(Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it's still a modern OS)
It's already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it's good on that front)
Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
Unsure what a "dotfile" is, so can't comment on that
And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people's dismay), and I don't feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too
keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delay
I’d recommend Debian 12/testing/sid with the Sway compositor. Homebrew, Nix and Guix can all be installed on top of any GNU/Linux distribution to provide containerized packages. Flatpak can be used to obtain the latest version of graphical applications as well. Terminals like alacritty and kitty are Wayland natives and Foot is widely considered to be the most minimal “default” terminal for Wayland compositors. You can use Sway’s built in “swaybar” or status bars like Waybar and eww. Sway configuration is just like i3 where you can configure specific devices like keyboards and monitors from a single file.
I daily drive NixOS on a gaming PC and work laptop, works great for both and haven’t encountered that password issue you mentioned
ElementaryOS, mint and pop are good starter ones and elementary looks a lot like Mac’s interface
For desktop environments the ones I know well that have the top bar, GNOME has one by default but don’t think it’s very configurable, Pantheon looks a lot like the Mac UI and I think you can technically edit the html behind it? KDE is definitely the one people use for maximum customisability and you can create a top bar with that pretty easily
As for capabilities, most distros will do most things, they’re all pretty much the same under the hood and all run the same software depending on package manager
Package managers generally come with the distro and I think that’s usually the thing that makes people’s minds. I’ve not used brew but most package managers will be something like
Snap (most distros): “snap install firefox” Apt (Ubuntu based distros): “apt-get install firefox” Pacman (arch based distros): “pacman -S firefox”
Apologies if I got any details/syntax for any of this wrong am doing this off the top of my head and am rather tired
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.
Why would you buy that? Overpriced and with that case it's no wonder that things get toasty. There's like fuck all for airflow. If you want a case with wood accents, there's the North from Fractal Design, which have great airflow thanks to their open fronts.
I'm just calling out those idiotic cases that completely choke your hardware of air. You want an open front (or similar depending on the form factor) to get a bunch of silent fans in to let your system breath properly. Bad airflow will just cause your temps to rise, which also severely increases the noise.
Designed, built and materials sourced in the USA, and high attential to details. Their own back plane for SATA connections and custom board for controlling thermals. All open sources designs. imgur.com/gallery/UfVBDWI
I’m not American, but system76 is an opensource company and actually builds a very good products and their own OS. I would choose USA built also because I’m Canadian and reduces chinese components and possible slave labour. Not sure why you care so much about my choice. lol
It just sounds very weird for non Americans to value "made in US" labels so much. America doesn't actually have that kind of product reputation, except for maybe fighter jets.
They don’t have to have a reputation, some people just want to support more locally made or sourced products than relying on China as the worlds factory for too many reasons to list. System76 has been building PoP!OS with good gaming and hardware support, they have also spent a lot of time doing proper airflow analysis, to maximize airflow without over revving the fans, and as somebody who values opensource as well as they have been opensourcing all their hardware designs so if you wanted to take their CAD files you could build your own case , keyboard, etc you could
Because it’s open source i.e. fully upgradable and repairable, and the mission behind the company is something I would want to support.
It’s a prebuilt company that doesn’t use proprietary garbage to force each and every customer to buy an entire new system when their original purchase starts to become obsolete.
I don’t own anything from system76, I’ve built my own my whole life, but I still believe prebuilts should be for people who can’t build their own, not a timeless and somehow socially acceptable way to scam your customer and still have them come back for more
That doesn't make sense. Many hardware stores offer an assembly of your hand picked hardware, which gives you 100% control over the components and actually fair prices, as well as the option to use a more sensible case. Of course it costs a bit extra to let them do that and you have to buy everything in one store, which might be more expensive than spreading it out, but it is still better than 90% of those prebuilt systems.
And nothing there is open source, you can install Linux on any computer you want, regardless of where it came from. They just save the Windows license costs.
Are there prebuilt desktop PCs that aren’t? I have personally yet to see one, even though I build my own. Maybe some small form-factor office rigs would be a hassle, but those are not really marketed to usecases where upgrading makes much sense anyway,
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.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
I game on linux regularly, primarily thanks to Valve. In the last 2 months steam lists 11 different games I’ve “Played Recently”.
7 worked flawlessly (Baldur’s Gate 3, Destroy All Humans!, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Besiege, Deep Rock Galactic, Shotgun King, Call of Cthulhu)
1 the native linux version doesn’t work, but the windows version works perfectly (Northgard)
1 didn’t initially work, but worked a month later after proton was updated. (Grounded)
1 I had to choose an older version of Proton (due to the external launcher breaking things), but with enough performance hitching during cutscenes that I chose to just play it on windows (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order)
1 I couldn’t get to work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s a linux issue because the game’s discussion forums are full of people saying the game is riddled with game breaking bugs on windows (The Sinking City)
I’ve been gaming on linux for a couple of years now, over that time I’ve put many hours into WoW, Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, Golf with your Friends, Core Keeper, Outer Wilds, and dozens more without any issues at all. 90%+ of the time the game starts up and just works.
I’m just one datapoint, but yeah, Linux as a gaming platform is totally viable for me these days.
Also, protondb lists 19% Verified and 16% Playable, so your 5% number is just demonstrably wrong.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted, you’re totally right. I wish I could have gotten it running on current proton as the recent performance updates are massive. Alas, EA Play ruined it. I found a GitHub issue for it and gave as much data as I could to help debug it.
Side note, when I ran the game on windows, EA Play was not only installed, but automatically configured to launch on startup. I just can’t imagine an app ever doing that to me on Linux.
