My reasoning is nothing big and fancy or philosophical. Hell what had happened was: I upgraded from windows 8.1 to windows 10 and I couldn’t pair my phone to my laptop via bluetooth in a way that allowed me to use my laptops speakers and the music on my phone. I started looking for a fix and ended up finding some article or forum about how to do that in linux. Installed ubuntu 17.04 or something like that because I didn’t know the release cycle of ubuntu. I never looked back. After that tried Fedora then KDE Neon then back to Fedora then openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now EndeavourOS.
I bought a laptop just as Windows Vista came out that could barely run it despite being labeled as “made for Vista”. Once I installed Ubuntu on (Gutsy Gibbon) on it everything worked much more smoothly…even World of Warcraft through Wine, which was why I wanted a new laptop in the first place. I haven’t played WoW for years, but I never wanted to go back to Windows.
First I did it for privacy and to embrace free software.
However overtime I started to notice how much of a bloat Windows really was and my laptop runs a lot better, although I still have Windows installed because certain applications I need do not run on Linux or a virtualized Windows container unfortunately. I have also started to notice how much Windows tries to force you to use their Microsoft products like Edge Cortana and whatnot and force you into making a Microsoft account now, I mean shit I have a local account setup and one time when I was booting into Windows it asked me to create a Microsoft account, but luckily there was an option to just say no I want to keep using my local account. Outrageous.
Install Synaptic and remove it from there. I have used Vivaldi on KDE Neon in the past and I remove it using Synaptic, although you can also remove it from Discover.
I'm running Arch with dual Nvidia cards. It's nice to have a distro that actually updates it's Nvidia driver on a regular basis without having to manually do it and breaking things. Any rolling release should work just fine.
At a certain point I’ve heard that being a developer on Linux just feels more comfortable, and I’ve decided to give it a shot. Never looked back since then. My enjoyment of using a computer skyrocketed, and it gave me flexibility to do a lot of things I couldn’t do properly before
If using steam, there’s a steam snap project that also aims to upgrade mesa stack more, so that can use newer stack to play with 22.04 host installation.
For me it was the philosophy behind Free (as in freedom) software. Call me a Richard Stallman fan, but I would love to live in a world were everyone is free to:
Run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
Distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
I’m actually interested too; are you looking for a desktop or laptop? My biggest hurdle is laptop availability and finding decent places to start shopping. How have you approached it? I know it’s not ideal but I prefer laptops for work.
I'm genuinelly not sure if it's sarcasm or delusional.
Is fair to say that long term Linux users who are very proficiant in command line know that Linux will never have any relevence on the desktop and that the year of the Linux desktop is a delusional fantasy, it's never going to happen?
At this point it's humourous when there's some new feature in whichever distributon and someone says "Year of the desktop!", it's legitimately comical, if it's said to mock all of that talk
I was being sarcastic, tbh. I’m happy to see this (I use Linux everywhere), but I’m realistic. 3% doesn’t look super impressive. I’m not sure where the line would be, though. 10%?
I would guess Linux desktop means nothing until it gets close to 15% for software developers to include a Linux version for new software releases, of any kind or type of software.
I do PC gaming and I only use Windows on that one gaming computer, so I can play any and all games, and have the best graphics hardware performance.
All of my other computers are only a mix of BSD and Linux, but for playing games I'm not willing to use anything other than Windows.
It seems to have grown enough that software like Zoom, MS Teams, Webex and Teamviewer all have versions available for the various linux OSs. If the market was so tiny no software developer would want to release these and handle bug reports, and fixes. It would just not viable. So there must be enough of a base that this is needed.
Yes, I know there is a market, as tiny as it is. Imagine how much further along corporate software for Linux would be if there was a single format for installing all software in a default configuration for a fresh Linux install.
I genuinelly don't understand why Linus never develeped a universal installer like .dmg, .msi, .exe, for Linux.
He was focused on the kernel, not the OS part unfortunately. Maybe Snap, Flatpak or AppImage will rise to the top for default install. For now I run OpenSUSE which has 1 click installer for rpms, probably as close to msi or exe there is right now.
I also think “year of the desktop” is a unicorn (even if it were to come, you wouldn’t pin it on one year - it’s a process) and I personally believe that if Windows is going to die, it will be replaced by some web-only shit instead of another local desktop-based OS.
However, Linux desktop adoption did increase quite steeply in the past few years and to a point I confidently moved also my wife’s and mother’s computers to Linux because it actually causes me less headache than Windows did.
So, no need to be condescending and sarcastic about it.
Would you agree that what makes Linux laughable as a replacement for consumers is how splitered or fractured it is?
