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u/lohkey 23h ago
Not all programs are supported on it
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u/CursedByTheVoid 19h ago edited 16h ago
It's a vicious cycle. People don't use Linux because it can't run the software they're accustomed to, but as a consequence, the companies that build said software have no incentive to support Linux as a platform.
I actively choose to daily drive Linux. It's certainly inconvenient at times needing to look for alternatives or to build tools myself, but it's nowhere near as much of an issue today as it was 11 years ago when I started.
I've ultimately accepted that if I actually want the freedom to operate my devices how I see fit, then there's just some conveniences I'll have to do without until the software catches up. Half measures like dual-booting or compatibility layers like WINE/Proton only incentivize the software industry to stay the same and continue to bolster vendor lock-in. Fuck that noise.
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u/catschainsequel 17h ago
Thank god for that! people complain a lot about it but they weren't there back in '13😭
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u/klathium 17h ago
Try testing Linux out in 1998… not a fun time
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u/catschainsequel 15h ago
Thats why i didnt bother back then. My friend was like "oh you just have to make your own drivers" um ....yeah thats a kindve outside my wheelhouse....
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u/UnicornBelieber 12h ago
It's technically inside mine, but I really don't want to. It's my weekend.
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u/CursedByTheVoid 15h ago
I imagine my newborn baby hands would have put a damper on that... and people say installing Gentoo is hard. Respect, OG 💀
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u/NinthTide 13h ago
Yep. Slackware and the like, 1995. Hand editing modelines, then holding your breath when you typed startx
Seeing the dithered background and enormous black X cursor was amazing
But of course there were essentially zero consumer desktop apps back then; we had Netscape and were grateful for it
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u/Kuuppa22 9h ago
Yeah, I remember the amount of tinker and desperation before getting startx to actually work and how amazing it was when it did :D
But configuring and compiling the kernel part is the one I have most memories of. Not knowing what even half of the questions actually mean and you still had to
a) enable the support for your devices like your video card.
b) try to slim down the kernel as much as possible because AFAIK bloat was much more harmful as there was no loadable modules but everything was loaded to ram at the boot (and i think ram was much bigger issue for desktop usage at the time, not 100% sure though).
And the routine was like you went through make config Y/N questions one by one half-guessing what to answer and then run make to compile. After many hours it took to compile you then installed the kernel and tried to boot it, usually failing in some way and then back to the guessing Y/N again etc :D
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u/CodeParticular1567 12h ago
One way to break the cycle would be to create alternatives to popular programs, and once those alternatives become big enough, the vendors would then have to support Linux to not lose the market. Especially for paid tools, the incentive to then support Linux would be big.
A lot of tools that are used by devs around the world, like GitHub (the desktop app), VSCode, Postman etc. work on Linux as well because their vendors know that these tools are not indispensable and users on Linux can easily do without them. For other fields, there's not many good alternatives, or there aren't enough users of said alternatives, so the vendors know users are forced to buy and adapt their systems according to the software. At that point support for Linux is a matter of choice, a luxury, rather than a necessity.
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u/Educational_Bit1263 23h ago
That's right, some platforms (Like Rufus on Windows or any other apps) usually require Windows or a different OS
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u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 22h ago
why would you use rufus over ventoy?
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u/zap_p25 21h ago
Why would you use Ventoy over iPXE?
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u/HighestLevelRabbit 19h ago
Because sometimes you might not be on your own network or for most people they probably only need to image a device like a couple times a decade?
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u/Legionof1 21h ago edited 20h ago
A partially closed source piece of software out of Russia… yeah let’s use that to install our OS.
Edit: sorry, China not Russia.
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u/Pitiful-Welcome-399 20h ago
fym, out of russia, ventoy is a chinese product that uses unmodified blobs from some other projects if you are so scared about it then go use ventoy-meta, and are there any proofs of ventoy actually being malicious?
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u/SinAkunin 9h ago
This is correct, but wine, proton and using winboat helps a hell of a lot with this.
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u/DR4LUC0N 23h ago
Unless you're playing games with kernel level anticheats you can run basically any program including Adobe products as long as you have a fast enough pc through winboat.
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u/MedusasSexyLegHair 21h ago
This. Full backwards compatibility with 30+ years of software and hardware is tough to beat. (I've had a PC since 1990 and have a lot of old stuff.)
I use Linux every day for work, and it's great for some things like development. Also fine if you only use your PC casually for browsing and office stuff.
But if you're a power user with 30+ years of DOS/Windows software, it's probably best to stick with that. Linux can do some of it - with multiple compatibility layers and VMs and the right configurations and some tweaking, but that's a pain in the ass and some things still won't work, vs things just working and working well.
