I recently had my Framework Desktop delivered. I didn't plan on using it for gaming, but I figured I should at least try. My experience thus far:
* I installed Fedora 43 and it (totally unsurprisingly) worked great.
* I installed Steam from Fedora's software app, and that worked great as well.
* I installed Cyberpunk 2077 from Steam, and it just... worked.
Big thanks to Valve for making this as smooth as it was. I was able to go from no operating system to Cyberpunk running with zero terminals open or configs tweaked.
I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.
> I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.
I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32. Running something via Wine means Wine is doing the plumbing to take a Windows app and pass it through to the right libraries.
I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.
>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out
This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.
Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..
For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.
I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.
Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.
The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work.
That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.
Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.
This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem.
For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies.
I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.
This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.
Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.
My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(
I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB).
I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves.
My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world.
In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".
This week we closed the doors on our Linux gaming podcast, which has run continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama. With the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the original launch), it just seemed like the right time. Proton has evolved to the point where most things work out of the box. Few people are bothering with native support, and it’s become difficult to find new things to cover.
It really feels like everything is lined up for the year of Linux in the living room, and it’s great to see.
I never listened to the podcast, but I see where you're coming from and thanks for doing it anyway.
Twenty years ago I was in university and had a Debian install on a cheap-ass Acer laptop and I managed to get exactly two and a half games working under Wine: the first two Fallouts and about three hours of Civ IV before crash. Getting games to run was A THING.
Today I have a full-time job and deleted the Windows partition from my expensive PC about three years ago... pretty much every game I've ever wanted to play has just WORKED. Better than on modern Windows, even.
One thing I wish is that Valve could publish a 'Proton spec' that people could build against to ensure compatibility, but I imagine that that this would be an IP nightmare.
I was still using Windows 8.1 at the start of 2024 and was trying to slowly shift away to Linux at the time, but circumstances beyond my control ended up throwing me into the deep end a lot quicker than I expected.
I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
I'm one of those weird people that has been on Linux so long (wow, like over 2 decades now) I quite literally don't remember how to use Windows - even though I cut my teeth on it in the 90's. I dabble on the Mac to a moderate degree, but I'm just mostly comfortable on Linux, despite more BS than one would prefer. The benefits certainly outweigh the downsides (for most purposes), especially if you're technical enough to be self-sufficient.
When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.
> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
There's at least a few factors:
- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late
- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc
- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly
I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.
I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.
Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
You said it in your first sentence: you know that Dropbox is not designed to function the way you're using it. That's a kind of tech debt that may (will?) bite you in the ass eventually. Linux being incompatible with the way you use Dropbox is just a symptom of poor infrastructure and security practices, though I understand that it's probably out of your hands to fix.
My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.
I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.
> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.
I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.
The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.
And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?
At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."
In practice this doesn't affect the overwhelming majority of people as they're either not going to be compromised (the most likely case) or, in the tiny chance they're compromised, they're not going to notice (in which case from their perspective it still "isn't broken").
It isn't like this is the original WinXP during the era where computers connected directly to the open internet and caught viruses just by existing, making computers groan and being very visible that something was wrong. Pretty much everyone is connected via a firewall and on top of that Windows has improved its security considerably over the years. And there are still security updates for browsers (the main vector for malware by far) that support Win8.x (e.g. Firefox ESR will be supporting Win8.x until next year and people have made Win7 and Win8 compatible builds for modern Chromium).
So it isn't surprising that for all intents and purposes it isn't broken, especially when the alternative is having to change to something that feels like downgrade in terms of UX. From a user's perspective it is a choice between the unlikely potential of something invisible perhaps happening (getting compromised) versus the absolute certainty of something very visible happening (having to get used to a worse UX). Considering Windows still tie security updates with everything else, it isn't surprising that people judge based on what they perceive the most.
Of course the best solution would be to switch to an OS where such choices are not necessary in the first place. I've been using Window Maker since early 2000s and the UI has remained the same since 1997 when WM was first made, aside from the occasional theme change (which is done only whenever i personally feel like it, i.e. is not forced on me) while at the same time i'm using the latest Linux kernel, C library, drivers, etc with all security fixes. I do not have any choice between having security fixes or using a GUI that i am comfortable with - i get to have both.
It is VERY much a "compromised but don't know it, or it doesn't slow down things or break enough for them to notice" territory.
The state of security is /awful/ for general users.
But they also can't figure out how somebody keeps getting into their email account, why they get text messages that quickly disappear from history, or what these weird charges that keep showing up on their bank statement are...
who cares? it impacts nothing. windows updates are counter productive for a decade. "but security and zero days!!"
ok surely that firewall and home lab and ability to not download and run garbage is enough for someone on the supposed "hacker news" to handle. but no, we got heaps of people using "out of support" as some sort of argument whatsoever to upgrade to absolutely dogshit versions of windows. make it make sense
People get their identities stolen every day, and it is a super, super, super shitty process to go through depending on how deep it goes. It can change your life forever.
Having oldass OS and application versions make that a thousand times easier when you have so, so, so many CVEs you can exploit. And LLMs have been show to make this very trivial now.
All you need to do is click on the wrong pop-up, or the wrong link in your email, or tap something on your phone screen, or have a poorly configured (often from the factory) router, and the initial intrusion takes place. After that, an outbound encrypted session quickly gets setup, and congrats, now your network is acting as a residential proxy that can be sold to criminals that want to download CSAM from your IP, AI companies that will use your connection for scraping, and other elements that will either mine the data on your systems (your PII, logins, etc) and scrape your screens.
But if you don't care about your life becoming a living hell, then I can't make you.
This happens all the time, every day.
If you have a car, you maintain it. If you have a bike, you maintain it. Power tools? You maintain them. Your electronic devices also need to be maintained. They have access to your most sensitive data, and potentially private conversations.
This is bad. New user going onto an arch distro with a ton of tweaks is worst case scenario for a smooth experience.
I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth.
You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.
That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).
It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.
Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.
Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.
Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.
> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.
What do you mean "PC Gamers"?
It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".
So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.
Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.
There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.
Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?
They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.
Ideally, this would be the best solution, but what happens when the upstream distro packagers disagree with the vision of one of these downstream distro maintainers?
Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal.
But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.
I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.
I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release.
Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.
If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.
Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.
actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.
New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.
It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.
I use bazzite linux for gaming full time and can't say enough good things about it. You don't need to do anything at all to maintain it. Every Windows game I've ever tried just works perfectly out of the box. Sometimes I will see a warning telling me that a certain game is not certified for a good experience by Steam, and it all just works perfect anyway.
When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.
Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
In the 2000's I used to fear that not having windows at home would lead me to a lack of troubleshooting prowess when it comes to problems with windows at work.
Now I'm just glad I only have to suffer windows at work.
After some uni class at a conference room, back in 2006, there was a Linux hackathon/demo-y thingy outside where there were people showing off Compiz, the cube and that kind of stuff. Of course my noob ass was impressed with that - you can switch windows a 3d cube? That's amazing! That's the future! I want to try that!
So they were kind enough to give each one of us a Ubuntu 5.10 CD, one of those from back then when Canonical shipped free Ubuntu CDs to people around the world completely for free.