Although up to a certain point I believe the choice of GUI desktops to be a good thing, but I believe the only choices should be Plasma and Mate, with all the customization available for each one, the format for software insallation is what kills it. I never understood why when Linus started it, he never developed a built-in way of handling software installs along with tools for making changes to programs that got install.
Making people learn about which distribution they are using means it's better for them to forever stay on Windows where they can use any program they want without learning anything beyond looking for a Windows file to install.
As Theo de Raadt says, people want to use the software, not study it.
ChromeOS has a massive market (10%-20% depending on who you ask) and that’s basically linux with a chrome frontend.
So it really depends on what you mean by ‘year of the desktop’ as you can spin the definition either way… either it’ll never happen or it happened years ago.
If you switch everything you can to flatpaks and use distrobox for other apps before you switch you’re pretty close (better than toolbox and recommend layering it if you do switch to Silverblue).
Anything can be layered onto Silverblue if it can’t be installed another way. I’ve found it works well.
Sounds dope. I love OpenSuse. I almost made it my main OS, but got kicked in the ass installing graphics drivers and the fixes were many and too annoying.
I had a reasonably good time getting NVIDIA drivers installed. I found the instructions here. I installed the newest drivers using the following command + a reboot. transactional-update -i pkg in nvidia-driver-G06-kmp-default nvidia-video-G06 nvidia-gl-G06 nvidia-compute-G06 nvidia-utils-G06 nvidia-compute-utils-G06The OpenSUSE guide doesn’t include compute-utils, which is needed if you want to run nvidia-smi. I haven’t tried installing a full CUDA SDK, so ymmv there.
I also like them just for the sake of tidiness. Some apps like Steam tend to make a big mess of dependencies all over the place, so it’s nice to have that all contained in one place. It does take up more space but I have a reasonably big hard drive so it’s kind of negligible for me.
I’m late to the party but windows Vista forced me off of windows. Not 5 minutes into setting up a new laptop and it told me even after clicking yes for admin privileges that I didn’t have the right to uninstall mcafee… I threw Debian on the laptop and never looked back. Ended up running FreeBSD for years on that thing and have mostly stuck with them since.
For Linux as others have stated lack of crashes and clear ways to customize/fix things was incredible.
FreeBSD doesn’t support all the newer standards yet (looking at you wifi6), but it is beyond rock stable. A month plus of 24/7 uptime between reboots for years and it’s just as snappy as when I first installed it. And even better they push hard to keep things more or less the same. The things I learned setting up FreeBSD 8.0 are still the same for FreeBSD 13. The biggest changes have been upgraded hardware support and quality of life tools that interact with the systems I was already using.
As a note FreeBSD does not come with a graphical interface. They have imo the best manual (handbook) for setting it up and getting going, and have native zfs for software raid arrays.
My risky two cents here is FreeBSD is great for learning all the ins and outs of Unix-like systems but is missing some things linux users take for granted like docker for servers (they use jails you set up yourself) and no cuda libraries for ai. If you have the time and want to learn how these systems operate from the ground up I find it’s better than arch. Easier to install, no compiling everything like gentoo, and an incredibly clean manual that has always made sense and worked exactly as expected. For just getting a desktop and easing into things there’s also nothing wrong with say Linux mint or any of the other recommendations others have said either.
The glory of Unix-like systems is they’re yours, and once you get used to how they run they’ll be rock steady for years and run faster than windows on the same device.
I switched for two reasons. First, I don't like how Microsoft is trying to attach everything to an online microsoft account. I prefer local control of my OS. I know there is a workaround for this, but it isn't worth the effort.
Second, I am Cheap. My latest hardware is a decade out of date, and linux makes better use of the limited resources that I have.
I decided to switch when windows xp went end-of-life, because my pc was a mid-2000’s era relic that would surely catch fire if it was forced to handle the windows 7/10 bloat. Naturally, I installed Mint on bare metal without doing any research beforehand. Not the best idea, but sometimes it’s fun to jump headfirst into a completely foreign landscape. That said, Cinnamon (the desktop environment of Mint) shares much of its design language with windows, so it’s not really that foreign, as far as the graphical interface is concerned.
What surprised me was just how different the underlying system was, how much more transparent and accessible it was, and how incredibly efficient and versatile the command line could be. Then there’s the broader OSS community, which I think is a fantastic thing to participate in even if you don’t use Linux, but using Linux is certainly a gateway.
I’m not saying Linux is perfect, and it’s probably not for everyone, but it is nice to not be held captive by some monopolistic corporation, who continuously engages in ethically questionable anti-consumer behaviour, in the name of increasingly monetizing their user base. Linux gives power back to the end users, and that’s what makes it worthwhile and important.
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