More like, “doesn’t matter – not being tracked > all.” :^)
Even so, Linux is easier to use than Windows (yes, I went there.) because of a single and only fact:
Configuration files.
Does the average Windows user can configure EVERYTHING through a SINGLE configuration/text file, that explicitly says “what does what”? Video, sound, window size, hotkeys…?
Linux is easier if you’re already comfortable with a computer. A lot of users wouldn’t understand how to edit a config file / would be uncomfortable doing so, especially those who grew up with modern phones and apps. Even if a 30 second edit took 30 minutes in a GUI, lots of people will prefer the GUI.
Unfortunately most people find Windows / MacOS “just works”. If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher. I love my Arch setup but the average user would probably find it unusable LOL
No it’s not. That’s a flat out typical year of the Linux desktop mentality.
I have commits to TF and cncf. I ran lfs like 6 years ago. I use Windows DE because it’s a far better experience now that WSL does 99% of what I need. Not because I’m uncomfortable in Linux.
People use what comes on the computer. OS usage on the Steam Deck is overwhelmingly Linux because that’s what comes on it. This indicates that Linux is perfectly fine for the average person, it just needs to come pre-installed. Very few people install their own OS either way, Linux or Windows.
100% - I was thinking more about adoption for gaming in relation to the article (which I should have been clearer about), but pre-installation is the #1 reason for the lack of general adoption. But I think if the perception of Linux was a little less intimidating, and some aspects were easier (NVIDIA drivers, I’m looking at you LOL), I think people putting together a new PC would have a much more difficult choice to make when flashing the pen drive :P
That’s an incredibly wrong assessment. People don’t use Linux because it’s not pushed like drugs by hardware manufacturers. It’s that simple. Linux is at a point where it’s actually way easier to install, use and maintain than the 2 other major players out there. Add to this the diversity of DEs, ways to make things work, customization, etc.
I think 5 or 6 years ago, I would agree with this. But I’m not talking about being comfortable with Windows, I’m talking about computers as a whole - a lot of younger people have grown up on app-based devices like iPads, deeply entrenched in “ecosystems”. I’ve found myself in situations where when working with people younger than myself, I regularly find myself having to explain things as mundane as how files work since they’re used to things like Google Drive. Sure, if you took someone with no computer experience and put a Linux and a Windows machine in front of them? I’m sure both have a similar learning curve, and maybe an arguably easier one for Linux. But realistically, when growing up surrounded by devices is now the norm, we can’t really ignore the prior experience.
This is true, and frankly a huge issue. It’s ironic that right now “older generations” (like myself) know more about computers than younger ones. When I was growing up the widely accepted concept was that the younger generation was always going to do circles around the older ones when it comes to technical and computer concepts. You have no idea how many younger ones know nothing about computing. Like asking if a laptop with “8GB of memory is enough to store all their music”. It’s kind of alarming.
I agree to an extent, but most games just work in Linux with no slowdowns or glitches. And I’ve had to mess with many games in Windows over the years to get them to run.
I don’t agree whole heartedly, but I understand where you are coming from.
I recently installed Win11 for work related reasons. Not entirely happy with that, but keep learning or die. If I’m gonna have to support Win11, I should probably run it for a while, lol.
I will say it was nice to just install steam, vortex, download game and mods, and just play without any further tinkering required.
I’d love to see Linux have that sort of native support, not just from the gaming industry, but the community as well.
I’ve been running Wayland for a while on my amd rig and haven’t had any problems with xwayland in regards to compatibility. Nvidia on the other hand is problematic but the drivers seem to be improving with every release.
OP only has to force the dGPU to be used, and that’s it for Linux. For the azerty issue, the solution is usually to install qwerty as keyboard 1 and azerty as keyboard 2 and always use keyboard 2. I do that with Dvorak and most games work without needing remaps (though I’ll occasionally need to fiddle).
On Windows, OP needed to install drivers, which can be a massive pain, esp for Wi-Fi drivers. Also, most software needs to be installed individually, which can take a while vs Linux’s package manager. For me, a typical install of Linux takes about 30-45 min from installation media to having all my software installed, whereas on Windows it’s like 1-2 hours because I have to go track down every installer I need, find drivers, disable a bunch of privacy-violating stuff, etc.
So the net result was:
azerty issue - easy fix
rendering issue - imo, sounds minor, and it’s probably just that game; maybe fixable by tweaking in game settings
Not bad for running a Windows game on a completely different platform.
