What’s stopping you from switching to Linux?

I’ve recently switched to Manjaro, with a copy of windows on another drive for games that I can’t play with Proton, but in large part everything I do works so well on Linux, and I get to avoid the forced updates and other Microsoft non sense that comes with it.

Change takes time and effort, so people won't switch until Linux is demonstrably better in every way and on every setup. Microsoft will have a lot of opportunities to fuck with the Linux community until then including their signature move of releasing software that checks for nonstandard behavior and crashes in a cryptic way specifically to prevent their competitors from releasing a better implementation of their APIs.

A huge advantage is that everything is on the web and Google dominates the browser market. Pulling another AARD with browser APIs would only cause Microsoft to lose credit. They have to comply and support at least Chrome, which on the other hand is motivated to support Linux because Google doesn't have a desktop OS and Microsoft is their competitor.

steam really is awesome.
I found out the reason my windows games werent launching however is because they were on an ntfs vs an ext4 fs however. just to keep that in mind. your other games will probably work.

Nothing. Even most of my family are on Linux now because after Win 7, Microsoft replaced the tradition of "every other Windows sucks" with "Windows sucks."

I’ve been quite happy using Linux exclusively for years — primarily Debian and its variants. I have yet to jump on the Arch wagon again after the last time it hit a snag, crashed, and fell to pieces around me.

Lack of a good enough "personal computing" (defined by me) experience. I work mostly on Linux etc, but my personal "main" desktop is Windows because it just works with everything without hassle. At the end of a long day the last thing I want is to fiddle with scripts to play a game or figure out how to connect my VR headset or have my content creation work borked because something crashes repeatedly or fix my wifi when I want to watch a movie or have the DE break on an ultrawide screen and also refuse to render at 144Hz or having stuff run horribly slow and fail to use new/existing driver features and fail completely at things like networking or adaptive sync or HDR or manual power control or just freaking playing YouTube with sound (all of this has happened to me, over and over again). Tried to switch to Linux for personal desktop multiple times before, didn't enjoy it one bit, not going to bother now till all the stuff I care about runs effortlessly. I'm usually super tired and cranky when in that state, so yeah.

Yes it's been getting better and yes Windows has been getting progressively shittier and yes somebody's probably going to tell me how I'm "doing it wrong" and should learn to git gud and do it properly and it works for them, but at least for me there's a very significant gap still and honestly I'm too tired to care. I expect a lot more from my personal machine than just a ye olde desktop and terminal or browser.

Work machine is a hardcore Linux setup with a ton of customization, custom drivers for running the hardware we work with, whatever (very h a r d c o r e). It does well there.

For me it was driver issues and lack of creative software

I do enough intermittent work requiring iOS builds that I do need a mac, and its complete inability to run almost any game is actually quite useful for me.

Nothing but i keep a windows around for league and CAD

all these reasons and you'd think more focus would have been put on making windows binaries runnable on linux.

It has been more than 5 years I used Windows for both Personal And Official Use

The only thing that kept me from not liking Linux 100% is Gaming and thankfully, my PS4 is awesome at it. So, win-win (no pun at all)

My personal computers run Linux except for my gaming machine. My work environment is a mixture of Linux, Windows and Apple.

What stops me from making the complete switch to an all inclusive Linux system? Gaming and work.

Linux is getting there, not going to lie. In one of my machines from work I was surprised to see how well the operating sytem integrated with it all the way to the bios. I have never felt that Linux was more complex than Windows really. If anything, even with the gui, Windows sometimes gets way too complex for me when in Linux is a quick search and some basic terminal commands.

Now here is the kicker, I think that Microsoft has some really good things going for them in the driver and administration space of the OS, for example (watch me get hate for this) I think that powershell makes more sense in an object system over the shells we get on the Linux space.

@AvatarOfKaine

sigh. Even though I doubt that there is a possibility to reason with you.

There is a lot of effort going on.

But the basic principle of Windows is a non breaking API.

Which is the reason why Windows still has stuff integrated from DOS era.

Which leads to the inherent problem that Windows has a _fuckton_ of APIs as the only way to circumvent breaking an API is to create a new one.

Leaving that aside...

Linux is the exact opposite. While Linus, most of the time highly disputed, has a zero tolerance policy against user space regressions, it's constantly evolving.

The old problem of e.g. a specific port of a game requiring glibc v2.18 while the currently installed glibc is v2.32....

There are two - fundamentally - different principles at work here, like matter and antimatter.

