Could be small or big.
My answer has always been that, Linux can’t handle everything I’d ask out of it that I normally can with Windows. I know the games issue has been progressing far from the days when that used to have been an archaic flaw with Linux for the longest time. Games might not be the issue except for some concerns I have for some games.
I was taking some time a few moments ago, to check if a program called Firestorm Viewer would work on Linux Mint which could’ve been my distro of choice. And the description written on the linux page described exactly the kind of concerns I’d have for compatibility and usability from going Windows to Linux.
They said that their viewer was tested and designed to function mostly with Ubuntu and while it could work with other distros, it’s not to be expected to be smooth.
That’s the kind of sentiment and concern I have always had with Linux if I were to go from Windows to it. There are programs and tools on Windows that I have that are used for specific purposes and I know they will not function on Linux. Furthermore, incase anything breaks down, any and all solutions would only be applicable to that thing that would be far easier to solve than just being SOL if I was on Linux.
It is something as a user that I just can’t simply afford to deal with on a regular basis if I made the switch.
So while I may not have too much of an issue running games, I won’t have too much of an issue using alternatives, I won’t have to deal with the Windows ecosystem .etc I will just be running into other walls that would simply make me second guess my decision and make me regret switching to the point where I would dip back into Windows in a hurry.
Every couple years I decide to switch to Linux, spend few weeks trying to get everything to work right, then give up and go back to Windows.
I feel like I’m in a “Goldilocks zone” where I’m enough of a power user that doing what I want in Linux takes quite a bit of work to get set up, but not enough of a power user that I enjoy the technical challenge.
Most recently I was trying to play a couple modded video games, and run a headless HTPC. One thing would work on one distro, another would work on another, but I couldn’t get everything to work at once.
Not sure what to get considering I want something fully European.
Unfortunately I’m addicted to a game that requires kernel level anti cheat. So I dual boot Fedora and Windows, but pretty much the only thing I use the Windows partition for is the game and that rare application that just works ™️ on Windows
Same here, fellow Fedora and Windows dual boot. I have a seperate hard drive for kernel level anti-cheat games: Escape From Tarkov - some PVE maps do run under Linux but PVP and parts of the map require anti-cheat.
Battlefield games from 5 onwards
Call of Duty games Coldwar onwards - do not open a call of duty game under Linux, there have been posts where it is an instant ban.
Ghosts of Tabor
I do have hope that one day the anti-cheat situation will work out where it doesn’t matter what operating system you are running but for now if I want to play some of the above games with friends for now I dual boot.
I did. But I could easily see how people are put off by the “fan base”. I actually avoid talking about Linux at all irl because I don’t want people to think I’m a fossbro
Jesus yes, the fanbase, more primarily the die-hards.
The kind that feel they have to be the jehovah’s witness of operating systems. Can’t tell you how many times someone wants a software or even a hardware issue troubleshooted and it never fails, there’s that one guy or two going “GO LINUX!”. “Have you tried Linux?” they butt in, disrespecting the inquiring user just wanting their problem solved so they can continue using their computer throughout the day. They’re not interested in being marketed to or browbeaten, even if that thing is free.
It’s happened to me before. Game won’t run? Linux. Can’t boot? Linux. Your computer is on fire? Linux because I guess it is capable of virtualizing a fire extinguisher to cool your computer down. It is no wonder some users online find Linux users insufferable this way.
The only worst thing a Windows user can do to you is just nag you to upgrade the OS but you can tell them to fuck off. With a Linux user? It could turn into an hours-long debate.
Jesus, yes. And I’m a lady so I get the extra layer of dudes trying to gatekeep their “manly” hobby. I can go for a hat trick of perceived emasculation while I’m at it and tell them my deadlift form is better than theirs and that I know the best way to clean a trout.
- CAD
- Photo editing
Gave FreeCAD and darktable a solid try hoping to switch my main desktop, but they have significant usability problems
CAD was a big problem for me as well. I’ve been happy enough with OnShape (coming from Autodesk Inventor), but the extreme SaaS nature of it makes me worry.