Installing WiFi drivers on Windows is actually very weird. I’ve never had to do that. Not with a dongle, not with a brand new motherboard with built-in WiFi.
Really? I’ve had to do it pretty much every time I’ve installed Windows. Sometimes I have more luck with a dongle, so I keep a couple around so I can get Internet to go find the proper driver. Sometimes its not recognized, sometimes it just doesn’t connect.
To be clear, I’m talking about installing from an ISO, not using whatever the factory installed. And almost every time I’ve done it, on board Wi-Fi doesn’t work until I find an installer. Sometimes dongles work (I think they have installers on the card?), and I think Intel NICs work, but I really haven’t had good luck.
Once I have Internet, it’s just a matter of tracking down whatever drivers Windows update can’t find (usually 3-5 of them). And Windows is really helpful here, and I have to search by hardware ID.
On Linux, it usually works fine, unless I’m using a really crappy card or something, though better drivers can help with stability. My system setup time is like 30 min from installer to using the system on Linux, and on Windows it’s like 1-2 hours. I’ll probably need to install random things on Linux here and here, but it’s just a package manager command away.
All my PCs are hand built by me since 1990-s. All Windows installations are from ISO. I haven’t installed a single network or WiFi driver since Windows 7. XP - yes, nothing worked out of the box. But W7 and above the only drivers I install are NVIDIA drivers (it works without them, but the default driver doesn’t have all game optimisations) and printer drivers. Even Bluetooth works out of the box. You don’t even need ADB driver for your Android phone anymore, everything just works out of the box.
I’m also not sure what you’re installing for 1-2 hours, it takes about 10 minutes or so over here. It might be dependent on how fast your storage is though.
This was Windows 10, and it’s mostly drivers and utilities. I had a ton of trouble getting my wife’s mic working, which apparently needed some user space utility to be configured, and this was just a simple 3.5mm mic (AMD audio card apparently). And then there was random stuff in Device Manager that didn’t have drivers that I needed to track down (motherboard level stuff, not accessories). I spent like 30 minutes messing with a weird flickering issue (only happened in games), and it was solved by switching which monitor was primary (she apparently can’t use her 144hz monitor as primary, but whatever).
The actual Windows installation process was quick (she has an NVMe drive), it’s just all the nonsense afterward to get stuff running correctly. And that doesn’t include installing applications (she handled most of that, I hate tracking down SW on Windows), this is just to get the hardware to work properly.
On Linux, I just install the system, install packages from the package manager, and I’m done. No googling anything, no configuration, I just install the handful of packages I need that don’t come with the base system and I’m done. I had more trouble in the past (muted audio, Wi-Fi cards that need to be force enabled, etc), but the last time I had anything like that was something like 10 years ago. I do pick my hardware carefully which certainly helps, but surely Windows should provide a better experience since that’s what manufacturers target.
It did for me on my last few installs, though I picked Linux compatible hardware from the start (Lenovo laptops, desktops with Intel WiFi and decent sound cards, etc). YMMV of course, especially if you’re trying to install on some random, cheap laptop with bottom of the barrel components.
I’ll check out Tumbleweed. Any downsides to it compared to Ubuntu forks?
It has been a while, but nVidia drivers have always been a pain to install, especially when you also need an older version of CUDA. If tumbleweed has a better compatibility/easier installation process, it is a big win.
Tumbleweed is rolling release (kinda like arch), although they have a pretty rigorous testing process. So that could be a pro or a con depending on who you’re asking.
If what you’re specifically after is older CUDA toolkit compatibility, then I’d recommend using distrobox instead. That’s what I do for ML workloads. (If you plan on redistributing binaries then you’ll have to strip them with binutils though)
That take depends on what you need from Ubuntu 18.04. I’m not to familiar with how robotics stuff works, but perhaps a docker image would work? That way you can keep whatever libraries you need, and run it on whatever base OS you need. That said, I don’t know how much of CUDA or whatever is in the driver vs the userland library, so I’m not sure if it would work.
As for distro, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s relatively decent. I recommend Linux Mint Debian edition, but I personally use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I saw a question below about Tumbleweed, and you may want to look into OBS, which is OpenSUSE’s way of building whatever libraries you need in a repo. So you’d basically find or build a recipe for your version of CUDA and install that alongside whatever else is in the system (assuming the Docker option doesn’t work). If you’re using a relatively popular stack, chances are someone has already gotten it working.
it runs my games better than Linux and I’m really lost.