I doubt Windows will be able to keep the promise in the future, it's already falling apart (eg. SQL server building on linux, now only supported container os afaik)

@IntrusionCM *sighhhsssss pretentiously in return* oh the effort to say that. it must have been so hard for you to act superior.

wine has been around since probably before the 1990s but that is the first time I encountered it.

given the overall enthusiasm to bring an end to having to buy a new computer or pay for a new installation of required software with a working one, while probably quite a bit of effort is going into wine its obviously not enough.

though it likely targets specific frameworks and is based on the same thing, proton is amazingly good at running windows games... as long as they bother to advertise that the games have to be installed on ext4 as this leads to crashes in some cases.

how much code did they tweak ? I dunno, but if they adapted it, as a programming firm and got this far along to fixing the biggest complaint about linux, at least for their games, it seems there would have been a more centralized push a long time ago that would have yielded ..

... better results.

problem is likely one of motivation since open source code doesn't pay you anything, which is still a solveable problem of course.

course money problems are always solveable, the most evil people don't wnat to modify or trash a system which might lead people back towards being normal.

Instability. Especially with rolling release systems like Manjaro.

You're at the will of the most recent updates, which DO come with instabilities (I have faced many personally), but upgrading is impossible if you ignore them. Wait 6 months and try pacman -Syu and you'll bork your entire system enough to where resintalling is the quickest resolution

@AlgoRythm The whole point of RR distros is getting the updates quickly. If that is not an objective, as evidenced by not running any in half a year, then you're better off with an LTS.

Oh, and yeah, drivers. Things like graphics cards, network cards, and even some headphones I had only worked in mono mode no matter what.

And that's even with installing proprietary drivers which really defeats the point of using Linux

@Fast-Nop I don't know why RR systems are popular as desktop. I think the hype of Arch is mostly to blame. Manjaro is not the best option for your mom's laptop. Even I have some issue with it.

Ubuntu is fair enough, I think. There's still some crashing here and there that Windows simply doesn't have as much of.

@AlgoRythm Manjaro is basically an easy and somewhat better tested Arch, with the compromise between "old but stable" and "bleeding edge" dialed in a little more towards stability. If that's what you want, then it's good.

I wouldn't recommend that for regular end users, which is why I installed Mint for them, that being a better Ubuntu. That also nailed my choice because I dogfood what I install for others, and it's actually good and stable as a rock. Both desktop and laptop.

No driver probs at all, BUT! I did take care to avoid Realtek ethernet chips and Broadcom wifi. Graphics are fine with the kernel integrated ones since AMD's recent iGPUs are well supported.

@Fast-Nop Before I knew any of the woes of Linux, I built my PC with broadcom and nvidia parts.

Even if I fucking could get a shred of silicon these days, I don't want to rebuild my system for an OS that I don't personally feel fits the job as well as Windows.

Those are my reasons for not switching

@Fast-Nop Not to mention the fact that specifically choosing hardware to get around the shortcomings of a Linux desktop is a disadvantage in and of itself, as I see it.

@AlgoRythm Yeah, not all manufacturers care about Linux drivers. Some don't even care about standards and just test whether it somehow works with Windows.

For the laptop, I went the easy way: buying one with some Linux pre-installed (not even Mint) because I figured that would guarantee compatibility. Plus that the vendor gave detailed specs what exact parts go in, actually BTO (built to order).

For the desktop, I build that myself anyway. Even the previous builds, made for Windows, had parts that would work with Linux, just to keep the options open.

It's not that you can't work with badly supported parts, but it may be somewhat more effort. In the help forums, I do read threads about manual installation of Realtek ethernet drivers - I'd probably just buy a low-end Intel PCIe card, maybe even as used part, and be done.

@Fast-Nop adding to the driver situation.... It's not optimal in Windows either.

Even Microsoft itself admits and tries to prevent the damage of bad drivers TM.

Eg. blacklisting bad drivers, like they did with AMD, requiring a signature / Windows 10 and so on.

Tools that try to trigger faulty drivers behaviour exist, too - e.g.:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/...

Just because a driver is installable doesn't mean it's good. Quite the opposite is true I guess.

@IntrusionCM Yeah, I did have driver troubles even under Win 7 back then where AMD's Catalyst fucked up video rendering with blocky artifacts. I did find a properly working version though and then never updated it again in years.

And my Win 7 netbook had a problem with audio stuttering when using wifi at the same time, but I found a "multimedia optimised" driver on the audio chip manufacturer's website that solved the issue.

So that's what's apparently counts as normal to get a computer working - and it's certainly not counted against Windows.

Videogames

🤔 can't swich to Linux. Practically all devices already on it.