd ask.
it’s sunk cost bias. I have this trying to use windows or macos, after using linux exclusively for half my life - everything feels foreign and frustrating, with an obnoxious amount of UX patterns you’re expected to know in order to find anything. ugh, I could rant for hours on how obtuse macos is (mainly because I have to interact with it for work right now - if you force me to use windows, I’ll rant about that too)
The nice thing about Linux is you can pick a DE that apes whatever OS you’re used to so the transition from Windows or Mac to desktop Linux can be very painless.
dear god if I could just run xmonad and dmenu on windows or mac I’d hate employers that tried to force me to use one or the other so much less.
oh my god another xmonad user. You can get almost close with some paid tiling window managers in mac but you can’t recreate the managed layouts of xmonad.
yep stuck on Xorg forever gang
Cries in perfectly managed window layouts and reasonable defaults.
It definitely is ya. I use mac for work and that shit sucks
Every time I’ve been asked to learn about Windows this year has resulted in “Haha fuck you who do you think you are? The owner of this computer? Eat shit pleb you belong to steve balmer now”.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of bullshit you have to go through to exorcise Edge. Some people told me “This is to protect the user” so i sent them back a picture of system.32 in the recycle bin.
I quit windows after I spent a few hours trying to get permission to delete a file I knew I didn’t need but but windows just refused to allow even admin accounts to touch. Had to dig so deep into windows settings.
I had same problem multiple times when I tried Windows. The recommendations I could find on internet were to disable fast startup and boot into live Linux disc.
Ya that’s about right. Next step is from that live Linux disc install Linux.
I don’t use linux because a linux computer is not usable for me. I use mine for blender(works on Linux), Creo(does not work), DCS(no linux support, people say it’s hard to get working with wine/proton game things) and Destiny (anti cheat will ban you if you run it through one of the linux game things). Like it or not, “just learn an entire new os and new software for all the things you want to do” is not an option for most people.
No I’ll never deny that. Some things do only work in very specific environments. I’ll also never pretend learning is a task with zero effort or that everyone is interested in doing. What bugs me is when people are dishonest about it. Linux is not impossibly difficult to use nor is Windows a sublime user experience with no friction.
Anticheat though ya that’s fucked. Hate that. I’ll admit I have a Windows partition solely for playing the few games that require it. Though haven’t booted it in a year or so.
Also the half life of windows knowledge is a lot lower than linux knowledge. Under windows: when you have this problem, click here, click there, find this button, select this option and then it might help, until the next version changes everything. Under linux you find this config file, change this line to that and the fix will likely survive multiple system upgrades and could even work on different distributions.
Absolutely. Once you spend just a bit of time figuring out how config files work suddenly fixing problems on and maintaining your Linux system is far easier than windows. Not hidden behind layers of bad UI that doesn’t work. Just edit the file. Restart the process.
Except that’s an article we would probably read, unless we’re already set in our ways.
I upgraded my Intel system to AMD today. And I didn’t have to reinstall a damn thing, because my existing Linux installation Just Worked™. It really is to the point that I could never imagine going back to Windows.
I was flirting with Linux for 20 years. There was always something that put me off an I went back to Windows. Recently I installed ubuntu with Kde plasma and I’m not going back. It just works and is heaps faster on older hardware. The old driver issues are gone, compatibility is awesome. The only issue is getting used to new software names.
I dual boot fedora with plasma (it has all my laptop drivers without me having to install anything) with Windows and it’s pretty great, but I was out of Linux for a long time and there’s things I don’t remember. So I’m missing stuff and don’t have the time to relearn what I knew 20 years ago.
It works well enough for day to day tasks and dev work. Windows works well enough to run some games.
How’s gaming support?
A large majority of games on steam work via proton.
For games outside steam, there’s a pretty good community around wine wrappers. I think it’s called lutris.
I used to play GTAV, assassins creed, and other AAA titles through it 4 years ago and its only gotten better.
Surprisingly good. It’s no longer that depressing list of the same handful of open source games. These days you can be fairly confident most games will run OK, especially if you’re running Steam.
Through Lutris, really good
Everyone acts like nvidia support on linux is completely broken. I game with nvidia on mine regularly and have never had a driver bug.
It’s not that it’s broken, it’s that the open source driver stack and AMD cards are a superior experience. The Nvidia Linux driver is just like the Windows driver.