You already answered your own question/experience – do some “duckduckgoing” (even if it means falling back to the basics once again, “How to run a windows game on linux”) and then come back here. Because yes, GNU/Linux is 100% viable for gaming and can even run games better than on Winblows – if you know how to setup things properly.
A word of advice however, Linux tend to be a bit “sensitive” regarding some system elements/packages – you’ve got to provide all possible info to everything – theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands.
Some games, others run worse. It’s usually within 10% either way, which isn’t something I’d personally pick an OS over. You can probably tune things to eek out an extra percent or two, but imo that’s not worth it unless you’re really into that kind of thing.
theres no “ready out of the box” in these lands
That’s just not true. Most of the time, Linux works great out of the box, but there are some common areas where that’s not the case:
laptops with dGPUs - Linux just doesn’t handle graphics switching as well as Windows, but the solution is easy as OP found out
crappy WiFi cards - just buy Intel NICs
crappy sound cards - less of a problem these days, but sound can still be a massive pain
And that’s pretty much it. If you buy quality hardware, your OOTB experience is probably going to be great! If you buy an AMD GPU, it’ll be even better since you don’t even need to install graphics drivers! I had zero issues on my desktop switching between distros (everything just works), and my only issue with my laptop was using very recent hardware, which was fixed with kernel updates (there was a known bug with sound over HDMI on my AMD laptop).
Imo, Linux is much more likely to “just work” than Windows, assuming you’re installing the OS yourself. Every time I’ve installed Windows, I’ve had to track down a bunch of drivers, downloading Wi-Fi drivers on my Linux computer and installing them with a USB stick. That sucks.
It’s hard to convey and interpret tone in text-format comments, especially short ones. I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but it’s not really hostile enough to warrant an accusation. It’s curt at most.
Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
Reading your post I'd say you should've installed Ubuntu. Don't know why you chose Fedora over anything else if you don't know what you were doing. The problems you faced were all likely already fixed in Ubuntu long ago.
I don’t see how anything here depends on the distro, could you be more specific? Here’s what I see:
azerty issue - I have the same with Dvorak, and having qwerty as the first keyboard in my DE and as my system keyboard and using Dvorak as my active keyboard usually works well; but this issue isn’t unique to Linux, non-qwerty keyboard users are second class citizens most of the time
rendering issue in game - related to drivers and Proton version, neither of which differ by distro
It’s possible the azerty issue works better in Ubuntu (not sure how), but the second is due to property software that Ubuntu does not have control over (NVIDIA drivers most likely), as well as the Proton version which is shipped by Valve (again, Ubuntu has no control here).
So unless you know something I don’t, I don’t see how choice of distro is relevant here. I’ve had the keyboard issue on every distro I’ve used: Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Debian, and OpenSUSE (both Leap and Tumbleweed). It’s just a quirk of how Linux DEs handle keyboards.
Windows also doesn’t work out of the box like you demonstrated in your post, people are just familiar with how to get it working. Like, Linux isn’t more complicated than Windows, it’s just both complicated and unfamiliar to a lot of people.
Yup. Imo, Linux has a better OOTB experience than Windows since most drivers are already part of the kernel (esp if you buy an AMD GPU). If you only need basic software (web browser, office suite, etc), you’ll be good with any major Linux distro after a default install.
The complexity of Linux only really comes into play if you run into issues, like some hardware isn’t properly recognized/supported (frequent on cheap laptops, esp WiFi and sound), or you need specific Windows software.
That said, if you know both systems well, I think Linux is easier. It’s usually just tweaking a config file or setting up a third party repo and installing a propriety driver. And that can be nearly completely avoided by being careful when buying hardware, and knowing what to avoid takes some experience.
When first switching to Linux I tried Pop!_os and it was awful was a headache to get anything to work … switched to Ubuntu and all my problems went away , I don’t recommend using pop .
I haven’t tried fedora myself and at this point I don’t want to mess with what is working great for me . I did have some issues with it freezing when idle but that was fixed with a kernel update.
For me it was the reverse. Pop was the clear winner for several reasons. Plus I like System76 overall. I vigorously recommend Pop as a beginner/gaming choice.
But honestly, Ubuntu vs PopOS should not have been that different for you - they are extremely similar. Pop is cleaner with less bloat, and not beholden to Canonical.