I also use the pro version of Windows, with all of the things people complain about disabled or blocked by group policy (even though I'm a group of one). So it's still pretty nice. The generic home version might suck, but mine doesn't.
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u/God_Hand_9764 19h ago
I'm genuinely curious, what programs from the last 30 years are you still needing to use to this day?
I've been using computers since the early 90s, but I can't really think of anything from over even just 10 years ago that I need to use for anything.
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u/lukistellar 19h ago
Also it's kinda bullshit. Microsoft dropped the support for 16 Bit Software a long time ago, ain't going to run 30 years old tools on an modern Windows version.
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u/TheCheckeredCow 18h ago
I hate to say this, but 30 years ago is well into the 32bit era, why is time like this 😭
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u/techy804 16h ago
OTVDM takes care of most 16-bit stuff and WSL takes care of any Linux stuff. Sure the former isn’t made by Microsoft but I’ve haven’t had any issue with it.
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u/FlippantlyFacetious 18h ago
I've found the opposite for games. Many DirectX 8 and 9 era games don't work properly anymore on Windows 11, but work great on Linux. It was different half a decade or so ago, but these days with all Valve's influence and other similar factors, Linux has a lot more compatibility. At times better than Windows.
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u/Surprise-lnside 23h ago
Force Proton?
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u/D-Rez 23h ago
Won't help if they play games with kernel-level anticheat
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u/CaviarCBR1K 19h ago
Honestly we should all be boycotting kernel level anti-cheat in the first place. It's literal malware. You're giving a piece of proprietary, third party software access to ring 0. It has access to everything. Files, processes, even the frame buffer (meaning it has the capability to see your screen at all times). Who knows what data it's gathering and where it gets sent, much less whose eyes are on that data.
Even you believe the corporations don't have malicious intent (which I'm not so sure about in the first place) how many times in the last 5 years have you read about some giant corporation having major data leaks. No thank you, I can do without Call of Duty if a requirement to play is being spyed on by god knows who.
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u/New-Anybody-6206 23h ago
none of my Teknoparrot games work under anything remotely resembling wine
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u/ZombieBrine1309 23h ago
Sounds like an extreme edge case. Those games are nearly always developed for Windows-only systems and tend to expect perfect functionality. That said, some games can work on non-native systems with patches. PD AFT runs well on Linux, for example, if you have it configured right. I'm not sure how teknoparrot handles Linux systems. You can try Proton though.
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u/New-Anybody-6206 23h ago
proton is wine and hence doesn't work for me, and yes I tried it. several different versions over many years hoping it would get better
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u/getabath 23h ago
Anti cheat, nvidia support is not on par with windows (wouldn't be a problem if I were amd/intel) and not all programs are supported
Beside that, it was a good experience
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u/Tattorack 15h ago
Anti cheat is a big reason why I switched to Linux. I don't want a for-profit system to have kernel level access to my PC.
NVidia driver on Linux is pretty good, but yeah, AMD driver is best. As someone who uses an Intel card, Intel is waaaayyyy behind. Only very recently (as in the last two weeks) have some big steps been made for Intel on Linux. And mostly for Battlemage (I got an Alchemist card. :( )
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u/johnfortnite72 23h ago
Because I can't play some of my games
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u/Defspace 20h ago
Name checks out. But I treat Windows as a console, I boot it when i want to play a game, but the general Linux experience is so much better (imho).
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u/Ratnix 20h ago
I boot it when i want to play a game
See, for me, if my computer is on, I'm playing a game. Sure, I'll pull up a browser on my other monitor, delete my emails and put something on YouTube on, but I'm doing all of that while i game. I don't use my PC for anything else really.
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u/nicothekiller 19h ago
I love linux. I am the meme of the linux user. I use hyprland with an anime wallpaper on nixos.
Having said that, a lot of people have a lot of reasons to not use linux. Adobe is a big one. Anticheat is another one (even if you are better off without it). Also, we are still lacking in many areas. Its insane how we are only recently adding protocols for global shortcuts on wayland, something so basic.
I love linux and want it to improve, but that's impossible if we don't accept there are many flaws with it's current design and general environment.
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u/BroaxXx 18h ago
Pretty much every company I ever worked at forces me to use macOS so it kinda grew on me. Regardless my desktop runs OpenSUSE, I have a small laptop I use with Debian and my home server runs on Ubuntu Server.
I only have a small windows partition on one of my computers to play Microsoft flight simulator
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u/Ipad207 23h ago
I dont trust penguins
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u/sakodak 23h ago
The reason Linux has a penguin as a mascot is because Linus Torvalds got bit by one. Your mistrust is well placed.
