Desktop linux has become great since I first tried installing it in 2002. I remember being in my barracks and I had to switch back to windows because I had no way to get the modem drivers I needed.
As amazing as the linux desktop experience has become, windows has really done this to itself. The windows experience 10 years ago was ‘fine’. Like it wasn’t amazing, it could be improved upon, but it did what it needed to do without bothering the user much.
Windows the OS has lost the thread completely. Its a travesty. I no longer recommend for non-power users to build their own PC (I’ve helped several family members who were going down the “I want a powerful computer, should I buy a mac?” direction and would steer them to build-a-pc+windows) strictly because Windows has become something entirely different than an operating system. Unfortunately, no Linux desktop experience is quite to the point where I could recommend it and not-expect to get a constant barrage of calls from a family member when they need to install a basic piece of software or their blue tooth headphones wont connect. Because of what Windows has decided to become, after decades of being anti-mac because of their ‘ecosystem’/ anti-collaborative approach, I’ve turned a corner and now recommend Macs for non-power users, but linux for every one else.
This increase in popularity has the potential to create a sea-change in that regard, especially if we can get people to support (financially) the teams that are putting these distros together. I really need a linux distro to recommend that won’t get me calls where I have to hop in and figure out why an nvidia driver that was working suddenly stopped working, what the hell is blueman doing, issues with audio drivers, issues with software compatibility.
Like I cant reasonably put my MIL on a linux laptop that I put together for her and expect her to have a good experience. So she gets a mac. But my nieces and nephews? No they are starting linux from day 0.
Cus I don’t want to get woken up at 6 AM to do tech support. I’m just not going to put Linux in front of someone who can’t do their own trouble shooting.
You can, no complaints from me, but I’m not going to do that.
I have, actually. I’ve converted both my elderly parents and aunt and uncle, over a decade ago, to Linux. They were first running Xubuntu, and now they’ve been running Zorin for the past couple of years. Both of them use an pure-Intel PC/laptops (no nVidia, no proprietary drivers) and they have zero issues. All they need is a browser for Facebook/email/etc, some light document editing, and the occasional prints/scans.
Linux works 100% perfectly for their needs, since all they’re doing is basic computing tasks. In fact the whole reason why I switched them over in the first place back then was because I got tired of doing tech support every time their Windows crapped out.
Yes. I even bought a generation previous in bluetooth hoping it would be issue free for my work machine I have to use windows on. I regularly have to turn it off and turn it back on completely. i also get random extreme video lag sometimes when bluetooth connects.
While I get the „windows bad“ point, linux works for your mother in law a lot better than for you because point and click has always worked well for linux from the reports I read. Please do not steer the tech illiterate to apple. It is dumbed down exactly to attract these figures. If you install a stable distro and dont go with need newest everything that linux elitists spew around, you‘re golden. System76 and Tuxedo Computers are the way to go as far as I can see atm. They even have their consumer ready builds of linux.
I’ve had two System76’s. Neither was a fricitonless experience. Its MUCH better than it used to be. But its not frictionless. I
If you arent committed to doing your own tech support, and lots of it, don’t expect things to go smoothly. They are way better than boutique linux distros, but by no means are they perfect.
We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking something is some way when it isn’t, just because we wish it was. The Linux desktop experience is 100x smoother than it was 25 years ago. The Linux desktop experience this year is 10x better than it was 10 years ago. But its still not quite there yet. Its not frictionless. It doesn’t ‘just work’, when people need to use software like MS office or teams. If I put someone on Linux who isn’t committed to the work it takes to run Linux (and it takes work; its easier than ever, but it takes work), I’ve just created an ‘anti-linux’ user; some one who will never be convinced to convert because they had a negative experience. One bad experience is all it takes to turn someone off for life. If my goal is to convert as many people as possible to Linux, I’m better off stratifying the users into those I can convert now, and those I may have to wait another 2-5 years for Linux to ‘get there’ in terms of a frictionless experience.
I think desktop linux will get there, but its important to be realistic about where its at.
You will never get a frictionless FOSS experience. Not today, not in 100 years.
For one simple reason:
It’s not human for something to be frictionless. The reason we are used to „frictionless“ is because us using this software makes them money. Its the crazy perfectionism some of us experience when overly stressed. Its unachievable.
I use apple products and it is everything but frictionless. My sonos app is a buggy mess, the linux version works without fail. It looks worse but it functions 10 times better.
