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0 pointsKronisLV3y ago0 comments

It will probably never be the year of the Linux Desktop in the mainstream, despite many promising projects out there.

But for personal usage, Linux is more than acceptable - if you can grokk all of its pain points, that is. Linus Tech Tips did a few videos on the topic recently, it was painful but understandable to watch. Personally, Ubuntu LTS (or equivalent boring long term support distro) or something with XFCE is solid and really usable, especially if you intend to do programming, where things are weird on Windows sometimes.

Except for gaming. Proton still has a ways to go and Wine isn't optimal for that sort of stuff and neither Linux or OS X are worth supporting for many games/projects/software because they represent a small part of the total userbase. For example, in regards to games: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

  Windows 96.68%
  OSX     2.20%
  Linux   1.12%

Supporting any system that's not Windows for games would be like burning money. At that point, you might as well offer the game for free on those systems (if using an engine like Unity/Unreal/Godot, where builds are easy) but refuse bug reports on them, if you don't have the resources for that kind of support.

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pjmlp3y ago

Typing this on a Asus 1215B that was sold with a Linux distribution and has already had a couple of LTS distributions since 2009.

Even though it was sold as Linux supported device, it had its own series of issues, with wlan driver being broken when Canonical decided to replace it for a less capable one taking 6 months to reach feature parity, nowadays GL is stuck at 3.3, although fxgl used to be able to do 4.1.

And then there is the whole issue with VA-API, and the workarounds to watch hardware accelerated video.

Hence why when this netbook dies, I most likely will stick to using GNU/Linux from VMs, which I have been doing with VMWare since 2010 in other computers, I don't recall the last time I went through the trouble of setting a dual boot system.

KronisLVOP3y ago

Makes me think of what other laptops (or even just PC hardware in general) have some of the best support on *nix. Personally, in my experience most hardware has been passably okay, at least when compared with trying to run FreeBSD, though some required tweaking (such as touchpads).

I think Lenovo ThinkPad laptops have some of the best reputation in that regard, though the newer models can definitely be a bit on the pricey side.

ncphil3y ago

With ThinkPads, just buy a few generations behind refurbished, preferably from a nonprofit recycler. They've always been great for Linux. The T series gives you more upgrade options, but the X models run longer on a charge and are small and light . I'm on my second now, having "upgraded" from a T430 to an X250. But I miss the larger screen and so will probably get a T470 or T480 soon.

Running boring plain vanilla Ubuntu LTS with the ("curse you, FreeDesktop.org!") Gnome Shell and a few extensions that probably drive the minimalists on the Gnome Project bonkers (also running a lot of web apps like Gmail and Keep as PWAs). Or at least I hope they do. Mostly program, don't game: I leave that to my kids, both game developers. As a literal greybeard I don't care much if The Year of the Linux Desktop ever comes, because I've been living The Life of the Linux Desktop for over two decades.

Still using docker for workloads at home, but if I was still managing massive numbers of containers at work I'd probably be running podman for anything that didn't justify the cost and complexity of k8s.

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interknot3y ago

I've largely abandoned macOS for Linux when it comes to work stuff, but I still have a Windows desktop for games. That said, I've been very impressed by my Steam Deck. Windows 10 will probably be the last version of Windows for me.

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