I can recall poking around that brown-y Gnome 2.x and feeling cozyness, like feeling at home. Everything felt transparent and humble and honest, from the desktop wallpaper, the icons and the typography to the tone the help pages were written. You could feel the ubuntu on it. It really felt like it was made for human beings.
The computer no longer felt like a dark box that only let you do things your license let you to do and if you dared to look at other direction, ever so slightly, things could go insanely wrong.
Granted, I didn't had internet at home back then (and wouldn't have it until late 2008 via a crappy 3G modem) so after nuking the Windows XP install and tried install it, also nuked the partition where I had all my uni docs and stuff and, defeated, had to go back to Windows via a pirate copy - until I had enough spare time to go learn what I did wrong and try again. Never went back ever since.
Things have changed a bit - Ubuntu is not what it what it used to be, I am not who I used to be (ended being a graphic designer) and not even the internet itself is not what it what it used to be - but I'm glad human creations like Linux still exist.
> So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?
I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.
There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.
This is the way. I've been dual booting with Ubuntu for almost 20 years now and my main finding these days is just how easy it has become and how rarely I need to switch to Windows. Sure, it happens and the option is always there, but Ubuntu as a daily driver is solid.
I switched over last year, no problems. Everything runs fine, and often better than on my wife's Windows machine. We're going to switch her over soon, because Windows 11 is such a shitshow.
Really interested to see where Valve goes with the new hardware. I love my Steam Deck, so I have faith they'll do a good job.
I just rebuilt my PC and setup Steam on Linux. It was fairly smooth.
I've dual-booted Arch and Windows for about 16 years. I always kept Windows around for gaming, and the occasional "doesn't support Linux" workflow.
For a few years where I didn't game I found myself almost exclusively in Linux. But then I spent the last 5-6 years stuck between the two as my PC use for daily tasks dwindled, I stopped working on side projects, and I started gaming a bit more.
I hated trying to split my time between them. Most of what I used a PC for was the browser, so I could just stay in Windows most of the time. I wanted to use Linux, but rebooting to use a web browser just didn't make sense. As a result I would accidentally go 2-3 months without ever booting Arch. As a result, I had a couple of major updates that didn't go smoothly.
I wanted to use Linux, though. I like having a customized WM, I like having so many useful tools at my disposal, etc. I just like using Linux, in spite of the occasional technical complexity.
In the last couple months I rebuilt my PC and a major requirement was that I get set up to game in Linux as much as possible. I even bought an AMD card to ensure smooth driver support.
I'm so incredibly thankful that Steam has made gaming not just possible, but relatively simple. Installation was simple. My single-player games seem well supported so far. And most importantly, Steam has made it obvious they're committed to this line of support, so this isn't some hero effort that will bit rot in a couple years.
I still have to reboot to play competitive games, due to their anti-cheat requirements, but that's less of a problem, I'll take what I can get.
Gaming on Linux always sucked because of many factors:
1. Linux decades ago was not "new user friendly"
2. Wine and PLayOnLinux was all we had with endless problem, and heavy dependency on Windows files like DirectX and libraries
3. Windows dominated the gaming market
4. 3D GPU driver was non-existent
The single reason why gaming on Linux now is better than Windows, has one name: Valve
SteamDeck/SteamOS changed everything, the whole Wine process is managed by the OS and no longer by the user. You may need to change the Proton version, that is all.
That also pushed GPU drivers to be better supported on Linux.
Valve single handled what gaming on Linux has become.
I run Mint Cinnamon Linux, and even tho it is not "SteamOS", I can play Steam games just fine.
Microsoft terrible takes and AI, is also pushing gamers over to Linux, better FPS on Linux than Windows.
The only restriction is kernel anti-cheat software that only runs on Windows, but many games do not use that and the ones that do use it like COD(dead game), BF, etc, isn't everybody cup of tea.
If it wasn't for Valve, Linux gaming would still be as dead as it has always been.
To make it more perfect, users that use their computer for browsing, writing docs (LibreOffice), etc, can be done on Linux for free.
You as a computer user in 2025, you have little to no excuse to try Linux, but try something good like Mint Cinnamon Linux that is extremely new user friendly, good for browsing, good for development work, solid for gaming, video editing is chef kiss, etc, etc.
Avoid Ubuntu (they are going proprietary).
I don't really play multiplayer games other than a self-hosted Minecraft server, so for me the SteamOS experience (using Jovian on NixOS) is strictly better than what I had on Windows. A lot of games from the late 90's/early 2000's have trouble running on modern Windows but work fine with Wine or Proton.
I've been utterly astounded by Proton in the last year. Nearly every game I have run has run just about perfectly, often better than on Windows, and I'm able to play them with an Xbox One pad no less.
Valve absolutely deserves a lot of credit, but I do think that the constant effort from the Wine people should get a lot of credit as well. Wine has had constant progress for three decades, with every release getting a little better. I haven't worked on it, but I suspect 90+% of the work with Wine is figuring out all the weird edge cases that have popped up on Windows throughout the years, which is often slow, tedious, thankless work. Valve did a lot of work but there's a reason they opted to improve Wine instead of writing Proton from scratch.
The problem with Wine is that you most know what libraries to add, etc.
PlayOnLinux automates that process somewhat but still very manual.
Steam Proton makes the whole process painless, you only select which Proton version to run, and that info can be obtained from ProtonDB if you encountered any issue, it is beautiful.
As for Linux, even emulators works like never before.
I could never get PS4 emulator to work on Windows, I got PS4, X360, GameCube, and a bunch of other emulators running on Linux like I couldn't believe it.
You can do the same from within SteamOS itself, you just install an app, select the emulator and you ready which is far easier than me doing this from from Linux.
I really like windows 11, works great. I have it way more customized to my liking than most "normal" users would, but there's really no negative impact on me. I also have a Mac and use Linux (bounced between arch, ubuntu, and now just use PopOS). Overall I generally prefer windows, it generally runs everything. Things like windows powertoys make the user experience pretty nice, doing similar on linux requires a lot more work. Wezterm standardizes the terminal across all platforms. But the OS really doesn't matter too much, it only accounts for maybe <10% of my experience. But everything just seems a bit easier on windows but I could live just fine in any of the OS's if I had to.
I generally like Windows too, which is a lot of why I'm so incredibly frustrated by the direction Microsoft is taking.
There are still glaring bugs, omissions, and regressions in Windows 11 that just are not getting attention because Microsoft is 100% focused on AI instead of improving their product.
I have a MacBook Pro now. I get by. Window management drives me absolutely insane, but this is the best laptop hardware, performance, and battery life I've ever had. Windows is now shoved into a VM that I pop open only when I explicitly need it for a few work things (primarily Excel and PowerBI Desktop).
I'd go back to Windows again the moment Microsoft starts respecting their users again, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.
This week we shut the doors on our Linux gaming podcast that has been running continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama, but with the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the origianl launch) it just seemed time. Proton has evolved to the point most things work out of the box. Nobody is bothering with native and it's gotten difficuls to find things to cover.
It really feels like evertying is ligned up for the year of Linux in the Living room and yeah, it's really good to see.
I just tried installing Heroic Games on Arch, and the install process has left me less than impressed. It will be one vague error with a bunch of forums saying, "try this" and no "this is what that error means". I try to install that one and it has its own error, with the same forum experience. I'm not trying to install something which will allow me to install vulkan which will allow me to install heroic games...maybe.