Frictionless is marketing speech, an image we reiterate to ourselves because we were manipulated into believing it. Showing you ads for new apps while you drive is another example why apple is making everything as smooth as they can. 30% of every sale goes to apple, for absolutely nothing. For the service that apt and flatpak provide and which snap tries badly to recreate.
Apple is a kiosk system, you can only change very few things. Replicating that in gnome for example isnt very hard once it is set up. Put debian stable under it and an amd gpu and your MIL has a machine that works pretty much forever.
But yes, linux is definitely not „frictionless“ and you absolutely need to throw away the tinker mindset when designing a consumer ready device. Partly because they have been shown how great autocracy works.
I mean, I would argue that today that some Linux experiences are smoother out of the box experience than windows. I did a highend gaming rig with windows set up for a neighbor who wanted to be able to do a racing sims (chair, wheel, pedals, the whole shebang). I couldn’t believe how difficult it all ended up being. All on the part of windows and what it has become as an OS. Like jaw dropping difficult.
Windows is actively adding friction to their experience, so Linux just needs to do better than that. And the friction points with Linux remaining are frankly, minor and solvable. The issues for me always seem to be WiFi/ Bluetooth/ and audio drivers. The second big friction point is software instillation. I don’t want to jump in on the flatpack drama, but being able to install software and have it ‘just work’ is the other issue with Linux. Oldschool windows got this completely right. You download an exe, double click, press yes a bunch of times, and now you have software that works.
Those two pain points, which I think will be solved in 2-5 years in some version of desktop Linux (and even more likely to be solved with increased adoption), and Linux could easily replace windows as the dominant desktop operating system. Great progress in all of this has been made. We’re very close.
So I’ll swap out ‘frictionless’ for ‘less friction than the competitive equivalent’. It just needs to be a bit better. We’re very close. A couple more years, a bit more adoption, and it wont even be a question. In some cases, the Linux experience is less friction than windows. In a few years, I hope that most Linux experiences will be less friction than windows. Once that’s the case, the whole paradigm shifts.
Okay, that I can agree with. Thanks for elaborating. Quick follow up question: what flatpak drama? I know of snap and their proprietary bs and recent scamware issues but besides the fact that flatpak can push proprietary software from a vendor I dont know of any issues.
If I want a naive user to be able to have software ‘just work’, this has to be resolved. Its just too frustrating for any one not fully committed to slog through.
Okayyyy, got it. So the standard argument against progression. Make the system work better for consumers but dont put stuff in that actually does that. Like we use this in german „wash me but dont make me wet“. Flatpak especially works well now. The fact that you cant actually break dependencies (no idea if that has been the case) now is also very cool. Its also much easier for the dev to make the app and package it once instead for each distro - you guessed it - to make it more consumer friendly.
The flatpak hate especially feels like thinly veiled elitism. I get that it should not be proprietary so fuck snap but flatpak is okay in my book. :)
The flatpak hate especially feels like thinly veiled elitism. I get that it should not be proprietary so fuck snap but flatpak is okay in my book. :)
I agree, and for me its irrelevant because I will figure out how to make any software I need to use work. Flatpak, snap, aptget, straight from github, whatever, I don’t mind. I’ll figure it out.
But for some one who has very little patience for figuring it out, I really need a solution that for them ‘just works’.
That pretty much is flatpak (snap too but proprietary sets bad precedent). Install it, have shop, click install, it works. Used to be more of a hassle from what I hear but its easy now.
The issue for example with ubuntu is that they push snap so hard that flatpak integration seems kinda broken. If you use discover on kde/debian its like flatpak is just part of the ui. I‘m gonna make a video in a couple of days just to show how easy it is. Updates too.
The issue for example with ubuntu is that they push snap so hard that flatpak integration seems kinda broken. If you use discover on kde/debian its like flatpak is just part of the ui. I‘m gonna make a video in a couple of days just to show how easy it is. Updates too.
Will try to remember. You can follow me on peertube (from mastodon, no idea if lemmy works yet) if you dont want to miss it. peertube.giftedmc.com
Edit: I checked. You can actually follow a peertube account from lemmy. Should work if you put peertube.giftedmc.com/c/haui777 in your searchbar. Takes a bit until it federates though.
I’ve had my computer-illiterate boomer parents buy Macs for over two decades now because I wanted to keep tech support to a minimum (and because I saw the writing on the wall for Microsoft’s abusiveness even back then). However, at this point their next computer is going to be running Linux because I genuinely expect it to be no more trouble than Mac OS.
(In fact, their “next computer” is really just likely to be their current Mac but with Linux installed on it, because it’s so old that the latest version of OS X it can run is EOL’d. To be clear, that is Apple deliberately making tech support trouble for me, in a way Linux never would.)