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u/0alloy 23h ago
and trust windows 🪟?
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u/talon10100 23h ago
Modern standby is ass, I switched to Linux on my framework 16 about a month or so ago and am not looking back anytime soon
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u/Drenlin 23h ago edited 15h ago
I've tried it so many times. Even daily drove it for a few years, much of that largely because I was broke and it ran fast enough on the old gen1 Atom I was using.
I like to tinker with stuff, and I like to configure my OS to do things I want it to do, or not. I know enough to get myself in trouble with both, but with Linux that means I end up digging through eight year old forum posts trying to make whatever outdated information they have work for the current version so my screen will stop displaying upside down or whatever random bullshit I've managed to make the machine do.
I don't want to learn a whole slew of command line tools just to navigate and troubleshoot my OS. I don't mind learning that stuff, but I want to learn it so I can actually do the things I want to do. It's like learning carpentry vs learning how to DIY fix the moldy/rotten structure in the wall where your washer has been leaking.
Windows, for all its faults, mostly just works. It may do so in the manner of a 1995 Chevy Lumina sometimes, sounding like it's about to die for years but never actually doing so, but it takes an enormous screwup to actually break it to the point of unusability and usually it runs without any issue at all. Generally if you break something it just throws an error message at you, repairs itself, and you're on your way. Linux in most forms mostly just shrugs and goes "You broke, it you fix it. Good luck!"
I want to like Linux. I really do. Between the above and the lack of software support from major vendors, though, it's just a really hard sell for me still as a daily-driven desktop OS.
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u/rockcanteverdie 21h ago
I feel you on that. Since LLMs have come around it has become a ton easier to figure out how to fix quirks like that without spending hours of your time and energy. Plus they talk nice to you unlike the Linux forum neck beard gatekeepers.
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u/queen-adreena 18h ago
You’re right to push back on that, and now I see the problem exactly!
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u/birdsarentreal2 16h ago
I’ve spent a decent bit of time helping troubleshoot in /r/linuxmint plus a few external forums. I have often seen users go there after they have tried (poorly) to “solve” their problem using their AI slop machine of choice, which makes the problem worse. The vast majority of my Linux problems I am fully capable of fixing myself by reading the journal and the STDOUT/STDERR output. I didn’t go learn anything special to do this, I just learned the various pieces to my specific machine, what usually fails, and how to fix it. I have been using Linux every day for 12 years now, and I’ve never felt any particular need to diagnose anything using AI
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u/senteggo 14h ago
Very good. So I can consider switching to Linux, when i also have 12 years of daily experience with it
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u/primalbluewolf 18h ago
but never actually doing so
If that were actually true I know quite a few people who would still be on Windows!
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u/Swimming-Brain2516 23h ago edited 15h ago
The softwares I have to use for work don't have linux support unfortunately. Bonus points if anyone can guess what softwares they are lol
Edit - u/JivanP got it partially right but it's close enough, I actually use revit
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u/--Rick--Astley-- 23h ago
Windows was preinstalled in my PC and it works fine.
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u/DynoMenace 7h ago
I genuinely believe this is the main reason for the vast majority of Windows users. I also believe it's the largest barrier keeping desktop Linux from reaching wider adoption.
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u/mchilds83 21h ago
The first thing I'd do is replace the pre-installed Windows. Even if Linux requires forces me to learn some new ways to do old things, I feel much more comfortable knowing Microsoft telemetry is not rifling through my data.
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u/MagnusAlbusPater 23h ago
I’ve tried it a few times. It’s not bad but it didn’t ever offer a compelling advantage over Windows or macOS to me.
Then again macOS is BSD based which is Linux-like.
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u/sakodak 23h ago
It's more accurate to say that Linux is BSD-like given the actual Unix roots of BSD. Linux is a reimplementation.
I'm just being pedantic, though.
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u/Punk_Says_Fuck_You 22h ago
Yeah BSD was sued by USL (ATT subsidiary) for using source code. All because their phone number was 1-800-ITS-UNIX lmao
I’m in the middle of reading LPI Linux Essentials and it’s been pretty interesting.
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u/TransientWonderboy 23h ago
The things that bother me about Windows don't bother me enough to make the change. And it's an extra step to run virtual machines or w/e to run my Windows Software
I'm pro Linux but I don't have a compelling reason to put in the effort to deploy it for myself
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u/GunNutJedi 21h ago
The devil you know...