I used to dual boot windows just for when I needed to run LR Classic or Photoshop but now I just use winboat which makes them usable in Linux in your desktop environment while under the hood its running through a VM. It works great except not having GPU acceleration hurts, but it was a compromise worth it to me to not have to reboot into and out of windows.
Have you tried RawTherapee instead of Darktable? They both do pretty much the same thing, but I find RawTherapee much easier to use :)
I’m convinced it’s much less straightforward than people here say it is.
I hate Windows, but I only use my computer for OpenOffice, some liiiiight browsing, and old-school light pirating (light enough TPB fits all my needs), so meh.
My new neighbor is an old leftist techie though, and when my 9 year old laptop dies, I may ask him to convert me. Maybe.it is not, but for the simple use case you mention, it’s actually more intuitive.
you can try it out straight from the usb.
Honestly in my experience linux is dogshit.
Want literally any program that reads or writes files to be able to work? Well good fucking luck spending hours asking on discord and reading websites trying to figure out how to fix the permissions and never figuring it out.
Want the system to fucking boot the OS? Lol. Roll the dice baby! 1/3 of the time it’s going to get stuck in command line.
And why struggle in the first place? Two of my favorite games don’t even run on it.
And even the games that EXPLICITLY SAY THEY RUN ON LINUX IN STEAM DO NOT WORK
I turned a gaming laptop into a word processor. And ultimately into a dust collector.
I’m done trying. Fuck linux and fuck the first person who tells me different.
I’m curious to know exactly what distribution you tried. Every type of Linux I have tried have never given me issues with programs, booting, or running games.
In fact, the only games that have flat out not worked for me are the ones that require a Windows system for their anticheat.
I don’t blame you for hating the system; I would too, given the circumstances. I’m just curious as to how your system got to such a state of unusability.
mint manjaro kubuntu
I don’t remember the specifics of the first two; all above complaints relate to the third
Mmm yeah, Mint is like the only one of those designed for compatibility and ease of use first. Manjaro as your 2nd distro is an especially wild step. That was my 2nd distro as well, and it was miserable and I broke my machine lol. Then, come to find out, the company that makes it suxx with a capital XX.
You know, now that I think back on my early days, I actually did try Kubuntu for a little bit and I had a few hiccups there. Never failed to boot on me, but it did have times where it felt like it was trying. 😭
If you ever feel like giving it a go again, Pop!_OS is pretooled to have all the drivers you need. I didn’t have a single problem with Pop! my whole time using it. If that doesn’t suit your visual style, then PikaOS has a great KDE Plasma spin that feels just like Windows!
My point being: I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but also understand that there are options that are drag ‘n’ drop easy at this point.
I’ll go fuck myself now, I guess…
Oh, by the way, what are those two games?
I had way more problems with kubuntu than manjaro by the way. Trying to remember back, I think I switched away from it because of some security issue that was a meme at that point? I was thinking of switching back but I merged the laptop’s ssd and hdd in the disk manager so now I’d have to have a clean start and I got lazy.
I’m no longer in a situation where the laptop is especially useful to me and it was my trial run for deciding if I would switch on my desktop.
Oh, by the way, what are those two games?
Rocket league and this
I could probably run a VM for the latter if I were on a desert island I guess
Yeah, Kubuntu has some issues. If you didn’t have any trouble with Manjaro, CachyOS is similar, but without the BS, super fast and gaming focused. I’m using it now, and I was fully expecting to break it but it just keeps trucking.
Also, you can run both of those games on Linux. Steam’s Proton tool is magic. ProtonDB users have Rocket League working on the Steam Deck. You probably just need the Heroic Games Launcher to get it from Epic. I don’t have any personal experience with Rocket League, but Civ IV definitely runs through Steam with Proton, and it’s not hard to mod games on there.
I want to be able to rely on all the things I want to do on my PC “just working” I don’t want to come home after a long day of bullshit looking forward to playing a game or working on a project and have to do a bunch of troubleshooting because something is fucked up. I’m not there yet with Linux. To be fair I’m not there yet with Win 11 either so I’m in a tight spot.
I did buy a laptop so I could try it out more aggressively but have ran into a lot of roadblocks and just have a lot of things that I haven’t had time to figure out yet.
What kind of projects are you creating?