I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.
The experience using Heroic Games Launcher is a good bit less polished than Steam IME. I only really use it to play games that are occasionally given away on the Epic Games Store for free so I mostly treat it as a nice bonus if they actually work on Linux.
I had to briefly go back to Windows and I just couldn't understand how anyone serious can run an OS that just decides to reboot itself in the middle of the night.
Just install Reboot-Blocker. Or equivalently, define a Scheduled Task that rotates your “working hours” every hour, so that it always matches the current time. Yes it’s annoying to have to do that and that there isn’t a simple switch anymore like there used to be, but at least it’s defeatable.
The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.
If you are looking solely for a Linux gaming distro, Bazzite is it. I switched from Windows earlier this year and I haven't looked back. Everything works out of the box.
I've been gaming on Linux exclusively for the last few years. Problems with games are few and far between these days.
I've only had to fully reinstall once every ~2 years or so, and it's usually due to some problem with my DE/system not booting that I can't be fucked to troubleshoot. That's mostly my fault for running GNOME on a rolling distro. I just back up my home dir to the storage drive and I'm back up and running in less than an hour. Other than that, it just continues to work and I can be reasonably assured that if I don't touch it, it'll be fine.
My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.
Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.
I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.
Not only has Nvidia Linux support been first rate for decades now, but their FreeBSD support is also great. The secret has been that they run the same driver on all platforms with just a shim to interface with the different kernels.
I can confirm your anecdote, based on messing with ML on a linux system in my personal time over the last few years. I don't do any work in ML, but I have never heard of anyone doing anything with ML on Windows other than maybe running some models locally.
Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).
Any technical minds care to explain how the "agentic Windows" actually functions?
Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?
Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?
I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.
"How it actually functions" is too much of a moving target. The book of "best practices for building AI agent functionality into your OS" is still being written. But "sandboxed envs for AI to do things in" is one approach MS is currently trying for.
I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.
Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.
That's what I understand. It basically spins up a windows VM, you grant it access to specific files or folders, and it runs the actions in the VM.
From the MS support doc:
> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."
MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.
thanks for explaining that. I could see some value and also tremendous risk.
My concern is that the Windows Credential itself doesn’t have a ton of value (opening windows apps) but the browser cookie jar (e..g Edge or Chrome) , which the Credential unlocks, has tremendous value — and threats.
The core problem is lack of granularity in permissions. If you allow the agent to do browser activities as your user, you can’t control which cookie / scope it will take action on.
You might say “buy me chips” and it instead logs into your Fidelity account and buys $100k worth of stock.
Let’s see how they figure out the authorization model.
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
Graphics drivers are near the top of my list of issues I've had with Ubuntu. I've been using Linux for well over 20 years and Ubuntu (and to a large degree, other Debian derivatives) is just such a pain in the ass to install and configure. It is superficially a good UX in the sense that if you can somehow manage to stay on the happy path, it's smooth, but go an inch off of that and you're in for a world of pain.
Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.
A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.
LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.
If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.
Yeah the NixOS recommendation here is clearly a joke and I wouldn't recommend it to almost anyone, but I too switched about a month ago, and it's basically made for LLMs. Let them read the Git repo and they'll actually have a chance at figuring out the issues you have.
I have been waiting for this time to come. Microsoft clearly doesn't care about Windows very much, and Linux has never been more ready to break out in market share. Quite exciting to see!
>I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.
I don’t understand this reaction. It’s an immutable distro and is very similar to SteamOS. It’s very hard to break and dead simple to maintain. You will likely install apps via Flatpak and never have to touch the Arch repos.
I think you're thinking of Bazzite. Which indeed would probably have been an excellent fit for a gaming-focused beginner for the reasons you mentioned.
Changed from Windows 10 to an Ubuntu with beefy specs. When I saw firsthand the improvement of the user experience, I felt the year of the Linux desktop is nigh.
Did pewdiepie not write a voice to text for his LLM setup?
Thing is, we can talk faster then most of us can type.
Voice + Programming is slow because of all the special symbols. But voice + vibe coding? The ability to tell your LLM to do tasks, while you focus on other parts of the code, without the need to switch tabs/windows.
What about "change the color green on this element (html page), where my mouse is pointing"... Annoying with keyboard if you need to switch windows, very possible with voice.
And LLMs are very forgiving for mistakes, unlike if you want to voice program where every symbol needs to be accurate.
People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.
Please, really, I am sure we all get it. Who is even the audience for this kind of comment at this point? Can't we have one comment section that's about how Linux is cool and good and Windows sucks? Like when we were all still real nerds instead of product hypers?
There is exactly one game keeping me from running Linux as my main OS… and that’s iRacing.
Sadly, they won’t (not can’t…) ship the flag in EOS (née EAC) that enables anti-cheat support on Linux. It would work, but they just don’t have the resources to support a whole other family of OSes.
So, between that and the abject murder of WMR for my Reverb G2, I’m stuck on Win10 for the foreseeable.
Anyone have experience with CachyOS or Bazzite here? I'm using Fedora KDE standard, never toyed with Arch distros, and don't know much about Bazzite/Kinoite. Regular Fedora seems pretty usable to me.
In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.
Both are great options, but if you're happy with Fedora, there's probably not a big reason to switch. Arch is a full rolling release, which requires you to be aware and ready to deal with any breaking changes each time you update your packages. On Fedora, you'll mostly only have to be ready for this on a new version release. If you want to always have the newest packages for everything and don't want to wait, then CachyOS is great. If you want to turn on auto updates and only think about changes when a major release drops, Fedora is a better pick.
Bazzite, being an atomic distro, is kind of hard to compare to. For basic use-cases like running just software available in Flathub, it is incredibly solid and easy to use. If I were choosing a Linux distro for a non-technical family member, I would go with an atomic Fedora distro and be completely confident they could get things done without breaking anything. However, if your needs are more advanced, you're going to need to be ready to relearn a lot (e.g. using containers for development), since atomic distros are a big paradigm shift from standard ones. This isn't a bad thing, just something to be ready for.
I use cachyos. It's good as long as you're fine with some knob turning. I haven't had an issue granted I haven't played many things. Cities skylines 2 works for me so I can't complain about it
Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are realizing that Microsoft (any proprietary vendor really) is NOT their friend, and looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.
Over here we've been saying for years that gaming on Linux is a far better experience, with better framerates and better stability.
Just you're kind of SOL if you want to play anything that isn't based on some flavour of Quake or Unreal engine.
Well, that's different now. See? Told you. Faster, smoother, less crashy.
Oh, you want Microsoft Office? Yeah well you're probably using Office 365 these days anyway. Everything's in a browser. No, it looks just the same. Edge? It's less crashy in Linux, weirdly.
Funny timing. I just said screw it the other day and wiped an old laptop to install Linux. I'm using budgie at the moment, but it's been pretty smooth sailing.
I suspect the combination of modern Linux + + Steam + LLM to troubleshoot and learn may see more conversions like myself
Please don't install some weird trendy distro. I'm starting to think that Microsoft is sponsoring them just to make sure that people come running back to Windows, complaining, saying "not ready for prime time." Just install Debian. Stable. Or Mint or even Ubuntu. Move over to something bizarre when you know why you want it.