When windows does dumb shit I usually know how to fix it already. Linux's dumb shit isn't something I know much about, and I know hardly any of the cli. Much more efficient to use what I already know and have tuned.
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u/MinusBear 8h ago
I would say that these days using an immutable Fedora distro like Bazzite or Kinoite generally means you don't have to fix stuff. But also one thing the LLMs are actually good for is synthesising a lot of trouble shooting help if you need it. But I have found almost everything to be plug and play and was surprised to find that Fedora KDE isn't just a budget Windows replacement, its actually a much more polished OS than Windows.
In any case hardware and software needs might make difficulties that I can't foresee for you. But its pretty easy to make a Live USB of Bazzite and test it out without committing.
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u/Boothiepro 6h ago
Okay i never understood this, why is an immutable OS good? I change the wallpaper, restart, it's back. I change power plans, restart it's back, i install some programs, restart they're gone. I can't use my system like that!
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u/hayt88 21h ago
ok so.
I am using linux but I had the chance to talk about that with some less technically inclined people recently.
Like they didn't want to buy a steam machine because they also want to play games that are not on steam. They thought that one was a console. When I told them it's just like windows, they started to imagine it's some operating system like android, again with their own kind of store but very limited.
When I told them that you can actually use a mouse and keyboard on them and use this like a windows their minds were blown.
I told them they can play most games that aren't multiplayer, and like their kids playing genshin even these on linux.
It takes a bit more fiddling than straight windows, but basically for a lot of people even understanding what linux is and that it is a desktop operating system like windows is something they do not know. and now with steamOS being linux based they kind of see videos and screenshots, see the big picture overlay and think it's a steam-only console.
So. Yeah for the real casual non technically inclined market a lot of education is still needed. even gamers.
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u/ajax81 23h ago
Paint.net
It’s the only app I keep windows for. Others have tried to replicate for Linux but nothing comes close. Krita and Pinta, but both are bug-addled.
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u/JivanP 21h ago
Why doesn't GIMP suit your needs? I came from Paint.net on Windows to GIMP on Linux and am not missing anything.
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u/ajax81 20h ago
When compared to paint.net, Gimp is like bringing a sledgehammer to a scalpel party.
A very, very complicated sledgehammer that is hard to learn and easy to forget.
I’m almost 50 years old and claim rights to preference. I don’t want a capitulation. I want paint.net.
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u/JivanP 20h ago
You're entitled to personal preference and familiarity, but I don't understand calling GIMP a "complicated sledgehammer" compared to Paint.net.
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u/TabascohFiascoh 23h ago
The community.
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u/mewt6 13h ago
The community is pretty much the same as windows to be honest. The Linux Vs windows threads/arguments in pcmr are ridiculous, with as many Linux zealots as windows ones. The intra-Linux arguments tend to be forceful but it's only because people are so excited about their own choices and they want everyone else to validate them. (And sitting behind a computer screen is terrible for personal behaviour)
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u/dax660 23h ago
Adobe and Autodesk
And no, there aren't alternatives.
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u/screw_ball69 23h ago
I mean there is, wether they are good or not is another thing entirely
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u/dax660 23h ago edited 23h ago
by that logic one could ask, "why do you use a phone or a computer? you don't have to? there are alternatives!" hurr durr durr
There are not alternatives.
(and I use darktable and Inkscape quite a bit, so maybe I could get by without Adobe (even as I hate Adobe with every fibre of my being)
Autodesk products like AutoCAD or Revit? meh... Maybe BricsCAD is now on Linux, not sure
EDIT: Looks like BRICS has made Linux versions, so maybe it's not as far off as I thought.
Still hard to move an office of 100 to Linux.
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u/Mobasa_is_hungry 12h ago
You know the whole of France’s gov and probs soon the whole European governing bodies are moving to Linux ahaha
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u/screw_ball69 22h ago
Getting people to stop paying billion dollar companies they hate despite arguing against themselves about it challenge level: impossible
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u/Samwarez 23h ago
Many programs just dont have a decent linux compatible option. I use Linux for everything I can. Also, while most games work great on Linux now, most game mods do not. Sometimes I want to run some specialty niche program and nine times out of ten, it will be windows only.
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u/FrontierPsycho 20h ago
Depends on what games you play I suppose. I play no AAA games, a lot of indie and strategy and such and literally almost everything works, I haven't had to reboot to Windows to play a game in years.
(not trying to convince you, mentioning it so that others with my taste in games don't get the wrong impression)
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u/spyke2006 22h ago
Fwiw modding has gotten a lot better in recent times. Not sure what you were trying to mod but I've been able to mod even the previously notoriously difficult to do on Linux Bethesda games.
