The fact that you get a full OS for free, customizable and no crappy forced in features that you don’t want is amazing.
I can stress enough that my experience with Linux has been resoundingly positive, it’s almost like that finnish bill gates guy made a golden goose of an OS.
Ever since I upgraded my WiFi to pcie and moved to Fedora, it has been nothing but smooth sailing.
• AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike
•Customize Fedora to my liking, made it more like windows with the extensions provided
• What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!
• The mascot of Linux? 10/10 and penguins are one of my 2nd favourite animals
How was your experience with this Unix-like wonder? In a home user manner and/or a business use manner?
Let me know!
I’ve used linux for 20 years and was generally happy. I always used my main rig to play games, so I kept windows since my tries to switch to linux for gaming ended unsatisfying. Last October I decided to get rid of ms products and said goodbye to windows for good. Gaming on linux today works great. I am constantly amazed how great everything works and happy pretty much every time I turn on the PC. A big thank you to everyone involved in linux development!
What’s this? A software app store?
It’s ironic how on Linux, my distro’s app repository is always my first stop when looking for software, while on Mac or Windows it’s my last resort.
Commercialized app stores are full of spam, and Microsoft and Apple both decided that app store apps should not have the full capabilities of normal apps. It’s the exact opposite on Linux.
For something in-between, there’s https://winstall.app/
Microsoft also released their own package manager called Winget a few years ago. It mostly just wraps existing installers to allow for unattended installation, but it seems to work pretty well in my (limited) experience.
In a nutshell,
Zorin > Ubuntu > Debian > Arch, while (always) pestering google about trivial stuff, “How do I install something on Linux?” – “Oh look! A package manager! Which package manager is the best?” – “Distros have their specific packages? Cool!”, etc.
I broke nearly every distro, may have been KDEs fault.
Now on Fedora Kinoite 40 it works like a charm.
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the experience was wonderful. I learned I lot about computer, found new forums and IRC servers. It brought a new world to me.
I am still a newbie though. I don’t know much about Linux just enough to make it work for me.
I use Linux servers on my job and I did a ton of research. I felt confident in moving from Windows to Linux and for the most part it went very well. Most distributions provide a live environment and the installer is extremely easy.
I had a ton of small little problems with Nvidia, Wayland, audio… I ended up fixing most of them, or at least apply some workarounds but it was a painful experience.
Gaming works really really really well, which I found surprising.
I started on Ubuntu if I recall correctly, then made the jump to Fedora at some point. I think Manjaro was in there too? That was my first exposure to KDE Plasma
At some point I installed Arch in a VM and then I was hooked. These days I daily drive Arch with Hyprland (apps and whatnot provided by Plasma)
AMD GPU just works, no fussing about, get straight to fragging on Xonotic and Counter Strike
Unless you have a monitor that requires HDMI 2.1 to get full resolution/refresh. Then it only works partially.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, and I’ve been using it on my desktops/laptops for almost 30 years at this point.
But there are still issues to deal with on a regular basis, same as Windows or OSX.
Generally good, but fairly troublesome. I dualboot Pop_OS!, and the install was a nightmare. The live USB wouldn’t boot until I unplugged every USB device. Once it started, I could plug them back in. Then, when actually installing, the info about the various partitions I would need was apparently pretty out of date (recommend partition sizes were way off).
Once installed, though, it’s been really nice, albeit a fair bit more complicated. The only real issue I’ve had so far is that, in Unity games run through wine, video streamed in-game won’t play.
It sounds like at least part of your bad experience with the install was your motherboard’s fault.
For the issue with video in games, sometimes the codecs are missing from WINE/Proton. If possible, try using GloriousEggroll’s Proton fork
If you’re referring to the USB thing, I also tried booting Memtest86, GParted and Ubuntu to test, and all of them booted from a live USB without me having to unplug everything. That was totally unique to Pop_OS.
As for the proton, I’ll try that fork. I did try a couple forks, though the latest Wine-GE is the only one I can think of the name of.
Edit: I’m using Lutris, and Wine-GE is the non-steam equivalent of Proton-GE, so… whomp whomp I guess
I guess it all depends on perspective.
I love that it’s free compared to those $10-20k licenses for similar systems.
I love that there are good package managers.
I love that it’s open source.
I hate that it’s GPLv2.
I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.
I hate how it’s not POSIX-certified.
I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.
Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.
Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn’t take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore…
I would like to see Linux finally move to the FreeBSD architecture model. Or a sane Linux with a FreeBSD kernel.
What’s wrong with GPLv2? I feel like the fsf community says it is weak and the commercial community complains they can’t seal it.
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Guix
Ah yeah, I’m in the same situation. My daily driver is arch, but at some point I came across guix and installed it on an old laptop for when I feel like computering in front of the tv or something. Somehow I’ve even gotten yubi keys to be recognized and usable, but I really feel like someone needs to write an intro to the system-level APIs. The official documentation often feels like it assumes a lot more understanding of this than I do, and I haven’t figured out a way to wrap my head around it.
Since it’s not mission critical for me though, it’s been a fun experience!
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Yeah it sucks that Node is on a 2 year old version. I ended up just using a Docker container for that stuff. Weird that Guix has some packages years out of date while others are always bleeding edge.
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Yooo rare fellow Guix user. After a while Guix motivated me to learn Scheme. IMO easiest way is to just read the first chapter of SICP, its only about 60 pages.
Linux has been the biggest rabbit hole I’ve been in. There are too many distribution for me to choose one without testing as much as I can. It made me change what I wanted/needed. I went from “I don’t want to use CLI at all” to “man, GUI is too slow for that”.
I tried many Debian children and grand children distributions, Fedora based ones (Nobara, atomics bases,…), Opensuse, NixOS, Solus, arch based distributions…
Now, I’m on cachyOS, that seems to be the good balance I need (for now), between GUI/already configured and “I can do it the way I want”.
One year after starting using Linux, I’ve switched from a 3060ti to a 6700xt, just because it made hopping easier.
If you exclude me not being able to settle down on a distro, Linux is a funny experience to me. My needs are not that big, as I just play some games, have a light need of an office suite. I can do anything I used to to in windows, but without Microsoft and his friends looking above my shoulder.
I was entering my teens in the early 2000’s. My memory is terrible but my family got a pentium 3 desktop PC and I remember I had some versions of SuSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake (or was it Mandriva by then) on that PC at one time or another. My family never knew how to use it because it was different all the time. Heck I didn’t know how to use it.
When I built my first PC, a pentium 4, I dual booted windows and some flavour of Linux for a time, but I got into PC gaming so I only casually checked out new releases of Ubuntu over the years. Once Proton arrived though it was finally time to make the switch.
I’m not a developer, I made a pong clone with python once because I wanted to learn for the sake of it, but I support a few projects financially that I enjoy, I try to submit bug reports best I can. For the most part the community is great, and yes I use Arch btw.
• What’s this? A software app store? Swell! I no longer need to download stuff off from dodgy sites or numbingly installing everything manually!
Ayyyy! Some recognition! Some people install linux and ask “where do I get apps from?”, you show them the “store” and they go “wow, that’s so complicated”. That’s when I question how they manage to survive in this digital world.
Keep on fraggin’!