I think it’s more that they are broken (esp. on Wayland) and that they are closed source and that they are not pre-installed in Mesa and that they lack basic features such as GAMMA_LUT for night light on Wayland…
To clarify on why it’s especially terrifying, for the nVidia drivers to be closed source, they’ve been allowed to add binaries into the Linux kernel. Nobody but nVidia knows what those binaries actually contain.
The entire
linux-firmwarepackage is just a conjuntion of binary blobs from different vendos (one of with is AMD). This is nothing special.Sure, and I don’t like any of it.
Raytracing is mostly fucked though, otherwise I’d be gaming exclusively on Linux as well. Aside from that though I’ve never had any issues with Nvidia on Linux.
What do you mean it’s fucked? I’ve read this before but honestly Cyberpunk 2077 runs way better for me on Linux and I think it looks great. Never checked settings in detail since it seemed to do a good job of automatically selecting graphics settings. I have an Nvidia card on pop_OS and it works better than I ever thought gaming on Linux could!
Is that using Dynamic Res Scaling? I was also impressed with the ray tracing performance of cp2077 on linux until I realized that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The reality is, it’s going through a translation layer, so it’s simply not possible for linux to run better than windows on the same hw, unless there is something hampering the windows config. But it does run better than I thought it could.
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The new CPU requirements for Windows 11 are why I wiped it and am now on Linux Mint. No dual-booting.
You know, I’ve been using Linux on desktops and laptops for like 20 years now. I can count on one hand then number of times I’ve had hardware support issues. Outside of a fingerprint scanner, I’ve been able to solve all of those issues.
Meanwhile, my adventures across the years dealing with Windows drivers led me to finally say “fuck it” earlier this year and nuke the Windows install on my gaming rig in favor of Nobara.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
That reminds me of a Microsoft-branded USB WiFi adapter that I was making heavy use of back in mid-2000s. The MN-510. You could buy it brand-new circa 2006. It had a $75 launch MSRP, about $114 adjusted for inflation. Come 2009, we find out that Windows 7 wasn’t going to support it. And given what we know about OS development cycles, they presumably made that call in '08 or even '07. Looking back on it, I think this was one of the major catalysts for me to reconsider Linux as a drop-in replacement. Because, wouldn’t you know, the adapter kept working just fine when I tried it out in Ubuntu. Support was simply there in the kernel. Plug-and-play. I suddenly had this whole other operating system providing an it-just-works network connection, for free. It was amazing. So I used that adapter for several more years until I could afford a network upgrade. And I’m still using Linux the majority of the time today.
I have the opposite experience. For 15 years I’ve been installing windows on laptops and desktops. Never did I had to ‘solve’ driver issues. They were either easy to find, by clicking ‘search in windows update’ or were supported directly through windows itself. No need to solve anything…
The opposite was true for my few Linux (Ubuntu and Linux mint) adventures. Every time something would just not work. The most frustrating for me was the broken sleep function. There was no way to get my laptop to sleep properly. It would wake up at random times or just not boot anymore thereafter.
Just saying that these kind of things really depend on what you work with and what you want to get out of a system
I totally get that. The world is a funny place, and no two people will habe the same lived experience.
And FTR, as weird as this may sound to you, the big deal to me was that on Linux (usually Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, or a derivative of those three) there were significantly fewer problems in the first place, never mind whether or not they got solved. I may just have gotten a lucky spin on the Great Hardware Roulette Wheel.
I’ll take Linux hardware support over Microsoft any day of the week.
I’m really undecided on this. It really depends on the type of hardware, for example when dealing with graphics card drivers, especially nvidia I’ll take windows over linux any day. On the other hand on Linux I don’t have to install drivers for almost anything and things mostly just work unless the device is brand new.
I’ve been using all of the major OSs and they’re all good and they all suck in their own way. Windows does suck a bit more than the others, but I don’t think it’s as terrible as diehard Linux fanboys make it out to be.
I still use Windows on my home PC because bideo gaems and music production. I’d prefer to use Linux instead but oh well it’s not the worst thing.
Gaming on Linux has gotten to the point that if it won’t play on linux, I just shrug and play something else. Their are more native games, and games that aren’t native usually run under Proton, Proton GE, or Wine. There’s not much left that won’t play.
The Nvidia thing is less of a problem these days with distros like Nobara, Gardua, and Vanilla installing proprietary Nvidia drivers out of the box. Heck, you can even do it with almost 0 extra effort on plain Fedora.
I can’t help you with music production, though. Linux has some good stuff for that, but my understanding is that Mac and Windows are still the best choice.
Anyway, like I said to someone else, everyone’s different, and everyone’s threshold for horse hockey gets set off by different things. It’s all perspective, really.
