I’m curious as to what everyone’s reasons are! The Linux desktop has came quite a far ways in the last few years and is improving every day. I’d say for most people, Linux could easily replace Windows as their daily driver nowadays.
I think an overlooked potential userbase for linux is older people who are still on windows XP. I have a few family members on manjaro mate (I know there are better distros, but it’s what I use personally) which is overall more familiar to them than newer windows versions would be. Get it set up with regular BTRFS snapshots and a grub hook, and you can talk them through rolling something back easily.
Gaming. For anything work/school related I’ll use a vm or ssh into the school labs if i think the task will be easier on linux
I’m afraid of messing up a dual boot install
[grub boots into rescue mode]
I have seen the face of God.
I can barely manage to do the dishes most of the time and you expect me to learn a new OS?
I hate how almost all system programs have weird names/icons. KDE, why is a file explorer named Dolphin?? It has zero link to files to me. And that goes for a lot of default programs making it unintuitive to use.
Windows uses clear names for everything, why can’t Linux do the same? Or at least, let me rename Dolphin (and others) to a name that makes sense. But that appears to be impossible too.
Ive been using linux as my sole OS for the last 20+ years. Nothing windows based, anymore. That said, i find questions like this a bit disingenuous. There are a LOT of reasons why it aint the year of the linux desktop, and if youve been using Linux for any amount of time, you likely know this too. That one or two cruicial apps, games, compatibilty between office suites, ease of use for those who aren’t technologically inclined, forward momentum, hardware incompatibility (broadcom, realtek come to mind specifically, im sure theres others)
I only use my machine for work and I’m required to use Windows 11. I wish I’d gotten into Linux when I was younger and computers were still fun but I’ve come to hate this little electronic box.
I feel like I’ll need to switch to linux at some point whether I want to or not, since the assholes at microsoft seem to want to turn Windows into a subscription service, but for now windows is fine and I’m scared of fucking up my computer trying to figure out how to get linux going.
I use Linux at work regularly, and often prefer Linux and suggest Linux for work projects. It’s an extremely capable OS for infrastructure and embedded applications. It’s a pain as a desktop though. It’s just clunkier and harder to do things. Intermediate level configuration tasks which you can do with one dialog in Windows require editing shell scripts and decoding APIs designed by mathematicians in the 70’s on Linux. It’s just too much when I want to relax after work.
Also I like gaming, and gaming through a compatibility layer like Wine is always annoying. I don’t want launching a new game to be a project in itself.
Intermediate level configuration tasks which you can do with one dialog in Windows require editing shell scripts and decoding APIs designed by mathematicians in the 70’s on Linux.
Full disclosure, I’ve used linux since high school, to the point where I am lost as shit on windows. What I’m trying to get at is that the question I’m about to ask is not supposed to be judgemental or disbelieving or anything, I’m just genuinely curious: can you please give me an example of an intermediate config task that’s significantly easier on windows than linux? I have a hard time believing such a thing exists, but that’s likely because I haven’t used windows since like the vista days
can you please give me an example of an intermediate config task that’s significantly easier on windows than linux?
I feel like it’s the kind of thing that use to be true. I think it’s easier to edit a a text file in linux and run the restart service command in terminal than it is to wander through window’s new maximum white-space electron GUIs and hope what you’re looking for isn’t removed in windows 10 or doesn’t get reset back to default on next update.
I absolutely agree. I’ve been very happy with linux for years. I love a well-documented plaintext config file!
steam has wine built in, for most games you don’t even need to futz with the settings
Even in the best case scenario that’s a straight downgrade though. Right now, I never have to worry about Wine compatibility or settings. All the games I play are tested and optimized on Windows.
It’s not always true that steam proton is a downgrade. There are quite a few games, especially old ones, that actually run better with proton than natively on windows. Which is wild, but true.
That is surprising, I might give it a go next time I have an older game that doesn’t run so good under modern Windows.
Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer to translate Windows API calls to POSIX calls. In theory it should actually yield near native performance or better since Vulkan is far more optimized than DirectX.