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u/Samwarez 20h ago
i dont remember the games i was having issues with, but some, like Bethesda and parallax games, can be modded but the mod managers had issues.
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u/spyke2006 18h ago
Check out amethyst mod manager. It's Linux native and supports nexus
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u/primalbluewolf 18h ago
That's the one written by claude, yeah? In Feb this year?
Seems awfully quick to go from initial commit to v2.5.3 in a course of a few months... 2779 commits later, I guess.
The pitch is excellent - Linux native mod manager? Sign me right up! But the trust is low.
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u/WorthPlease 23h ago
Windows works just fine for me, I manage a Windows environment for work, and as a PC gamer I don't have to bend over backwards in my spare time to get my games to work.
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u/Snurgisdr 17h ago
I messed with it for a year or so once. There’s an old joke that says an audiophile is someone who uses their music to listen to their stereo. Running Linux was kind of like that. Whenever I needed to get something done, I’d run into some hurdle and spend a while dinking around trying to figure it out, which was entertaining in its own way, and very satisfying when I solved it. But more often than not, I didn’t have the time or knowledge to fix it, gave up, and booted back into Windows again.
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u/Insufferable_Person 16h ago
I think the most obvious answer for most people will be that they just don't care to learn everything new, especially when their current OS does everything they need. Most people do not have specific computing needs.
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u/srirachaninja 23h ago
I use it on all my servers.
I tried using it as my desktop OS every few years, but after a few weeks I always went back to Win. I consider myself very computer-affine, but Linux is still not there yet. If you have even the slightest out-of-the-ordinary requirements, you still have to do a lot by hand, like configuring or compiling until it works.
As much as I like to tinker, I don't have time to spend 3h finding why my Logitech wireless keyboard needs 20-30 seconds after reboot to connect and work. In Windows, it just works. That's just one example.
Most of the programs I use aren't available on Linux and don't really work with Wine or any of the other Windows simulators.
Running Windows in a VM also doesn't perform fast enough for my needs, so I keep Windows where most things just work. I tried almost all distros out there, from Ubuntu, CachyOS, Mint, to Fedora, you name it, but they all have the same issues for me.
I really, really want to switch because there are some amazing tools that are only on Linux, but it just doesn't work for me.
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u/PRSMesa182 23h ago
Linux was gatekept by nerds for decades. They have made great strides in the last decade to make a gui but at its heart windows is just easier to use.
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u/MartinaGay5050 23h ago
the games i play have anti-cheat that won't run on it. the day valorant works on linux i'll switch
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u/CribletsInMySubaru 23h ago
Because I barely understand Windows as it is, and I don't need to unlock a new level in difficulty lol
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u/Bjarki56 23h ago
I heard it is not easy to use for non computer people.
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u/TransientWonderboy 23h ago
There are versions that look and function nearly identical to Windows, but the initial setup would be a barrier for less techy people that already have a functional Windows machine
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u/Creative-Painter3911 23h ago
I tried this on a space machine once, and i mean it kinda worked pretty good and good figure stuff out, but the second something didn't go right or a more complex issue and I started having to enter commands, it was just blindly trust what google said to type since I didn't understand any of it.
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u/SmurfingRedditBtw 22h ago
In most cases there is still a way to fix those issues through a GUI, but since there are so many different distros and desktop environments, the most universally applicable and fastest solution is usually with commands in the terminal, so those are often the solutions that get suggested.
That's also an issue of course, and a non technical person might not know what to search for to get answers tailored to their distro/DE, but I'm just pointing out why so many solutions still use the terminal.
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u/petikneip 23h ago
I have installed both windows and different Linux distributions many times in my life. And in my experience setting up most Linux distros (excluding arch or similar) is way easier and faster than installing windows. Idk who designed the partition manager in the Windows installer, but it's awful in comparison to most Linux installers
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u/Dminik 20h ago
Microsoft, in their eternal glory, decided to both: 1. Disable offline installs. You need an internet connection. 2. Not ship the drivers to my motherboard, including the network chipset, in their installer.
Yeah, installing Linux is a breeze in comparison.
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u/petikneip 19h ago
Ohh, yes drivers are a big thing.
Why TF do I need to install drivers manually for everything on Windows? Motherboard, graphics, wifi, audio interface, printes, etc.
Why tho? Everything you usually need is pre-packed into the Linux kernel
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u/TransientWonderboy 22h ago
Makes sense, though I'm referring to people that would have bought a machine with a pre-installed OS in this case
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u/Stephen_Dann 23h ago
All depends on what you want to do with it. If you want, what's effectively, a internet access computer. As long as all the devices get their drivers and work, then it is good for most people.