Unless you care about privacy. That one’s more empirical than perceptual.
I have to use Windows and their extended malsoftware and I was checking if I could run some stuff necessary for my work on Linux but didn’t find info. I’m so tired of how low quality and buggy Microsoft stuff is.
And you aren’t tired of being unable to find comparable software on Linux?
It may exist. I work as QA for games ported to consoles. All info is hidden behind NDA accounts so I cannot access it easily.
It’s just when you have peripherals, you might just not find a driver for Linux at all
Fuck Goodix
Sorry, I feel like I’m going to regret asking but… what?
Goodix is the manufacturer of some popular FP readers (at least it’s the one I have on my 2021 XPS).
And it’s known to not support Linux at all.
So for me it’s just a useless button sitting there doing nothing.
I remember having some issues with Ubuntu 10 because I had a janky pentium 4 built out of scrap. I think it was an pci ide card I had issues with.
Linux will run on anything
Ps3. Raspberry pi. Phones. All computers ive ever tried to install it on… and even M-chip macs.
I had a pile of old parts of all sorts of machines sitting in some boxes. Was poking through and thought “hang on”… Bing bang boom threw some bits together and built a new PC to run a jellyfin media server on Mint. Don’t even know what most of the parts are…
Add PS4 to that
That’s the first time I’ve heard of that. For real, tho?
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https://piped.video/watch?v=pgSZOG6xCHw&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Blows my mind that anyone would use windows.
The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I’m concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?
Yep, really new hardware is still an issue.
My new Zenbook (AMD CPU/GPU) had pretty major issues until the chip family was around a year old.
Previous to this laptop, I always got older hardware when it went on sale (usually from Dell), chip sets and CPU’s that have had a while to “mature” I never had any issues with. Except of course with Nvidia drivers, those are always shit.
If you stick with older hardware, you very likely wouldn’t ever experience hardware issues.
I’ve been running various distributions at my primary OS since around 2006. Hardware support these days is amazing.
Except of course with Nvidia drivers, those are always shit.
Doesn’t that depend on the distro? In most cases they should be supplied as a (meta)package and only require installation through the package manager, kernel modules should be built automatically then.
While this is ofc only anecdotal evidence: I haven’t had problems with different models of Nvidia GPUs on different distributions (OpenSUSE, Debian, Pop!_OS, Elementary, EndeavourOS) in the last years. With a small workaround, even Wayland works flawlessly - the problem with missing GAMMA_LUT support and night light notwithstanding here.
To be fair I haven’t had a Nvidia card in about 4 years.
So things could have changed, but over the preceding 15 odd years, no other thing caused me more issues than Nvidia drivers. But I put up with it, that is what you had to do to get good graphics.
The AMD GPU I have now, has been great, no issues at all. I had chipset issues mainly on the new laptop.
Am I missing something?
No. I think you are correct and mostly even wifi hardware works fine, at least compared to *BSDs. I use Linux across a wide-range of machines, both desktops and laptops, with mostly very recent components. The only other unsupported hardware I have personally come across is some gaming hardware (e.g. Thrustmaster racing wheels) and an add-on sound card (Soundblaster AE9). And of course, some things like DLSS3 with Nvidia do not work.
I bought a new PC recently and put Linux on it. It didn’t work with the on-board Bluetooth until I did some research and digging through the logs and compiled and installed a kernel driver and edited some config files as root.
Also the fps on my Nvidia graphics card is really bad in games.
So it does still have driver issues, I’d say.
Also the fps on my Nvidia graphics card is really bad in games.
Are you sure you have the official Nvidia driver installed? Most Linux distros, if not explicitly configured otherwise*, use the open source “nouveau” driver by default. Since that driver doesn’t support some vital aspects - such as frequency scaling - of the hardware, the performance is bad.
*Some distros, like Pop! OS and EndeavourOS, offer a “Nvidia install”, meaning that the official driver will be installed and configured upon OS installation.
I would place the blame for poor driver support directly on the chip/device manufacturer and not on Linux (whoever that is).
People say that Nvidia just doesn’t work right on Linux. I’d never know that except for everyone saying it. My desktop has Nvidia and all Linux distro I’ve tried on it are like perfectly fine. Yes for gaming also.
It’s a combination of Nvidia not supporting mixed refresh rates and mixed DPIs until like really recently and the open source driver not being nearly as performant as the closed one.
Congrats, You’ve been blessed with good luck.