To each their own of course, and having options is what makes switching great.
My wife’s laptop crapped out so I threw pop os (previously had arch on it) and made profiles for both of us. Lets her play the few games that she likes, and Firefox is the same. It’s made for an easy transition from windows to Linux for her. Ubuntu would probably be just as easy overall, but she likes the tiling too since it’s very helpful on a small screen (arch + bspwm is my main driver so I wasn’t going to give up tiling)
This may be a YMMV situation. I’m not a huge gamer, but Pop has worked great for me for nearly all games I’ve tried. The one glaring exception has been the Civilization series (specifically 3 and 6)… Anyone know if that’s a Linux problem, a Pop problem, or a just me problem?
(Also, sorry you’re getting downvoted for sharing your honest opinion/personal experience)
I had a bunch of issues and the more I tried to fix it the worse it got to the point that steam wouldn’t even work anymore and couldn’t get any games to launch. I’m not worried about upvotes so it’s all good lol .
I decided to install LM Cinnamon as the main OS on my new PC, and I can’t get GOG Cyberpunk to work for the life of me - tried Lutris where it doesn’t launch at all, and Heroic where it launches but has no sound. I’m ready to give up and go back to Windows at this point.
Use proton and/or a distro actually meant for gaming (Linux mint is simplified, more for beginners imo and not one I’d personally recommend). Try Pop!, Manjaro or Garuda.
As someone contemplating a move, posts like this and many others make me nervous. I have used mint a few weeks for just documents and browsing and had planned it for my main PC. Now you say it isn’t meant for gaming?
Sometimes reading about Linux is a mix of you can do anything with anything but shouldn’t do anything with somethings.
Linux mint specifically is great for documents and browsing but other distros are gonna have better gaming presets is all I was saying. Imo, It’s a “typing laptop” OS when you probably want Pop! Instead. That or the other ones I listed have extra drivers and whatnot by default. Just trying to be helpful!
I jumped right into Mint without trying other distros because I was coming from Windows, and it sounded like Mint is the least-needy next step. But my experience so far has been: If it’s not easily fixed with a version upgrade/downgrade, it’s not getting fixed. There are lots of forum posts to look at for guidance, but the fixes are always really specific to the OP’s system and not applicable to mine. I’ve seen a lot of people on Lemmy using Pop!; maybe I’ll try that next before giving up completely
You absolutely should, sounds perfect for your use case. It’s meant for gaming PCs, and as you’re starting out don’t be afraid to take advantage of the several different package managers out there (I think pop has one built-in but there are others like snap). Finding and installing programs via command line isn’t as hard as you might think either and is usually more secure/ideal. If you need something more cutting edge and are willing to dive into stuff like that I’ve had great experiences with garuda and manjaro too. There are lots of FAQ’s out there, and it can be really daunting at first but I promise it’ll be rewarding somehow. I personally love all the different free software repositories and having apps like fortune run when I start my machine- there’s something so cozy about configuring a PC to be a little fun and reflect your own personality a bit.
Love to hear it! Hope that does what you need it to for a long time! being a commercial product (kinda, system76 mostly makes money off hardware with it iirc) there should be great support and I’m pretty sure it has its own forum too like many other distros. Good luck!
I greatly appreciate the help. So then something like Pop caters more with drivers one may need.
I’m just tying to make sure my step into Linux is a good one. I have only used Ubuntu and Mint a bit and not what I would call extensively.
I was tempted by Arch but I don’t salivate at the idea of creating my own desktop environment like others seem to. Hmm. I have my research to do as I had not looked at Pop.
If you don’t like it there are always other options (if you like a lot about arch, Garuda or Manjaro would be my next suggestion) but I do think Pop is great for those adjusting to the new ecosystem from windows
Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.
For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.
I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.
But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.
Arch sounds both wonderful and terrifying. I’m still watching videos to pick a distro but aur sounds like the wild west. I also am not sure how much effort I want to put into creating my own desktop environment. Videos talk about building it all but provide little info on what length of effort and maintenance that will take. Are things more likely to break? I’m unsure and trying to find out.
Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.
Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.
People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.
You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).
Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.
And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.
However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.
Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.
Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.
Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.
Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.
But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.
I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.
My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.
Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.
Yup. If performance isn’t good enough, I upgrade my hardware. The delta between Windows and Linux is generally not interesting enough to have separate installs.
linux_gaming
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.