People want to game. Telling them to install Debian stable is not going to end well. There's a reason why these "weird" gaming distros are popular, and it's not because they are making people run back to Windows - quite the opposite.
The secret for a reasonable linux distro for most people is LTS Kernel + Latest packages. Most people want the latest versions of whatever software they use that will often include new features and lots bugfixes. The only time you really need a new kernel is for to support cutting edge hardware.
Many of the Arch or Fedora derivatives fit this paradigm well.
I wish my parents would switch. Look at my comment history if you want more details, but TL;DR the auto update to windows 11 bricked my mom’s laptop and I had to do some weirdness with Linux to save her files and then wipe the computer.
Since I am a software person I have become the person that my parents call for IT help, and increasingly I have grown pretty frustrated with Windows. I have been trying to convince them to move to Zorin or Mint or something or to buy a Mac, and they will not yield.
In a bit of fairness to them, the biggest issue is MS Office; they did recently try LibreOffice and the MS Office online, and they had shortcomings with both. Since I have been wholly unsuccessful at getting any modern Office to work on Linux (without virtualization), so now I don’t have a case for them to move.
Which is annoying, because I really hate having to deal with it.
My dad complained about StarBasic being different enough from VBA to where he'd be forced to port over large amounts of his spreadsheets over. He also uses the paid version of Mathtype to do his equation editing, which I'm not sure would work in Linux even if Word did run on Wine, at least not the direct integration.
I am drawing a blank over what my mom was complaining about but I do recall that it was valid. Something to do with Word.
It's tough for me to give full rebuttals to any of this, because I don't really use any WYSIWYG stuff for documents anymore and just use Typst or LaTeX/Pandoc for everything now. That works fine on Linux but of course that's understandably a non-starter for most people.
At this point I think the only thing I could realistically do to get them to switch, and I doubt it would be successful, would be to convince them that Winboat would be fine.
I recently had my Framework Desktop delivered. I didn't plan on using it for gaming, but I figured I should at least try. My experience thus far:
Big thanks to Valve for making this as smooth as it was. I was able to go from no operating system to Cyberpunk running with zero terminals open or configs tweaked.I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.
> I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.
I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32. Running something via Wine means Wine is doing the plumbing to take a Windows app and pass it through to the right libraries.
I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.
I run Fedora 43 and all games (single tickbox in settings) are running through "compatibility mode" (wine/proton). Works great!
>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out
This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.
Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..
Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow:
* Question with reasonable amount of detail.
* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"
* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"
[Thread closed.]
Or
* Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)
For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.
At least it's not Qualcomm support forums.
"Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"
I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.
Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.
The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work.
That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.
Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.
This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem.
For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
Nailed it.
Or "Did you try rebooting?"
The Microsoft Way (tm)
Lmao true.
The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies.
I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.
This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.
Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.
The use of the Latin plural fora really resonates. It's like they are their own class of organism evolving in a digital terrarium.
> either Microsoft or Adobe issues
Please run sfc /scannow closes topic
Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."
My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(
... and reinstall Windows is offered as the next step after sfc /scannow.
This is grossly unfair.
You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance
Blast. Soz.
I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB).
I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves.
I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html
My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world.
In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".
For sure. Despite its reputation, troubleshooting is much easier on Linux than on commercial OSes. It's not even close.
I've set Kagi to blacklist sites like answers.microsoft.com for a reason.
[dead]
This week we closed the doors on our Linux gaming podcast, which has run continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama. With the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the original launch), it just seemed like the right time. Proton has evolved to the point where most things work out of the box. Few people are bothering with native support, and it’s become difficult to find new things to cover.
It really feels like everything is lined up for the year of Linux in the living room, and it’s great to see.
I never listened to the podcast, but I see where you're coming from and thanks for doing it anyway.
Twenty years ago I was in university and had a Debian install on a cheap-ass Acer laptop and I managed to get exactly two and a half games working under Wine: the first two Fallouts and about three hours of Civ IV before crash. Getting games to run was A THING.
Today I have a full-time job and deleted the Windows partition from my expensive PC about three years ago... pretty much every game I've ever wanted to play has just WORKED. Better than on modern Windows, even.
One thing I wish is that Valve could publish a 'Proton spec' that people could build against to ensure compatibility, but I imagine that that this would be an IP nightmare.
Wait, what was the reason for winding down the podcast?
> Few people are bothering with native support
Was the podcast an attempt to increase porting efforts to Linux? But Proton (and now Steam Machine II) took the wind out of your sails?
I was still using Windows 8.1 at the start of 2024 and was trying to slowly shift away to Linux at the time, but circumstances beyond my control ended up throwing me into the deep end a lot quicker than I expected.
I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
I'm one of those weird people that has been on Linux so long (wow, like over 2 decades now) I quite literally don't remember how to use Windows - even though I cut my teeth on it in the 90's. I dabble on the Mac to a moderate degree, but I'm just mostly comfortable on Linux, despite more BS than one would prefer. The benefits certainly outweigh the downsides (for most purposes), especially if you're technical enough to be self-sufficient.
When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.
> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
There's at least a few factors:
- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late
- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc
- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly
- forced to use Windows at work
I think MS Office is also singularly keeping people on Windows. That’s the only argument I don’t have a response to for getting my parents to switch.
I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
The online MS Office is pretty good.
Genuinely interested - why particularly MS Office 2024, and not any older version?
It would have to just be a recent-ish version. I tried getting 2016 working as well and was unsuccessful.
This is an extremely niche problem that is probably not a factor for the vast majority of people: but my organization uses a shared dropbox account for file storage (yes, yes I know). The linux dropbox app does not have the smart download feature where you can see all files and folders but don't need to have them local unless you request them. The only options are to either download the entire dropbox folder, or to selectively sync certain files and folders, and then only be able to see those files and folders.
Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
You said it in your first sentence: you know that Dropbox is not designed to function the way you're using it. That's a kind of tech debt that may (will?) bite you in the ass eventually. Linux being incompatible with the way you use Dropbox is just a symptom of poor infrastructure and security practices, though I understand that it's probably out of your hands to fix.
Do people hate LibreOffice that much?
My dad makes extremely liberal use of the VBA in Excel. LibreOffice does have an equivalent, but it's different enough to where he would be forced to port over large amounts of his code.
I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.
> When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.
I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.
The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.
And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?
At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."
Personally, I wish I'd swapped sooner.
Windows 8.1 in 2024? Why? You have Win10 which is miles better if you needed Windows.
Very curious what kept you on 8.1.
"If it ain't fixed, don't broke it."
But it was broke, security support ended 3 years ago.
I wouldn't use a condom that broke 3 years ago.
In practice this doesn't affect the overwhelming majority of people as they're either not going to be compromised (the most likely case) or, in the tiny chance they're compromised, they're not going to notice (in which case from their perspective it still "isn't broken").
It isn't like this is the original WinXP during the era where computers connected directly to the open internet and caught viruses just by existing, making computers groan and being very visible that something was wrong. Pretty much everyone is connected via a firewall and on top of that Windows has improved its security considerably over the years. And there are still security updates for browsers (the main vector for malware by far) that support Win8.x (e.g. Firefox ESR will be supporting Win8.x until next year and people have made Win7 and Win8 compatible builds for modern Chromium).