I have several idiot family members running linux.
Its been zero problems. Of course they are not power users, everything they do is pretty much via a browser. Though one does have a scanner/printer set up (that runs with no issue)
only tech support I’ve ever done is get the question once a year asking “ubuntu says I should upgrade to this new version, should I?” and I say yeup.
My non-tech literate aunt has been running her Ebay business from a laptop running Fedora with unattended upgrades for 3 years now. She manages her expenses in Libreoffice calc and accesses everything else through Chrome and prints labels on an old USB HP printer. I don’t think she’s even noticed I switched her over from Windows 10 when her machine was getting slow.
My Dad’s laptop is also on Fedora (though he mainly just uses an Android tablet these days) and I intend to install it on my Grandma’s PC when Windows 10 stops being supported. So for the people who’d be happy with something like a Chromebook, which is a good chunk of older folks, it’s perfect and I can easily provide support.
That being said if I had to deal with helping kids who wanted to game and use Bluetooth bits and pieces surrounded by RGB crap then yea outside of a few well supported options it could be a nightmare depending on what they’ve got.
I think their original intent back when Proton originally launched was to just show generic Linux compatibility on any titles if it worked with Proton and was approved by Valve. I'm not sure why they stopped doing that.
Probably they understood that they couldn’t realistically check every new and old game out there and that people could patch games themselves, so it would be kind of misleading and pointless. Just like SteamDeck now: you get the “not-compatible” warning with working games that don’t have a nice starting UX but that works just fine
ProtonDB isn’t a Steam product though, it’s a crowdsourced community effort built and maintained by users. Steam pulling that into their official infrastructure would immediately put a ton of technical stress on the project. It would also be pushing on that boundary between a corporation supporting a community project and drafting all its volunteers as unpaid labor.
Suddenly I want to see a super smash bros knockoff where all the playable characters are public domain, and every January 1st they release an update with new characters that lost copyright protection in the past year.
Just a thought:
Isn’t that logo a bit weird? One proton but it looks like two electrons, and what’s the extra layer around the proton?
That is neither a Proton ion or a valid atom.
I guess graphically it looks OK, but it doesn’t make much sense IMO.
Stop it, no one cares…making it look like something recognizable to the masses is the idea. No one cares about it looking like a real proton or electron.
Thanks. 😀
I know that most probably don’t care, but I kind of do. Not in a big way, but enough that it irks me a bit.
I’m guessing there are others with a slight streak of introvert autism OCD that feel the same way, or at least find it funny that they’d make such an erroneous logo. 😋
That said, of course I’m all for Proton getting a logo, even if it’s a tad stupid.
On a post about the logo, I should stop commenting on the logo! Is that what you are saying? Really?
Apparently someone cares, you wrote your trash comment, that’s caring too. And some upvoted my post, probably either because they found it funny, amusing, interesting or even informing.
I’m guessing your intellectual curiosity is at the low end, for sure your tolerance is.
I don’t see why there shouldn’t be room for an observation regarding the logo design???
Because it’s a pendantic and contrarian remark that makes you look like some kind of self-indulgent prick. The fact that you can’t just say “you’re stupid” and had to make sure you sound intellectually superior just reaffirms my observation.
Who is or isn’t intellectually superior isn’t the issue here. You may find my comment pedantic, which you are entitled to.
But what do you think entitles you to ask/demand me to stop commenting my observation? When it regards the subject matter, and was all polite and only described a couple technicalities?
How do you claim to know nobody cares, and talk on their behalf, on a post that was already upvoted when you commented?
Seems to me that you are the one who has a sense of entitlement and is pedantic and a prick here.
I wrote earlier. “I’m guessing your intellectual curiosity is at the low end, for sure your tolerance is.”
Seems I was spot on.
Double check your model number on your controller. It’s possible you ended up with one that doesn’t have Bluetooth. That happened with me and I had to swap which controller I was using with my Xbox and which one I was using with my computer.
It has bluetooth. I’m able to connect it to bluetooth on Windows 10 with the same computer and was able to connect it to a Fedora 39 KDE laptop via bluetooth, as well.
I suspect the issue is the Linux driver for the MediaTek MT7921K or the bluetooth configuration on my arch linux system needs to be adjusted somehow
Let’s be honest year of Linux desktop won’t happen until more company’s sell computer with Linux already installed most people don’t install their own OS this is why Windows is so popular until that is fixed by preloading Linux on more systems I don’t think it’ll happen.