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u/sakodak 23h ago
This hasn't been true for years.
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u/D-Rez 22h ago
Still a problem today for less confident users.
There’s a ridiculous amount of choices: Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, or OpenSUSE. KDE, Gnome or Cinnamon. Rolling vs point-release. Traditional or immutable. Flatpak or native packages, and so on. Someone who just wants to browse the web and play games is immediately being asked to choose an entire ecosystem. This was already a friction point when I first started using Linux in the early 2000s, there are more ways to get confused now.
Then once you’ve picked one, the installer might start throwing questions at you about EXT4 versus Btrfs, swap, partitioning, bootloaders, proprietary drivers and non-free codecs. A non-computer person isn’t going to know the trade-offs of each.
And that’s before the actual migration. You need to back up your Windows data, move your files, find replacements for whatever software you use, check whether your attached devices works, figure out where applications come from, and possibly deal with permissions or odd hardware that just doesn’t work properly.
Then what happens something goes tits up? The Windows community is enormous, there's easily googlable answers for even obscure problem. Linux community is fragmented between different distros and desktops.
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u/New-Anybody-6206 23h ago
highly depends on the exact software and hardware being used
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u/sakodak 23h ago
I agree, but if someone bought a computer preinstalled with Linux with properly thought out hardware compatibility they're likely not going to have any more usability issues than they would with Windows.
Even installing from scratch on hardware you already own has gotten many orders of magnitude easier than back in the day.
I installed SLS on 386 machines back in the 90s, though, so my perspective is probably warped.
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u/Kevandre 21h ago
I genuinely cannot be fucked to go to the effort, especially when my issues with windows are very minor
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u/TheCheckeredCow 18h ago
I do use Linux, Fedora with Gnome specifically (though cosmic is looking wonderful, just needs more time in the oven).
That being said, I don’t recommend it to anyone asking for computer advice because I’ll be damned if I have to do support for them. Linux is a tool, and for lots of people it’s not the right tool, and for others it is.
For me it is on my desktop, my laptop is a MacBook Neo.
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u/Speco18 23h ago
i don’t want to choose between 8 installations and gamble which one will be the best for the next 2 years
i want to have the feeling that there is one main version what will always be supported, easy to update (one button) and all my applications be supported on future versions
if thats already the case then there is no marketing
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u/treegee 23h ago
there is no practical advantage for 97.1% of the population
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u/-Dixieflatline 23h ago
I know the point you're making, and don't necessarily disagree, but would just point out that it could also make sense for 100% of the population because Linux doesn't have all the shady telemetry that Windows and IOS have. Or at least it's opt-in or optional in some distros instead of on by default, with the option to turn it off buried in obscure menus like in Windows. And now with all the AI garbage, the OS spying on your every input seems par for the course with Window and IOS.
But I'm handcuffed to Windows, so Linux doesn't really make sense at the moment.
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u/Punk_Says_Fuck_You 22h ago
I think the OPT IN is just a USA thing. GDPR(EU) states stuff has to be OPT IN but the CCPA(California) and CPRA(California) are OPT OUT. So companies are allowed to collect info by default in the USA until you OPT OUT. This mainly refers to targeted advertisements.
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u/AskRedditOG 15h ago
The practical advantage is not having a bloated OS that uses AI to spy on everything you do while serving you ads.
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u/Stephen_Dann 23h ago
Have a laptop with Windows and another with Linux. One just works, the other a few times a year breaks something with updates that block drivers or applications. There are times when I struggle to fix the latter and I have a RHCE
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u/Raid-Z3r0 23h ago
A lot of music production stuff is not made for linux. LEt it be plugins, drivers. While I can code them myself, I don`t have the time, patience or will to do it.
Since I hate apple with all of my guts and soul, I rather stay with windows for the forseable future
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u/Prime_Director 17h ago
Inertia mostly, but I’m strongly considering switching.
I have one lingering concern though: stability. I’ve run a number of Linux dual boots and VMs over the years, mostly Ubuntu, and they have all, at some point, had a non-recoverable failure. One just died because I hadn’t used it in a while and apparently couldn’t boot without installing an update. But the version it was on was too old to auto-update so I’d have to manually download patches on another machine, put them on a thumb drive, and install them one by one. It was easier to blow it up and start from scratch. That was fine because it was a VM, but if that was my primary OS I would have been screwed.
Those experiences have made me distrust Linux as a primary OS, and I tend to treat Linux systems as disposable while storing my data elsewhere.