I will say, Linux really is not all the way there for people who use Adobe products. I get the hesitation. But, I haven’t had issues with games since like 2022 - and that was because I was trying to mod anyway.
That said, I have to inquire what distribution you’re using on your laptop? Not that they’re perfect, but something a little more preconfigured for your needs like Pop!_OS or CachyOS may be the ticket to a smoother experience.
CAD for 3d printing/woodworking
Drawing
Managing my media server and putting together playlists/reading lists.
Various little coding things to help with workflows on different things.
I’ve been playing around with Bazzite which seems to be pretty good so far but I have a list of things still I need to figure out how to do on it. Also for the record I’ve been running a headless debian server for my media for years without much issue so I’m not clueless about Linux but that isn’t as involved as using it for a desktop.
CAD is the one thing that has no meaningful Linux alternative.
For drawing or painting, Krita or Gimp are your top options, though Gimp gives some of the worst user experience in all Linux. Inkscape if you do vector art.
Yeah, you’re a bit SOL for CAD and drawing. I mean, Krita is great, but if you use Adobe you’re fucked.
I hear so many complaints about FreeCAD… Maybe we’ll be there someday.
Yeah, I use Krita for drawing so I’m not so worried about (assuming my tablet works) I do have FreeCAD installed and have played with it a little but it was a pretty rocky start that left me not super confident that I’ll be able to rely on it.
Theres also the issue that working off just the laptop is annoying so I’m looking to see if theres a KVM switch/Dock that will let me use my periphreals with the laptop without having to unplug all my shit. Haven’t messed with hardware like that in a long time though so I’m not sure what’s what.
Have you tried https://www.winboat.app/ ?
No, but it looks like it could be worth a try. Although I do see that it doesn’t currently support GPU passthrough.
I run Linux but it’s hard because no Adobe, no Microsoft, and no esports fps games except cs.
The Finals, TF2(if you play comp), and Older COD games (if you use Plutonium Launcher) are supported :)
Thanks for the recs :) I could never get TF2 so love some warthunder tho
Depending on what you need, I might be able to suggest some Adobe alternatives to you, having just been through this myself.
do you know if Affinity works well on Linux? I’d love to main Gimp as another step towards moving away from proprietary software but it’s just not there at all for me.
The main one for me is Adobe acrobat. There appears to be no full feature off editor for Linux… any suggestions? Thanks for the offer!
@xorvixen@lemmy.ml: I’m not familiar with Affinity, so unfortunately I can’t speak to that. It looks like it’s not Linux compatible, but you could always run it in a virtual machine (which, if you’re not familiar with, sounds kind of scary and hard, but if I can set one up, I’m fairly confident that just about anyone else can too!).
There’s also Viva, which is proprietary, but does have a Linux version(actually looks to be more of an InDesign replacement, so scratch that).You can always go through what AlternativeTo recommends, and see what works best fot you.
What do you feel is missing in GIMP? If, by any chance it’s full CMYK support, I believe that Krita has that and possibly other features you may be looking for as well.
@ComradeMiao@lemmy.world: Yeah, I do feel that Linux comes up a bit short in the PDF editing department. Even though it’s proprietary, I do really like Master PDF editor, for which I believe there is a free version, but I do think is worth paying for if there’s room in your budget for it. Also, have a look at this.
I don’t know about games, but I have had the thought in the past that if there were really good alternatives to Adobe products (which for the most part do exist, at least for my needs) that people could quite easily ditch Windows if they wanted to and would never look back. Due to enshittification, I think it’s only going to become more and more intrusive over time.
Anyway, hope this helps!
I’m aware it’s not Linux compatible, I was just wondering on how well it plays with wine, since I heard Photoshop doesn’t really like to run under anything (thanks creative cloud).
My issue with Gimp is probably a user issue, as i’ve been a life-long user of Photoshop until my switch to Affinity (which behaves exactly like Photoshop without the “cloud” BS), although the fact that they only recently got non-destructive effects should probably hint at what I mean (slow development of- to me- essential features). My main issue though is probably just not being used to the workflow.
If Canva, who bought Serif/Affinity last year, ruin Affinity with cloud features, which currently seems very likely, I’ll probably try to just deal with Gimp and get used to it.