Doesnt invalidate other people (like me) who have had tons of trouble with trying to get nvidia cards working/nvidia drivers installed over the years. Even with new distros that bake the drivers in, like Pop!, I still had issues and and headaches that ultimately made it not worth the effort.
What card do you run? I went from a 970 to a 3080ti and both drivers just automagically worked. The 970 used to have dkms issues but it randomly stopped at some point.
Won’t deny luck is involved. Everytime I turn any piece of technology on im amazed it works at all considering the fact it’s all a cobbled together mess.
I’ve been running Linux for 100% of my productive work since about 1995. Used to compile every kernel release and run it for the hell of it from about 1998 until something like 2002 and work for a company that sold and supported Linux servers as firewalls and file servers etc.
I had used et4000’s, S3 968’s and trio 64’s, the original i740, Matrox g400’s with dual CRT monitors and tons of different Nvidia GPU’s throughout the years and hadn’t had a whole lot of trouble.
The Nvidia Linux driver made me despair for desktop Linux for the last few years. Not enough to actually run anything different, but it did seem like things were on a downward slide.
I had weird flashing of sections of other windows when dragging a window around. Individual screens that would just start flashing sometimes. Chunky slideshow window dragging when playing video on another screen. Screens re-arranging themselves in baffling orientations after the machine came back from the screen being locked. I had crap with the animation rate running at 60hz on three 170hz monitors because I also had a TV connected to display network graphs ( that update once a minute ). I must have reset up the panels on cinnamon, or later on KDE a hundred times because they would move to another monitor, sometimes underneath a different one or just disappeared altogether when I unlocked the screen. My desktop environment at home would sometimes just freeze up if the screen was DPMS blanked for more than a couple of hours requiring me to log in from another machine and restart X. I had two different 6gb 1060’s and a 1080ti in different machines that would all have different combinations of these issues.
I fixed maybe half of the issues that I had. Loaded custom EDID on specific monitors to avoid KDE swapping them around, did wacky stuff with environment variables to change the sync behaviour, used a totally different machine ( a little NUC ) to drive the graphs on the TV on the wall.
Because I had got bit pretty hard by the Radeon driver being a piece of trash back in something like 2012, I had the dated opinion that the proprietary Nvidia driver was better than the Radeon driver. It wasn’t til I saw multiple other folks adamant that the current amdgpu driver is pretty good that I bought some ex-mining AMD cards to try them out on my desktop machines. I found out that most of the bugs that were driving me nuts were just Nvidia bugs rather than xorg or any other Linux component. KDE also did a bunch of awesome work on multi monitor support which meant I could stop all the hackery with custom EDIDs.
A little after that I built a whole new work desktop PC with an AMD GPU ( and CPU FWIW ) . It has been great. I’m down from about 15 annoying bugs to none that I can think of offhand running KDE. It all feels pretty fluid and tight now without any real work from a fresh install.
My next build as it stands will be AMD. of course who knows what will be good by the time I get to do that.
I have an nvidia discrete GPU in my laptop. It works fine.
I think that’s probably a bit of misunderstanding. Nvidia doesn’t work right in gamescope due to some missing vulkan extensions. Linux gaming is primarily focused around using gamescope as a compositor, specifically with gaming focused distros. You can see where the idea comes from following that trend.
But also, fuck you Nvidia.
I don’t think I’ve heard very often that “Nvidia doesn’t work right on Linux”. It’s more that it’s missing features compared to Windows and because it’s a closed source binary blob you have to wait for Nvidia to release a new driver every time a new kernel comes out.
Linux does support more CPU architecture (x86 Arm PowerPC RISC) while Windows only support x86 and some Arm CPU so technically Linux support more CPU but Windows does support more GPU and Plug and Play devices (controller, external sound card…)
Windows 11 inherently does not support my CPU because of their fake secure boot requirement. You have to have UEFI.
I’ve had zero issues with any of my plug and play usb devices. Elgato key light, stream deck, fiio DAC, scarlet solo audio interface, Logitech Webcam, steel series arctis usb headset, etc. All work great without any faffing about.
For stream desk and keylight you aren’t using elgato’s software but there are pretty good open source options I installed from the graphical package manager in my OS. The audio stuff just all worked when plugged in. I’m missing zero functionality from windows and spent a lot less time “setting up” everything compared to windows.
Even with x86 only, Linux supports more CPUs. For example, the Ryzen 5 1500x in my old PC isn’t supported by Windows 11.
I’ve had way more plug-and-play success with USB-serial devices under Linux than Windows. Maybe just me though…