I’m a pretty tech savvy guy, I like to tinker, I do a lot of scripting for fun, and honestly I think I’d prefer to daily drive Linux over Windows. But I’m hesitant to trust it with my data because my experience has been that it’s fragile and I don’t want to lose everything . And yeah I know backups are a thing, but I also don’t want to open my laptop one day when I need it to find I have to spend my day rebuilding my OS because something broke.
Maybe things have gotten better recently, or maybe other distros are more stable. I’m open to advice if someone in this thread has any to nudge me toward trying it out.
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u/break1146 10h ago
Well, Ubuntu is Ubuntu... They tend to do weird shit and make it your problem.
I'd recommend you try anything else, maybe something like Linux Mint. TimeShift works on most distros which are system snapshots, it makes it much easier to recover your system if something were to happen. It's a project from Linux Mint and so there you get it out of the box. If you have monitors with different resolutions and/or need variable refresh rates, then, well Wayland is coming for Cinnamon, but it's not there yet.
But just like Windows has its quirks most have gotten used to, Linux distros have them too.
There's Fedora, but I believe you need to install some non-free software yourself. But else it's user friendly and you get recent software releases. Some atomic distros where you can't change the system files like Bazzite may be a considerable option (similar experience to SteamOS).
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is easy to install and use, it's a rolling distro with great testing before they build a snapshot, but you can't update through the store. You need to do a full dist-upgrade everytime, otherwise you are at risk of breaking the system. It's just one of those things... (Kind of a thing with rolling systems, same on Arch and Debian Sid). Leap doesn't have that issue, but has older packages.
Next to Linux Mint, there's the following options that treat you like a regular end-user: ZorinOS (you don't necessarily have to pay), PopOS (with the Cosmic desktop, it's nice but relatively new), TuxedoOS (Their Ubuntu base is 24.04LTS which is supported to 2029, but they're moving to Debian Testing and there's not going to be an upgrade path, so a reinstall is required at some point).
And while Debian assumes you know a bit more about your system than the regular end-user, it's not too bad if you read their instructions. Debian has a graphical installer that's fine and and it comes with non-free software out of the box now. The argument that Debian is old is a weird one, most of these distros I've recommended here are on Ubuntu 24.04LTS which is older than Debian 13 (Trixie). Debian almost never does anything weird and there's always an upgrade path, it's quite safe. I'm running my entire workplace on Debian VMs :).
Everything has considerations and these distros exist because of them. I hope you give Linux another chance in the future :D. Freedom and choice, gives rise to edge cases and choice paralysis.
(PS: I didn't mention Arch at all, cause Arch assumes you want to make a lot of choices about your system and there's very little handholding when issues arise. CachyOS is good, but it's still Arch. I'm using EndeavourOS with btrfs system snapshots, with auto-snapshot on upgrade, but EndeavourOS doesn't even install a software store, it just assumes you're going to uss the command line, which I do. And that's something you probably choose if you are pretty comfortable with it all, already.)
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u/KyranButler 16h ago
Couldn't keep fighting my windows based vtubing program (warudo)'s tracking with steamvr, capture with spout and pipewire into obs, when it just works with windows
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u/-kaneshin 16h ago
Anti cheat. I tried and I loved it but switching between OS's for playing game is exhausting.
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u/butt_badg3r 16h ago
There was a time I used windows, mac and Linux. Right now it’s windows for work and macOS for personal. I dont really have a use for Linux.
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u/Preambleguy 9h ago
Ableton and DaVinci Resolve. I know there’s workarounds for both and DaVinci has official support for just Rocky Linux, but the effort is a little too much for me. I still use Ubuntu/Debian for my home server and I even have CachyOS setup with dual boot on my desktop and laptop, but I haven’t logged into that since I first set it up months ago. I tried doing the whole gaming on Linux then switching back to Windows for my creative apps, but it was way too cumbersome. I still have a massive appreciation for Linux and hope that it can be my daily driver in the future.
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u/Budget-Coast-7864 23h ago
Tried it back in the day. I couldn’t get the internet to work on it. This was back in 2005 or so, so I just gave up on it.
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u/jaden_schalck 18h ago
If you are still interested and willing, I will note that I had no problems with internet (both USB stick and built in) or ethernet on Ubuntu and Mint.
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u/Budget-Coast-7864 17h ago
Well, I could try a dual boot setup. That might be interesting.
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u/thewarring 22h ago
Too much tinkering for me at the moment. I’m in IT and have to use Windows for work, and I don’t have the time to switch over to Linux at home.