It’s not just that. Prebuilt computers with Linux are probably the worst way to go, because the people buying prebuilt aren’t the ones who can troubleshoot their own systems, and like it or not, Linux requires significantly more and more involved troubleshooting. Windows/MacOS have abstracted that so far away from the user that most don’t even bother and just restart, because 99% of the time that fixes the problem.
I truly don’t think Linux can ever go beyond enthusiast desktops and web browsing machines. It’s such a steep learning curve where almost everything you’ve ever learned about computers needs to be thrown out and re-learned.
This is opinion is more than old enough to drink and gamble in the states and almost as senile as my grandpa. Current iteration of windows is fucked in so many ways and I grew up on 95 then used every version after it for at least a year or two each but mostly XP, 7, and 10. Mac os I have no idea as I only ever put the time in during the time of Netscape navigator and Mac os was different back then. Modern apple UI still seems unintuitive in the sense that I have no idea how to navigate some screens while shit ass windows I can albeit begrudgingly due to m$ enshittifying everything. Linux has it’s factions though and they are just as different as m$ and app£€. I’m in the ‘fuck gnome my desktop is not a phone and this doesn’t even feel good on a touch screen’ faction.
My senile ass grandpa bets on horse races online from his kinoite desktop. Man literally can’t even communicate with us any more and somehow he figured that shit out after asking me for a computer by calling it machine and calculator and electrical box thing. I’m genuinely puzzled though it’s a weird case.
The more realistic cases would be my parents who use computers for work and movie piracy. I switched them after saying they will use this or pay people to fix their virus problems, and since then I have done literally nothing apart from confirm that the update notification is indeed the real one and okay to click. Even the more boneheaded in my social circle have gotten steam decks and have nothing but praise for them, even though I have a number of gripes. I do love the thing though, it’s like having a shitty child and someone has to love them, and thank dog at least they aren’t as ugly and deformed as the neighbor’s kid ‘rog ally’.
Ok, but again, that’s you. Not the average consumer. The average consumer has been using windows and/or macOS exclusively for the last 20 years. They’re familiar with how the current operating systems work, and have a large number of habits, good and bad, to unlearn.
Modern Apple UI is very intuitive imo, so we’re just going to have to disagree there.
The online betting example is a good usecase for Linux, as it’s nothing more than basic web browsing. For someone who’s computer experience is turn it on, open a webpage and never leave the browser, it works (and I mentioned that in my original comment)
The problem is for the people who need to do a little more with their computer, but still aren’t what anyone would consider tech savvy. They’re going to have a much harder time with Linux than Windows/MacOS, and that’s the only perspective they’ll ever get.
The steamdeck is a weird case. I honestly find it more of a consoleOS, which have often been unix based than a full blown Linux distro. It’s still not a desktop, at the end of the day it’s a very good game console.
Apple is the worst, most unintuitive UI in the world. It’s pretty, but it is not functional. The same shit you just said about Linux applies to macOS. As soon as someone wants to do something other than the most basic shit with macOS, it won’t let you, will force you to jump through hoops or will require a higher than novice knowledge and skill with computers to make it do what you want it to. But I think Linux is ever more leaning towards mass appeal without losing it’s flexibility and power. Something that neither of the corporations can claim.
Most people can’t actually use Windows. What they can use (barely) is a couple applications and utilities. Put them in Linux and they still won’t be able to use the system, they’ll still get by with a few applications and utilities which will use the exact same paradigms. So no big difference.
Also they won’t dump data in random places on the disk but only in the user’s home. Which is an improvement.
And for the few that want to understand something, unlike Windows a lot of the help is built-in. The error messages make sense. There’s a logic to things. All in all, Linux is easier.
In the beginning, i used Proton Expermimental (i think) because of some problems starting the game. But i can check again and also try one of the stable versions.
I changed Proton to Proton 8.0-5 and it seems that it runs much smoother now! Thank you for the tip. But like i also mentioned, the graphics look grainy and bad (hope pasteboard is working here): pasteboard.co/J04DV6MLyjBy.pngpasteboard.co/jw2C0cRoKIxU.pngHow can i get rid of this? Has this something to do with the shaders? I already disabled the steam shaders and re enabled it.
I’m not familiar with the game or how it should look like but it is quite old and was considered quite intensive at the time which may explain some of the effects present here.
I can give some general observations and tips though:
The fizzling you prominently see here exists to mask LOD (level of detail) transitions
LOD appears to be quite low overall; especially textures in the distance
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