So it isn't surprising that for all intents and purposes it isn't broken, especially when the alternative is having to change to something that feels like downgrade in terms of UX. From a user's perspective it is a choice between the unlikely potential of something invisible perhaps happening (getting compromised) versus the absolute certainty of something very visible happening (having to get used to a worse UX). Considering Windows still tie security updates with everything else, it isn't surprising that people judge based on what they perceive the most.
Of course the best solution would be to switch to an OS where such choices are not necessary in the first place. I've been using Window Maker since early 2000s and the UI has remained the same since 1997 when WM was first made, aside from the occasional theme change (which is done only whenever i personally feel like it, i.e. is not forced on me) while at the same time i'm using the latest Linux kernel, C library, drivers, etc with all security fixes. I do not have any choice between having security fixes or using a GUI that i am comfortable with - i get to have both.
It is VERY much a "compromised but don't know it, or it doesn't slow down things or break enough for them to notice" territory.
The state of security is /awful/ for general users.
But they also can't figure out how somebody keeps getting into their email account, why they get text messages that quickly disappear from history, or what these weird charges that keep showing up on their bank statement are...
Support ended in January 2023...
who cares? it impacts nothing. windows updates are counter productive for a decade. "but security and zero days!!"
ok surely that firewall and home lab and ability to not download and run garbage is enough for someone on the supposed "hacker news" to handle. but no, we got heaps of people using "out of support" as some sort of argument whatsoever to upgrade to absolutely dogshit versions of windows. make it make sense
People get their identities stolen every day, and it is a super, super, super shitty process to go through depending on how deep it goes. It can change your life forever.
Having oldass OS and application versions make that a thousand times easier when you have so, so, so many CVEs you can exploit. And LLMs have been show to make this very trivial now.
All you need to do is click on the wrong pop-up, or the wrong link in your email, or tap something on your phone screen, or have a poorly configured (often from the factory) router, and the initial intrusion takes place. After that, an outbound encrypted session quickly gets setup, and congrats, now your network is acting as a residential proxy that can be sold to criminals that want to download CSAM from your IP, AI companies that will use your connection for scraping, and other elements that will either mine the data on your systems (your PII, logins, etc) and scrape your screens.
But if you don't care about your life becoming a living hell, then I can't make you.
This happens all the time, every day.
If you have a car, you maintain it. If you have a bike, you maintain it. Power tools? You maintain them. Your electronic devices also need to be maintained. They have access to your most sensitive data, and potentially private conversations.
If you're behind a NAT and have an evergreen browser, say FF with UBO, avoid email attachments, etc... it's not very risky.
[dead]
This is bad. New user going onto an arch distro with a ton of tweaks is worst case scenario for a smooth experience.
I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth.
You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.
If you want to game, then picking a "gaming distro" probably is the right choice.
Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.
It's two checkboxes in the gui to enable RPM Fusion, and then you click “Steam”. It's not that hard.
So easy it requires a 140 lines of howto: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/rpmfusion-se...
It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.
This is part of the installer now. New users will select this when setting the distro up
That is amazing news! My biggest gripe with Fedora has always been that it is recommended to new users and then 80% of the time they have an Nvidia card and you end up with "Linux sucks if you use Nvidia" even though the official drivers work well if you install them correctly (i.e using your distro-provided method, not going to nvidia.com and downloading a file which is what most people coming from Windows will do).
Itemized bill:
Chalk mark $1
Knowing where to put it $999
Agreed. I'm surprised by the amount of Linux newcomers being directed toward these weird, specialized derivatives that have existed >2 years.
It’s almost certainly driven by a desire for everything to work as expected out of the box.
Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.
Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.
Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
i don't have a problem recommending people use bazzite because of the nature of the whole system. It makes it harder for regular users to break it, while making it easy(er) to rollback.
okay but this should just be upstreamed into a real distro, we don't need 1000 distros that are all reimplementing the same thing
Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.
> Things that are basic table stakes for PC gamers are unnecessary edge cases or outright seen as negatives by the average Gnome or Wayland maintainer.
What do you mean "PC Gamers"?
It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".
So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.
Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.
Its JUST gnome thats blocking that protocol.
There’s merit to that idea, but upstreaming is easier said than done. There’s a whole gauntlet of politics and bikeshedding to get past among other issues, which is why these things are separate distros in the first place.
Bazzite provides a Steam-OS gaming-centric interface out of the box. How are you going to upstream that? You think Debian stable is going to agree all of a sudden provide it's users a gaming console UI?
Isn't that just Steam's Big Picture mode?
They don't keep separate packages for fun. Many of the changes would not be accepted to an upstream.[1] That's usually why the derived distro exists in the first place. Imagine arguing that Ubuntu should just be upstreamed into Debian.
[1]: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/why_cachyos/
Ideally, this would be the best solution, but what happens when the upstream distro packagers disagree with the vision of one of these downstream distro maintainers?
Partially agree. If you're only using your PC to play Steam games and absolutely nothing else, especially if you want it to auto boot into Steams big picture ui and behave like a dedicated gaming console something like Bazzite is ideal.
But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.
I think something like Bazzite would be great for those wanting to game. The fact that it's going to be hard to break the system and just letting updates be applied automatically will make it more like a console than a PC in that regard. I also assume that switching to the desktop mode is not difficult. I just started using Fedora Bluefin last year, and I've been really happy with it and it's architecture is the same as Bazzite, but for devlopers.
I tried to install CachyOS with KDE on my wife's new laptop (Lenovo Yoga) about 3 weeks ago. The version available was 2025-08-28 (still is, just checked), and it was crashing KDE all the time. Quick research told me that version had lots of KDE bugs that have been since fixed, yet no new release.
Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.
Most of the updates to CachyOS are delivered via packages. You don't need an entirely new version of the distro image that often.
Is it bad? SteamOS is an Arch based and extremely user friendly gaming-focused distro.
If all you want to do is play steam games then I'm sure steamOS is going to be the best experience possible. If you want to use it as a regular PC it probably works reasonably well but a user who doesn't want to use the terminal is more likely to run into a brick wall at some point (e.g. connecting to a printer or something). Something like Linux Mint is going to give an overall friendlier experience for someone new to Linux even if running steam games on it is slightly less friendly.
Ironically connecting a new Brother printer was the most painless thing I've ever done on Linux, because I didn't do anything at all. Linux saw it appear on the network and it just worked.
I concur. I use Linux Mint and I have no problems with gaming.
actually I am running the most fk'ed up system you can find (two gpus from different vendors, dedicated usb pcie card, highly customized kde slapped on top of catchyos) and I haven't had any issues, way less issues than kde neon.
New user choosing operating system has most likely just bought a new laptop or PC. Especially for laptops, Arch (or anything rolling with latest kernel) _is_ the best choice, because of drivers.
It’s immutable, so if something goes bad it will just rollback. SteamOS, Bazzite, and others also work in a similar manner. I run several Bazzite boxes for gaming and they are nigh impossible to brick.
CachyOS is not an immutable distro.
I've stopped recommending ubuntu for beginners by default, as the now only-wayland mode is beyond the level I can support
I use bazzite linux for gaming full time and can't say enough good things about it. You don't need to do anything at all to maintain it. Every Windows game I've ever tried just works perfectly out of the box. Sometimes I will see a warning telling me that a certain game is not certified for a good experience by Steam, and it all just works perfect anyway.
When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.
Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
In the 2000's I used to fear that not having windows at home would lead me to a lack of troubleshooting prowess when it comes to problems with windows at work.
Now I'm just glad I only have to suffer windows at work.
After some uni class at a conference room, back in 2006, there was a Linux hackathon/demo-y thingy outside where there were people showing off Compiz, the cube and that kind of stuff. Of course my noob ass was impressed with that - you can switch windows a 3d cube? That's amazing! That's the future! I want to try that!
So they were kind enough to give each one of us a Ubuntu 5.10 CD, one of those from back then when Canonical shipped free Ubuntu CDs to people around the world completely for free.
I can recall poking around that brown-y Gnome 2.x and feeling cozyness, like feeling at home. Everything felt transparent and humble and honest, from the desktop wallpaper, the icons and the typography to the tone the help pages were written. You could feel the ubuntu on it. It really felt like it was made for human beings.
The computer no longer felt like a dark box that only let you do things your license let you to do and if you dared to look at other direction, ever so slightly, things could go insanely wrong.
Granted, I didn't had internet at home back then (and wouldn't have it until late 2008 via a crappy 3G modem) so after nuking the Windows XP install and tried install it, also nuked the partition where I had all my uni docs and stuff and, defeated, had to go back to Windows via a pirate copy - until I had enough spare time to go learn what I did wrong and try again. Never went back ever since.
Things have changed a bit - Ubuntu is not what it what it used to be, I am not who I used to be (ended being a graphic designer) and not even the internet itself is not what it what it used to be - but I'm glad human creations like Linux still exist.
> So really, why wouldn’t I blow that up and start over?
I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.
There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.
This is the way. I've been dual booting with Ubuntu for almost 20 years now and my main finding these days is just how easy it has become and how rarely I need to switch to Windows. Sure, it happens and the option is always there, but Ubuntu as a daily driver is solid.
Why stop with only 2 OS’s? I triple boot with Haiku.
I switched over last year, no problems. Everything runs fine, and often better than on my wife's Windows machine. We're going to switch her over soon, because Windows 11 is such a shitshow.
Really interested to see where Valve goes with the new hardware. I love my Steam Deck, so I have faith they'll do a good job.
https://archive.ph/DNFkL
Dunno, just upgraded Fedora to Fedora 43 and all of the games I had set up (wine) stopped working. Will try gaming on Linux again next decade.
I just rebuilt my PC and setup Steam on Linux. It was fairly smooth.
I've dual-booted Arch and Windows for about 16 years. I always kept Windows around for gaming, and the occasional "doesn't support Linux" workflow.
For a few years where I didn't game I found myself almost exclusively in Linux. But then I spent the last 5-6 years stuck between the two as my PC use for daily tasks dwindled, I stopped working on side projects, and I started gaming a bit more.
I hated trying to split my time between them. Most of what I used a PC for was the browser, so I could just stay in Windows most of the time. I wanted to use Linux, but rebooting to use a web browser just didn't make sense. As a result I would accidentally go 2-3 months without ever booting Arch. As a result, I had a couple of major updates that didn't go smoothly.
I wanted to use Linux, though. I like having a customized WM, I like having so many useful tools at my disposal, etc. I just like using Linux, in spite of the occasional technical complexity.
In the last couple months I rebuilt my PC and a major requirement was that I get set up to game in Linux as much as possible. I even bought an AMD card to ensure smooth driver support.
I'm so incredibly thankful that Steam has made gaming not just possible, but relatively simple. Installation was simple. My single-player games seem well supported so far. And most importantly, Steam has made it obvious they're committed to this line of support, so this isn't some hero effort that will bit rot in a couple years.
I still have to reboot to play competitive games, due to their anti-cheat requirements, but that's less of a problem, I'll take what I can get.
Gaming on Linux always sucked because of many factors:
1. Linux decades ago was not "new user friendly"
2. Wine and PLayOnLinux was all we had with endless problem, and heavy dependency on Windows files like DirectX and libraries
3. Windows dominated the gaming market
4. 3D GPU driver was non-existent
The single reason why gaming on Linux now is better than Windows, has one name: Valve
SteamDeck/SteamOS changed everything, the whole Wine process is managed by the OS and no longer by the user. You may need to change the Proton version, that is all. That also pushed GPU drivers to be better supported on Linux.
Valve single handled what gaming on Linux has become. I run Mint Cinnamon Linux, and even tho it is not "SteamOS", I can play Steam games just fine.
Microsoft terrible takes and AI, is also pushing gamers over to Linux, better FPS on Linux than Windows. The only restriction is kernel anti-cheat software that only runs on Windows, but many games do not use that and the ones that do use it like COD(dead game), BF, etc, isn't everybody cup of tea.
If it wasn't for Valve, Linux gaming would still be as dead as it has always been.
To make it more perfect, users that use their computer for browsing, writing docs (LibreOffice), etc, can be done on Linux for free.
You as a computer user in 2025, you have little to no excuse to try Linux, but try something good like Mint Cinnamon Linux that is extremely new user friendly, good for browsing, good for development work, solid for gaming, video editing is chef kiss, etc, etc. Avoid Ubuntu (they are going proprietary).
I don't really play multiplayer games other than a self-hosted Minecraft server, so for me the SteamOS experience (using Jovian on NixOS) is strictly better than what I had on Windows. A lot of games from the late 90's/early 2000's have trouble running on modern Windows but work fine with Wine or Proton.
I've been utterly astounded by Proton in the last year. Nearly every game I have run has run just about perfectly, often better than on Windows, and I'm able to play them with an Xbox One pad no less.
Valve absolutely deserves a lot of credit, but I do think that the constant effort from the Wine people should get a lot of credit as well. Wine has had constant progress for three decades, with every release getting a little better. I haven't worked on it, but I suspect 90+% of the work with Wine is figuring out all the weird edge cases that have popped up on Windows throughout the years, which is often slow, tedious, thankless work. Valve did a lot of work but there's a reason they opted to improve Wine instead of writing Proton from scratch.
The problem with Wine is that you most know what libraries to add, etc. PlayOnLinux automates that process somewhat but still very manual.
Steam Proton makes the whole process painless, you only select which Proton version to run, and that info can be obtained from ProtonDB if you encountered any issue, it is beautiful.
As for Linux, even emulators works like never before. I could never get PS4 emulator to work on Windows, I got PS4, X360, GameCube, and a bunch of other emulators running on Linux like I couldn't believe it.
You can do the same from within SteamOS itself, you just install an app, select the emulator and you ready which is far easier than me doing this from from Linux.
I really like windows 11, works great. I have it way more customized to my liking than most "normal" users would, but there's really no negative impact on me. I also have a Mac and use Linux (bounced between arch, ubuntu, and now just use PopOS). Overall I generally prefer windows, it generally runs everything. Things like windows powertoys make the user experience pretty nice, doing similar on linux requires a lot more work. Wezterm standardizes the terminal across all platforms. But the OS really doesn't matter too much, it only accounts for maybe <10% of my experience. But everything just seems a bit easier on windows but I could live just fine in any of the OS's if I had to.
I generally like Windows too, which is a lot of why I'm so incredibly frustrated by the direction Microsoft is taking.
There are still glaring bugs, omissions, and regressions in Windows 11 that just are not getting attention because Microsoft is 100% focused on AI instead of improving their product.