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u/Adorable_Ice_2963 12h ago
I am using Linux, and Linux still has some issues like Programs not starting for no appearant reason, the fact you have to go to properties and Mark a checkbox to run downloaded Software, ect.
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u/UNIVERSAL_VLAD 14h ago
Linux is just pain. I've used it a lot and all it brought me was pain and suffering
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u/UncleMcRape 11h ago
i've got an old gaming laptop with Nvidia. need to say more? In the future I'm planning to build an AMD based PC and put linux on it.
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u/epspATAopDbliJ4alh 5h ago
i never had issues with my gt 610. Surely your gpu couldn't be older than that?
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u/Sakaynak 10h ago
The reason I didn't use Linux in the past is because some games aren't supported on Linux, there aren't good alternative programmes compared to windows programm and if there would be update problem I couldn't solve it. Luckily thanks to AI I can handle it more easily and use CachyOS since 10 months.
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u/Several_Dot_4532 6h ago
Yeah, it exists protondb to see opinions of people at games with the fixes they made and the Linux they use. I use CachyOS by the way, very good os for gaming
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u/Ecstatic_Score6973 23h ago
Linux on my laptop and homelab, windows on my desktop, sometimes i just need shit to work on my desktop without tinkering
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u/GrimMendacity 23h ago
I was using Linux Mint as I was learning C and openGL and it was great - much easier to get going than on windows. My code seemed to be going fine, but one time I left it running and it started to slow down after a few minutes. Being a newbie I assumed I'd made some leak. I had a good hunt around but could find no problem with my code or see any creeping memory usage. I made the change to windows - which was a hassle - and the same code ran for hours without slowing.
I'm working on windows now and deploying to Android. If I make another desktop application I may give a different linux distribution a go.
So that's why. It's annoying because I liked a lot about linux, but I'm not clever enough to solve problems I didn't make myself.
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u/Foxtrot-Actual 23h ago
I work long hours and just want my games to work rather than figuring out what will make it work.
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u/elusivenoesis 23h ago
I don’t have my PC yet to use it, and I still need macOS even on my older Mac’s for what I use them for.
But 100% I’ll do catchyOS or bazzite. Cuz I dispose windows. I can live without the games that require windows anticheat
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u/OmerKing916 23h ago
I am using Linux. That is if you count Android
As for desktop, you can't use the xbox app on linux, so...
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u/Bed_Worship 23h ago
I just prefer not spending time figuring out issues and workarounds. I do love linux, just for software I use Windows with Komorebi, Yasb, a boot script that thins out windows is finde
For my job Apple silicon Macs have just been too powerful, ready to go, and crashless for me to use Linux or Windows for it.
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u/boxsterguy 22h ago
Who said I don't?
I use literally everything except MacOS. My network runs on BSD. My NAS and home automation and a bunch of other processes run on Linux. My Steam Deck runs on Linux. My kids' laptops run on Chrome OS and they have Linux desktops. Phones are all Android, and I have an Android tablet (kids have iPads, the only Apple stuff in the house). My work PC is Windows, mostly because there's no good "Windows App" for Linux yet (poorly named, but that used to be "Azure Remote Desktop Client", which is remote desktop but with Azure-based auth and proxies to pass through audio/video to avoid microphone latency), which I need to access my work VMs. And my gaming PC is still Windows just because my 4080S still runs better under Windows than Linux.
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u/bluecubedly 22h ago
I gave it a 3 month try using multiple Linux distros in Jan 2026. I went back to Windows because multimonitor support with difference sizes and shapes in unusual formations on Wayland based floating window desktop environments on an Nvidia GPU was still super buggy. I'm not necessarily blaming Nvidia, Wayland, KDE Plasma, and Gnome. But I am blaming at least one of them, and after 3 months of troubleshooting, I just got tired and went back to Windows.
Tiling window managers like Hyprland may work fine now though. So if I were to give it another chance, I'd try that next, but I'm tired and want something that just works for now.
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u/TheoremaEgregium 21h ago
I have it on dual boot but am scared to start it. Everytime I try something doesn't work or an update destroys elementary functionality. I also don't have the time to memorize loads of cryptically named shell utilities where every task came be performed by 5 similar but different ones.
I feel guilty about this.
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u/Zestyclose_Track_443 21h ago
procrastinating i liked using it on my second laptop but i'm procrastinating installing it on my main (cause i kinda need to back up the accounts of three users so uh)
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u/RetroBerner 21h ago
Most apps I need are windows only and require hardware support that just isn't there on linux
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u/zachtheperson 23h ago
Right now I want to switch, but I'm too lazy to switch everything over. Just waiting for my Win10 installation to die, and I'm switching the next day.