Most of what you are missing out on are games that require some form of anti cheat. Most other stuff just runs. Most new triple A games just run these days.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
Speaking of delusional. You don't seem to have a whole lot of ideas about Linux gaming if you truly believe this ignorant nonsense.
79% of my library has a Silver or higher rating on ProtonDB, 65% are Gold or Platinum rated. For the Top 100 in Steam it's even better with 89% Silver+ and 79% Gold+. Of the Top 1000 Steam games it is 87% Silver+ and 75% Gold+. Even if we look at the entire Steam catalog we have 13% & 11% respectively, and that's only so low because there's literally just no reports. Only 1% of the titles are considered to be "Borked", another 1% are Bronze rated.
You can check the data for yourself here: https://www.protondb.com/
And again, that's just Steam and what has been tested by people. Most titles just run, others require minimal tweaking, some require a little tinkering.
DRM isn't really an issue. The main one that's used nowadays is Denuvo and that has no issues with Linux. Anticheat usually only for competitive games, which I personally don't give a damn. Other multiplayer games and their anticheat work fine, since they aren't on a kernel level type rootkit.
The only games that don’t work are essentially the ones using DRM/anticheat implementations that don’t support multiple platforms. Meaning more like 75% of all Windows titles work under Linux just fine.
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.
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 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.
The popularity of Windows is largely due to the fact it’s pre installed on most PC’s when you buy them, people literally think Windows ‘is the computer’. Such popularity has little to do with Windows being a great OS. In many ways Windows is like McDonalds: It’s not the best, it’s not the worst, it just fills that hump in the bell curve.
Due to the fact Linux has no marketing department, it’s unlikely this will ever change.
Windows comes pre-installed on PCs when you buy them because it’s what people are generally comfortable using, because it’s what they use at work too.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale. Windows is expensive. Like, really expensive. If you have 1000 PCs that have Windows and Office E3, assuming a bulk discount, that’s an up front cost of ~$200000 with the subscription costing an additional ~$20000/month. If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
You’re right in that that Windows is not some super great OS, but it does some things way better than anything else that make it an ideal choice for business use.
And Windows is used on business PCs largely because of how manageable they are at scale.
… Linux being manageable at scale is kind of the reason why Linux is the standard for servers. Many enterprises run Linux workstation distros, and they can be managed at scale just fine, it’s just different tooling. You can deploy a Linux desktop OS with Ansible as easily as a Linux server.
You can replace pretty much the entire Office suite with Nextcloud and OnlyOffice, both of which can be easily hosted on-prem, for a fraction of the cost of paying MS for roughly the same thing on their awful infrastructure.
If it was feasible for business to change to a free alternative, I guarantee they would’ve done so.
They have. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s pretty easy (and inexpensive) these days to run Linux desktop OSes like RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu on a VM running on Proxmox or OpenShift, complete with multiple monitor support and GPU. Hell, you can even run a Windows VM if you want. All you need is a system (like a thin client) with enough grunt to run a browser, and enough ports to handle multiple monitors and USB accessories.
And businesses aren’t interested in “free”, they’re interested in support, which they are willing to pay for. This is how companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE make their money. The OS is free, but you can pay for professional support.
No, Windows comes preinstalled on most PC’s due to clever marketing. As stated, it’s more a case of people thinking Windows is the computer as opposed to any form of comfort regarding a fragmented touch/desktop UI making poor use of screen real estate.
I come across a number of Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa types that outright struggle with Windows; the device they feel comfortable with is the iPad.
The possibility does exist. I think the Adobe CC hasn’t been released under Linux for a similar reason, as Microsoft and Apple know that should Linux get the Adobe CC, people will flock to Linux.
A number of years back Adobe accidentally released a slide showing the Adobe CC running under Ubuntu, but strangely the product was never released on the platform.
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.
Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
If you want to go really minimal you could use alpine Linux with dwl as a window compositor and st ans your terminal emulator
I currently run arch with kitty and hyprland but I’m thinking about switching back to Novara and arch in a distrobox or going with bedrock Linux with arch and nobara as a daily driver
a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager
I like i3, it ticks all your boxes. Made my own config in 2020 and it still works. Keep in mind that you have to design your whole desktop enviroment when you go the window manager route. bspwm might be an option as well
terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)
Every linux distro has it, I’m an Arch person, many people like Archs package manager pacman, so you could go with EndevourOS or if you’re adventorous with vsnilla Arch.
as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)
Well, what kind of software you’ll run is up to you. Linux has all the TUI stuff. If you haven’t already, check out vim, emacs and nnn. Don’t forget to customize your shell (and choose it first, i would recommend zsh or fish).
**General advice:**Look into r/unixporn, most posts there have dotfiles, look for something you like an try it (with a fresh user that you can delete afterwarda maybe?)
Damn. I love spicy mcd (in my country they are really hot & spicy) but eating one drumstick is enough for me to not eat it for the next couple of months.
I don’t think these are wood fire roasted, as I would expect you’d definitely taste that.
He was giving a workshop when I bought the beans, so I didn’t want to bother them too long. He did tell me briefly where his three roasting machines come from (one is a 100 years old!), so maybe one of them is wood fired? I’ll ask about it next time I’m grabbing some beans.
You may find yourself interested in suckless software, take a look here.
Its all written and configured with C, so it should be pretty fast. And there’s dwm, their dynamic tiling window manager.
I guess the distro/package manager would be whatever you want, as suckless software encourages that you build from source and maintain your version of the software.
lemmy.ml
Active