I have a MacBook Pro now. I get by. Window management drives me absolutely insane, but this is the best laptop hardware, performance, and battery life I've ever had. Windows is now shoved into a VM that I pop open only when I explicitly need it for a few work things (primarily Excel and PowerBI Desktop).
I'd go back to Windows again the moment Microsoft starts respecting their users again, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
I had to help someone elderly set up Windows 11 recently and it was monstrous. The error messages were useless and when we finally got it going, the UI was horribly sluggish. There was a time Windows was a solid default choice for the average consumer, but Windows 7 was 15 years ago.
This week we shut the doors on our Linux gaming podcast that has been running continuously for the past 13 years. No fuss, no drama, but with the announcement of Steam Machine II (we also covered the origianl launch) it just seemed time. Proton has evolved to the point most things work out of the box. Nobody is bothering with native and it's gotten difficuls to find things to cover.
It really feels like evertying is ligned up for the year of Linux in the Living room and yeah, it's really good to see.
I just tried installing Heroic Games on Arch, and the install process has left me less than impressed. It will be one vague error with a bunch of forums saying, "try this" and no "this is what that error means". I try to install that one and it has its own error, with the same forum experience. I'm not trying to install something which will allow me to install vulkan which will allow me to install heroic games...maybe.
I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.
My experience installing the Heroic Games Launcher on Arch was just:
- git clone the heroic-games-launcher AUR repo,
- makepkg -sc,
- pacman -U.
And it just worked. This was something like a month ago, though so maybe my experience is more recent?
The experience using Heroic Games Launcher is a good bit less polished than Steam IME. I only really use it to play games that are occasionally given away on the Epic Games Store for free so I mostly treat it as a nice bonus if they actually work on Linux.
I use it almost exclusively for Satisfactory, which I could buy again on Steam, but I don't want to.
Steam is working flawlessly. Other than anti-cheat, I haven't run across anything that doesn't play exactly like its windows counterpart.
I had to briefly go back to Windows and I just couldn't understand how anyone serious can run an OS that just decides to reboot itself in the middle of the night.
Just install Reboot-Blocker. Or equivalently, define a Scheduled Task that rotates your “working hours” every hour, so that it always matches the current time. Yes it’s annoying to have to do that and that there isn’t a simple switch anymore like there used to be, but at least it’s defeatable.
This 100%. The main purpose of an operating system is to run programs and keep them running. Windows fails at that.
The (only) people who pay for Windows are corporate managers. Therefore, the main purpose of Windows is to make corporate managers happy. Corporate managers want updates to install promptly, so they can tick their ISO compliance box saying "no insecure software running here". They couldn't care less about an annoying experience or slightly reduced productivity for their underlings. Therefore, Windows succeeds at its main purpose.
If you are looking solely for a Linux gaming distro, Bazzite is it. I switched from Windows earlier this year and I haven't looked back. Everything works out of the box.
https://bazzite.gg/
I've been gaming on Linux exclusively for the last few years. Problems with games are few and far between these days.
I've only had to fully reinstall once every ~2 years or so, and it's usually due to some problem with my DE/system not booting that I can't be fucked to troubleshoot. That's mostly my fault for running GNOME on a rolling distro. I just back up my home dir to the storage drive and I'm back up and running in less than an hour. Other than that, it just continues to work and I can be reasonably assured that if I don't touch it, it'll be fine.
My gaming PC sits next to the TV in my living room and I use it like a console, I have one of those cheap blutooth wireless keyboards with trackpad for the really basic iteractions and then I just use a game controller for playing games.
Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.
I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
Nvidia's Linux software is first rate -- actually a large amount of the software that would merit buying an Nvidia graphics card is Linux-only anyway. I actually briefly had an AMD card but ended up giving it away since it didn't support ~any of the projects I needed to work on. But YMMV, my anecdata is from a ML engineering perspective.
Not only has Nvidia Linux support been first rate for decades now, but their FreeBSD support is also great. The secret has been that they run the same driver on all platforms with just a shim to interface with the different kernels.
I can confirm your anecdote, based on messing with ML on a linux system in my personal time over the last few years. I don't do any work in ML, but I have never heard of anyone doing anything with ML on Windows other than maybe running some models locally.
Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).
I do ML in a Debian WSL install because I’m a crazy person. But I hate dual booting and it works perfectly.
Any technical minds care to explain how the "agentic Windows" actually functions?
Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?
Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?
I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.
"How it actually functions" is too much of a moving target. The book of "best practices for building AI agent functionality into your OS" is still being written. But "sandboxed envs for AI to do things in" is one approach MS is currently trying for.
I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.
Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.
That's what I understand. It basically spins up a windows VM, you grant it access to specific files or folders, and it runs the actions in the VM.
From the MS support doc:
> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."
MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.
thanks for explaining that. I could see some value and also tremendous risk.
My concern is that the Windows Credential itself doesn’t have a ton of value (opening windows apps) but the browser cookie jar (e..g Edge or Chrome) , which the Credential unlocks, has tremendous value — and threats.
The core problem is lack of granularity in permissions. If you allow the agent to do browser activities as your user, you can’t control which cookie / scope it will take action on.
You might say “buy me chips” and it instead logs into your Fidelity account and buys $100k worth of stock.
Let’s see how they figure out the authorization model.
Installing a working Nvidia driver was a nightmare for me. And this was on a very recent version of Ubuntu.
I don't know if I would use the word approachable
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
Graphics drivers are near the top of my list of issues I've had with Ubuntu. I've been using Linux for well over 20 years and Ubuntu (and to a large degree, other Debian derivatives) is just such a pain in the ass to install and configure. It is superficially a good UX in the sense that if you can somehow manage to stay on the happy path, it's smooth, but go an inch off of that and you're in for a world of pain.
It should be NixOS of course.
I started using NixOS a month ago.
Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.
A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.
LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.
If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.
Yeah the NixOS recommendation here is clearly a joke and I wouldn't recommend it to almost anyone, but I too switched about a month ago, and it's basically made for LLMs. Let them read the Git repo and they'll actually have a chance at figuring out the issues you have.
But: you will have issues.
As much as I like NixOS (I use it btw) I would absolutely not recommend it to a new user. I'd probably recommend trying Debian Testing.
I couldn't afford new computers in the past, would get some POS but putting Linux on it and a tiling manager gave me more bang for my buck
Started with Linux Mint then Debian/Ubuntu, tried some others too but ultimately just stuck with Ubuntu
I have been waiting for this time to come. Microsoft clearly doesn't care about Windows very much, and Linux has never been more ready to break out in market share. Quite exciting to see!
>I’m going to install CachyOS, an Arch-based distro optimized for gaming on modern hardware, with support for cutting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an allegedly easy setup.
oh no
I don’t understand this reaction. It’s an immutable distro and is very similar to SteamOS. It’s very hard to break and dead simple to maintain. You will likely install apps via Flatpak and never have to touch the Arch repos.
I think you're thinking of Bazzite. Which indeed would probably have been an excellent fit for a gaming-focused beginner for the reasons you mentioned.
Changed from Windows 10 to an Ubuntu with beefy specs. When I saw firsthand the improvement of the user experience, I felt the year of the Linux desktop is nigh.
>I don't want to talk to my computer
I recently vibe coded a voice typing software (using Parakeet — your best bet is probably Handy though).