But yeah, I use Proton and waiting for your vulkan shaders to compile is a little bit of a pain (especially for some games).
While I’ll admit I don’t have a lot of experience with Proton, I actually spent about 4 years working on a OpenGL based 3D graphics engine for augmented reality research. I’ve also written engine code in both DirectX and Vulcan but not as much. All this to say I’ve done some in depth research on Vulkan in the past, and I don’t think it’s really true to say that it’s more optimized. DirectX is probably more optimized, but it is over-optimized for graphics techniques that have been superseded by more modern ones. Vulkan allows more optimized code to be written by giving the application programmer more direct control over graphics card resources. This only works when the program is written to take advantage of this though, if you access a Vulkan driver via a DirectX compatibility layer you are going to get very similar performance to native DirectX because you’ll simply recreate all the bottlenecks that Vulkan was designed to avoid.
This gets to the underlying issue with Wine/Proton as a general solution to Linux gaming. So long as the application code was tested, debugged, profiled and optimized on Windows with DirectX it will almost always run better under Windows. The design will take advantage of efficiencies in the original API which will almost certainly not exist after calls are translated to a different API using different underlying OS primitives. The major caveat is older games which are no longer well supported because of changes to Windows system internals since release, these are likely to run as well or better because the assumptions they were optimized for are no longer valid on Windows, but Wine is already designed to compensate for programs written for a very different API.
Sorry for nerding out, but it’s a topic I’m actually pretty interested in.
I see that’s really interesting. A lot of my impression of Vulkan is that it’s a much more modern API.
Though I’d admit that some of these are faulty benchmarks like when some users got better performance on Elden Ring with proton than on native windows (performance metrics varied wildly). It was just nuts to see Linux competing head-to-head with Windows for the first time.
tried it and it fucked my computer up
I do use Linux, but it isn’t quite there with gaming (although it is getting there). That is the only thing keeping me on windows 10 on the desktop. Every other kernel in my household is Linux.
I hate windows 11, so I will be making the full switch soon I guess.
I got a new laptop recently and decided to try Linux again. That being said, I ended up jumping into Fedora Sericea to experiment with both the immutable image thing and to try i3/Sway, so we’ll see how that goes
The file system. I can’t touch that mess. And because I know Linux (Unix) will never adopt the windows file structure. I have given up on the idea of switching to linux, I am too attached to my partitions
Plus there are no professional grade CAD software for linux
What is it about the windows file structure you would miss?
Having partitions at the top of the hierarchy. C:\ for everything system and finicky programs like adobe suite and autodesk. And other partitions each for a specific aspect.
D:\ for personal
E:\ for portable software
F:\ for work files
And so on.
I hate to be dictated where to put my files. I very rarely put files in \my documents or \music folder . I like to install programs wherever I like.
And removable drives parading as files accessible from inside another file isn’t to my liking too
You can say I have been brainwashed by windows. But some of its aspects are just superior to me.
This is one of the areas I think *NIX blows Windows out of the water. The Windows file system hierarchy is a complete disaster and probably one of the worst things about Windows. Programs just throw their junk wherever they feel like and it makes finding things like config files an absolute nightmare. Is it in %APPDATA%? Nope. Is it in Program Data? also nope. Is it in the Program Files? why is it in the Program Files?!
I don’t like programs spreading their files everywhere. But I very rarely have to deal with that. Because I am not an OS nerd. I just look for it in forums when needs be. What frustrates me in windows is apps leaving breadcrumbs all over the registry after an uninstall.
Because “computers” isnt a hobby for me
For development, Linux is soooo nice. But when I want to play games, anticheats don’t tend to be happy running under wine. X11 is also ancient garbage, and Wayland is just not ready.
So instead, I run windows. When I need to do Linux stuff, I use WSL. VSCode lets me run it under WSL as if it were running on Linux directly, and very few of the things I’ve used under WSL have complained about it.
As soon as Wayland is actually ready, and companies stop their anticheats from getting mad under wine, I will switch back over.