I don’t want to in any way denigrate the hardworking folks who work on WINE, but from personal experience, I have never gotten it to work with anything. I’ve actually had much better luck with VMs. I believe that WINE itself has a scorecard for how well certain apps behave with it, to wit:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=18332
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=20209
Neither of which sounds terribly promising, unfortunately.
You could probably run Affinity on VirtualBox, but that means still having to deal with Windows, and running a resource-intensive program on it that way can be sort of, well, rickety-feeling.
If GIMP isn’t missing any particular features you need, you may just want to steel yourself and get used to the new work flow. In any event, good luck! 🙂
I flipped in 1997, so any software I might have missed since those days are probably not around anymore.
Windows 95 was pretty shitty in comparison to Linux, and a lot of software broke with NT 4.0
It was an easy choice at the time. Linux was the operating system for this new fancy thing called the internet. Software development turned into a career, and Linux is just a very nice stack for building backends and infrastructure.
I do have an old ThinkPad around running windows 10. I’ve only used it three times in the past five years: To unbrick an Android phone, to set the MMSI on a marine radio, and to update the maps on my car’s satnav.
Pirated games
There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.
And then there’s the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: “Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can’t you?” completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.
audio production in Linux is awful.
I’ve found a lot of success after biting the bullet and purchasing bitwig as my DAW.
I still need to provide binaries for Windows, so build and compile for multiple operating systems.
I love Linux. Deploying software to customer sites was historically challenging on Linux due to system dependencies. Containers alleviate most of those problems.
So many folks seem to be the opposite of me…
Linux just works now. Shit with my printer, device drivers, LAN things, stuff like like is like wrestling an animal on Windows for some reason, and… just works with KDE. It’s like they’ve swapped places.
Random Windows apps works better in wine than they do in actual windows, sometimes. With no fuss: I double click and they launch, that’s it.
Don’t even get me started on security.
But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia. It’s… fine, but I’m not going to take a 10%+ hit, sometimes much more severe, and poorer support for HDR, frame limiters, mod tools and such when I can just boot neutered Windows instead.
So I’m not getting away from Windows in the near future, but to frank, I don’t understand why more folks (who get past the admittedly tall hurdle of learning about partitioning and installing an OS) don’t dual boot, or seek to use certain poorly supported Linux native apps when double clicking exes mostly just works.
But my point is you don’t have to pick and choose. And there’s no commitment. You can have your cake and eat it, and send the cake back if you don’t like it.
But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia.
That’s true. If you really want to switch to Linux full-time, going with Nvidia is gonna be painful. Drivers have improved a lot over the last few years (especially on Wayland), but there are still so many small bugs and problems that add up and drive you crazy if you have to deal with them every day.
That’s why I sold my 3060. I had a 12GB model and for a period of a few months, the Nvidia drivers were just completely broken and I couldn’t even launch into a graphical interface (I guess they didn’t test that much VRAM because most models only had 8GB), so I had to go back to earlier (even buggier) builds. Even after they finally fixed that there were still constant graphical glitches and stuttering on Wayland with KDE…it worked, but it wasn’t fun.
Since I switched to an RX7800XT everything just works out of the box and I often get even better performance than on Windows. Just a few FPS here and there, but it’s still nice.
Nvidia doesn’t care. They do the bare minimum to make their cards somewhat work on Linux, but it’s not enough.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure working Nvidia on wayland is a very recent thing.
Honestly I just boot from my (AMD) IGP for linux, which is better for compute anyway.
Dual boot is a pain in the ass. I did this for a time and just ended up going to one OS.
My journey with Linux has always ended with “Oh, it’s easy, just paste this mile long command i to the terminal to do something that is a checkbox on Win or MacOS” type nonsense.
There’s just not any true benefits for me to run Linux. Windows and MacOS have their own bullshit but generally the amount of BS is easier to manage than Linux.
I guess it depends on what that ‘something’ is.
My linux partition used to be like this (mostly Nvidia issues), but its been relatively well behaved. And now my Windows install has become a pain with UWP apps, printers, and LAN drives, specifically, that I’ve just given up trying to resolve TBH. Not to speak of some programming stuff.
Both OSes are tools that make specific things easier.