It works in my terminal. (I just changed my paste shortcut to Ctrl+V
I can now literally speak software into existence!
I made a thin wrapper around my llm() function I can pipe text into from Bash.
This allows me to make many other thin LLM wrappers, such as one that summarizes then contents of entire directories.
I have a thing called Jarvis inspired by a Twitter post, where I ask it to do anything in bash, and it just does that.
I wouldn't exactly say it's useful (I am unemployed) but I am kind of having my mind blown a little bit.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
What lunatic thinks that voice is the best way to interface with a computer?
Did pewdiepie not write a voice to text for his LLM setup?
Thing is, we can talk faster then most of us can type.
Voice + Programming is slow because of all the special symbols. But voice + vibe coding? The ability to tell your LLM to do tasks, while you focus on other parts of the code, without the need to switch tabs/windows.
What about "change the color green on this element (html page), where my mouse is pointing"... Annoying with keyboard if you need to switch windows, very possible with voice.
And LLMs are very forgiving for mistakes, unlike if you want to voice program where every symbol needs to be accurate.
People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.
Wispr flow ftw
disabled people? also no one needs 105% efficiency all the time when using a computer
Please, really, I am sure we all get it. Who is even the audience for this kind of comment at this point? Can't we have one comment section that's about how Linux is cool and good and Windows sucks? Like when we were all still real nerds instead of product hypers?
There is exactly one game keeping me from running Linux as my main OS… and that’s iRacing.
Sadly, they won’t (not can’t…) ship the flag in EOS (née EAC) that enables anti-cheat support on Linux. It would work, but they just don’t have the resources to support a whole other family of OSes.
So, between that and the abject murder of WMR for my Reverb G2, I’m stuck on Win10 for the foreseeable.
My buddy gave me a computer because it wouldn’t run 11. I put Zorin Linux on it. I’m quite pleased.
Not once in initial setup or first week of use did it use dark patterns to try to trick or force me into something I don’t want to do.
Anyone have experience with CachyOS or Bazzite here? I'm using Fedora KDE standard, never toyed with Arch distros, and don't know much about Bazzite/Kinoite. Regular Fedora seems pretty usable to me.
In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.
Both are great options, but if you're happy with Fedora, there's probably not a big reason to switch. Arch is a full rolling release, which requires you to be aware and ready to deal with any breaking changes each time you update your packages. On Fedora, you'll mostly only have to be ready for this on a new version release. If you want to always have the newest packages for everything and don't want to wait, then CachyOS is great. If you want to turn on auto updates and only think about changes when a major release drops, Fedora is a better pick.
Bazzite, being an atomic distro, is kind of hard to compare to. For basic use-cases like running just software available in Flathub, it is incredibly solid and easy to use. If I were choosing a Linux distro for a non-technical family member, I would go with an atomic Fedora distro and be completely confident they could get things done without breaking anything. However, if your needs are more advanced, you're going to need to be ready to relearn a lot (e.g. using containers for development), since atomic distros are a big paradigm shift from standard ones. This isn't a bad thing, just something to be ready for.
I use cachyos. It's good as long as you're fine with some knob turning. I haven't had an issue granted I haven't played many things. Cities skylines 2 works for me so I can't complain about it
I've only played with CachyOS in a VM but I plan on installing it on my next computer build.
That sounds less than impressive.
Once they get music production onto Linux, it's fucking game over for Microsoft, at least for me.
A good deal of VSTs run in Wine already, Ableton works, Bitwig works...
Welcome to the world of computing freedom.
Open source sickos: Yes... hahaha... YES!
Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are realizing that Microsoft (any proprietary vendor really) is NOT their friend, and looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.
Over here we've been saying for years that gaming on Linux is a far better experience, with better framerates and better stability.
Just you're kind of SOL if you want to play anything that isn't based on some flavour of Quake or Unreal engine.
Well, that's different now. See? Told you. Faster, smoother, less crashy.
Oh, you want Microsoft Office? Yeah well you're probably using Office 365 these days anyway. Everything's in a browser. No, it looks just the same. Edge? It's less crashy in Linux, weirdly.
AutoCAD? Nah. Still SOL.
Never before has a successful software company worked so hard to reject the wants of their user base. Ai continues to be a solution seeking a problem.
C'mon. Microsoft is one of the top 3 companies in the world.
That couldn't have anything to do with being a near monopoly.. no sir.
Two names for the same thing.
but the windows brand is taking a serious beating
win10 was a great restart somehow but 11 transition was (and is) alienating many people
All three of the top three could vanish overnight, and a think a lot of us could just go on living without much issue from the "loss".
Funny timing. I just said screw it the other day and wiped an old laptop to install Linux. I'm using budgie at the moment, but it's been pretty smooth sailing.
I suspect the combination of modern Linux + + Steam + LLM to troubleshoot and learn may see more conversions like myself
Please don't install some weird trendy distro. I'm starting to think that Microsoft is sponsoring them just to make sure that people come running back to Windows, complaining, saying "not ready for prime time." Just install Debian. Stable. Or Mint or even Ubuntu. Move over to something bizarre when you know why you want it.
People want to game. Telling them to install Debian stable is not going to end well. There's a reason why these "weird" gaming distros are popular, and it's not because they are making people run back to Windows - quite the opposite.
The secret for a reasonable linux distro for most people is LTS Kernel + Latest packages. Most people want the latest versions of whatever software they use that will often include new features and lots bugfixes. The only time you really need a new kernel is for to support cutting edge hardware.
Many of the Arch or Fedora derivatives fit this paradigm well.
Occam's distro-hopper? Don't attribute to malice, what's easily explained by people chasing after trendy new things.
I wish my parents would switch. Look at my comment history if you want more details, but TL;DR the auto update to windows 11 bricked my mom’s laptop and I had to do some weirdness with Linux to save her files and then wipe the computer.
Since I am a software person I have become the person that my parents call for IT help, and increasingly I have grown pretty frustrated with Windows. I have been trying to convince them to move to Zorin or Mint or something or to buy a Mac, and they will not yield.
In a bit of fairness to them, the biggest issue is MS Office; they did recently try LibreOffice and the MS Office online, and they had shortcomings with both. Since I have been wholly unsuccessful at getting any modern Office to work on Linux (without virtualization), so now I don’t have a case for them to move.
Which is annoying, because I really hate having to deal with it.
What were their shortcomings with LibreOffice?
My dad complained about StarBasic being different enough from VBA to where he'd be forced to port over large amounts of his spreadsheets over. He also uses the paid version of Mathtype to do his equation editing, which I'm not sure would work in Linux even if Word did run on Wine, at least not the direct integration.
I am drawing a blank over what my mom was complaining about but I do recall that it was valid. Something to do with Word.
It's tough for me to give full rebuttals to any of this, because I don't really use any WYSIWYG stuff for documents anymore and just use Typst or LaTeX/Pandoc for everything now. That works fine on Linux but of course that's understandably a non-starter for most people.
At this point I think the only thing I could realistically do to get them to switch, and I doubt it would be successful, would be to convince them that Winboat would be fine.
Call of duty 6 and now 7 will never work. They’re checking for TPMs and yelling about secure boot. Insanity.
I wonder when games will require HVCI and friends
Yea and guess who owns Activision?
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