Linus Torvalds said somewhere, that in a weird irony, the reason why he made Linux in the first place was to use it on his desktop computer, yet desktop is the only market where Linux has not completely crushed all of its competition.
It is getting better. But most people CANT use it as a daily driver.
The unfortunate relaity is that MS rules the business space, and without native Outlook/Teams/Office is pretty tough. You can skimp by with browser based versions but still…That not gonna cut it for julie from HR i guess.
I have been seriously considering trying it at work. But I do admin work. So many of the tools I use are opensource. Will still need RDP though.
I decided years ago to switch next time I change OS. I’m not ever getting Windows 11, but I’m still too much of a lazy bastard to move off Windows 10 til it stops getting support.
Maybe a wild hair up my ass to do it early will hit, but at the latest I’ll switch when 10 is dead. Or if I decide to finally build a new machine to update my poor dinosaur it’ll have Linux day 1.
In the meantime I’ll have to do some homework on proton and such to learn what I’m getting into with games so I can hit the ground running.
You a want a suggestion on how to make the dive easier ? Install Linux on a USB stick.
Any old 32GB USB thumb drive will do. Linux is way smarter in how it handles storage devices, so you can boot it from a USB stick and it will be just as happy as if you installed it on an SSD or HDD. All you have to do is tell the installer to use the stick as the destination when installing. Then you can boot from it whenever you want and try out Steam and Proton.
Heck, you can even take it with you and use it to boot other computers into you own pre-configured Linux.
@Lazylazycat@Anarch157a
Dual booting is an option
If you go with Ubuntu (best starting distro in my opinion) you will be able to install Linux alongside windows but there is a need for repartioning the drive.
So, these statistics apparently come from StatCounter, a web analytics company. I know that this is probably the best way of collecting usage metrics for the entire Internet, but I think this is less efficient for counting Linux users - after all, I would say that the proportion of Linux users who also use content blockers is pretty high. Even if it weren’t the case, most distributions ship with Firefox pre-installed, which automatically blocks trackers out-of-the-box.
Also, wouldn’t this also count an embedded device with a WebView as a “Linux user”? For example, smart TVs have a web browser, and typically identify themselves with a “Generic Linux” user-agent.
I love Linux, I hate Windows, I installed Linux, but there was one thing proton could not hanlde, all my visual novels. I’ll completely switch to linux when it supports visual novels or Virtual Machines with a smooth performance (or when I finish reading all the visual novels) Damn, I’m trapped on Windows 10 until that day.
Yes but from what I know Proton can only make some of the games I like work on linux and some not. That is inconvenient and a pretty big downside because it would force me to use a boot manager and go dual OS just to be able to play all my games, something I could also do just with windows only.
I’ve dabbled in linux for years but could never break my reliance on windows. I got a Steam deck and realized there was enough compatibility to justify moving to linux. So I just recently gave a flavor of linux called Nobara a shot. It’s by a Red Hat engineer that contributes heavily to getting games working in linux through Proton. My experience has been way better but I wouldn’t say perfect. I think it’s worth checking out to see if it works for you.
I will wait until I can conveniently play all my games on linux and then make the switch. Seems like we are getting closer but are not quite there yet.
@luthis@Nacktmull I don't even check before buying anymore. Everything runs fine, and I can't remember the last time I bought something that didn't work out of the box.
I’ve been playing most of my games on Linux since, well, years. When Valve introduced Proton it made things even easier, and currently I just enable Proton Experimental on Windows games and it just, works…really impressive when you think about it :)
I’ve enjoyed using my steamdeck and that OS. Would happily install a desktop variant of SteamOS when available but I mainly play single player games on the deck, I worry I won’t be able to enjoy a number of multiplayer games.
Depends on the game’s anticheat. ProtonDB is a site that tracks Steam Deck (and Linux in general) support for games. You can check what you play to see if it would run on Linux with Proton, the tool Steam uses to run Windows games on Linux. If you want a desktop similar to SteamOS, any distro that supports KDE Plasma will have the same desktop as SteamOS’ desktop mode, with the new Big Picture Mode on Steam being the Steam Deck’s game mode
There is a chance it might become exponential for a bit. Its never gonna reach 50% any time soon, but a good percentage to actually make companies produce more often to it will definitely happen.
Yes. Laptops and desktop machines are included in the desktop platform together. We use the browser useragent to determine the platform and there is not enough information contained in the useragent to distinguish between laptops and desktops. That is why we do not have a separate laptop platform.
So it sounds like they’re using the useragent to distinguish between mobile and desktop. So most likely, yes, steam decks would be counted as desktops, but only to the degree that they are used to browse the internet. I suspect most steam deck users don’t do that, but I don’t know, I don’t have a steam deck.
Linux still doesn’t play nice with nvidia right? Last time I tried to daily drive it I had many issues with my dual monitor setup, where each monitor is a different resolution refresh rate and has gsync.
Has Wayland caught up to WDDM? Microsoft has been steadily improving multi monitor rendering, and this is the only reason I haven’t switch yet
Nvidia driver still doesn’t work right with Wayland for me on my 3090. It caps at 60fps and has screen tearing. But switching to x11 on fedora 38 is easy enough when I want to game. There is an easy toggle on the Lock Screen to switch between Wayland and x11. For gaming x11 works just fine so far.
It’s way better now. Matter fact, I swapped out my 3070ti for a Radeon 6900xt and I wish I hadn’t. Nvidia cards have so much more to offer and I never really hit major limitations in Linux. Ironically Ive hit more with the Radeon card.
Personally I’m still on x11, and have had no issues big with the Nvidia drivers.
The only things are minor annoyances that come with the system being proprietary, ex. Driverctl entirely freezes up when trying to use on a Nvidia driver, and the driver won’t let you live pass through a GPU like nouveau does (supposedly, it’s too buggy so I’ve never been able to try)
Just waiting for my AMD gpu to get here and I’m making the switch on desktop. Been running linux on my laptop for a year already. Few minor issues here or there, but for the most part been super reliable.
The reddit API debacle sent me down a Lemmy, FOSS, Linux, privacy, hacker rabbit hole that I will hopefully and happily never have to leave. My eyes are opened to a better future. I’ll probably be duel booting windows for awhile still to keep up for my job, but I have been able to start transitioning away pretty easily thanks to the hard work of linux desktop devs. I am so grateful for the FOSS community and hope to contribute myself someday.
@jackpot You add every device to every other device and they connect directly to each other. If direct connection isn't possible (1 out of 10 times) then a relay server is used. The relays are provided by the community for free (I am running one).
I’ve been mostly using Windows in a VM. I’ve not booted into my Windows partition for months now while sitting there almost untouched for 2 and an half years, and in one week or two I am getting rid of it. And with my Steam Deck coming I will install Windows on that on an SD Card, so in case I ever need a physical Windows system for something (likely some anti-cheat crippled game, or Microsoft Store exclusive game, or a software that for some reason doesn’t work on Wine or in the VM) I have one ready.