Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
I game on linux regularly, primarily thanks to Valve. In the last 2 months steam lists 11 different games I’ve “Played Recently”.
7 worked flawlessly (Baldur’s Gate 3, Destroy All Humans!, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Besiege, Deep Rock Galactic, Shotgun King, Call of Cthulhu)
1 the native linux version doesn’t work, but the windows version works perfectly (Northgard)
1 didn’t initially work, but worked a month later after proton was updated. (Grounded)
1 I had to choose an older version of Proton (due to the external launcher breaking things), but with enough performance hitching during cutscenes that I chose to just play it on windows (Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order)
1 I couldn’t get to work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s a linux issue because the game’s discussion forums are full of people saying the game is riddled with game breaking bugs on windows (The Sinking City)
I’ve been gaming on linux for a couple of years now, over that time I’ve put many hours into WoW, Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, Golf with your Friends, Core Keeper, Outer Wilds, and dozens more without any issues at all. 90%+ of the time the game starts up and just works.
I’m just one datapoint, but yeah, Linux as a gaming platform is totally viable for me these days.
Also, protondb lists 19% Verified and 16% Playable, so your 5% number is just demonstrably wrong.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
Speaking of delusional. You don’t seem to have a whole lot of ideas about Linux gaming if you truly believe this ignorant nonsense.
79% of my library has a Silver or higher rating on ProtonDB, 65% are Gold or Platinum rated. For the Top 100 in Steam it’s even better with 89% Silver+ and 79% Gold+. Of the Top 1000 Steam games it is 87% Silver+ and 75% Gold+. Even if we look at the entire Steam catalog we have 13% & 11% respectively, and that’s only so low because there’s literally just no reports. Only 1% of the titles are considered to be “Borked”, another 1% are Bronze rated.
You can check the data for yourself here: https://www.protondb.com/
And again, that’s just Steam and what has been tested by people. Most titles just run, others require minimal tweaking, some require a little tinkering.
DRM isn’t really an issue. The main one that’s used nowadays is Denuvo and that has no issues with Linux. Anticheat usually only for competitive games, which I personally don’t give a damn. Other multiplayer games and their anticheat work fine, since they aren’t on a kernel level type rootkit.
Most of what you are missing out on are games that require some form of anti cheat. Most other stuff just runs. Most new triple A games just run these days.
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
I could never go back to Windows, after having tasted the freedom of Linux.
Linux has its flaws, but so does Windows. And for me, the flaws in Windows became much more annoying than the ones in Linux. Game compatibility was the main factor that kept me backt from using it on a desktop, and that’s a non issue nowadays.
Flaws I didn’t pay for piss me off a lot less.
While that’s certainly also part of it, I would still stand by my opinion even if Windows was completely free.
Raise your hand if you ever paid for that hot chunk
I consider myself forced to pay for it every time I buy a laptop whose price has to include Microsoft’s cut off the action.
You are not forced, plenty of manufacturers offer FreeDOS variants for so many years, just support them instead.
Again, this community is delusional lol. If you consider only about 5% of Steam games being Linux-friendly these days as “a non issue nowadays,” I’d hate to see your game library.
I game on linux regularly, primarily thanks to Valve. In the last 2 months steam lists 11 different games I’ve “Played Recently”.
I’ve been gaming on linux for a couple of years now, over that time I’ve put many hours into WoW, Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, Golf with your Friends, Core Keeper, Outer Wilds, and dozens more without any issues at all. 90%+ of the time the game starts up and just works.
I’m just one datapoint, but yeah, Linux as a gaming platform is totally viable for me these days.
Also, protondb lists 19% Verified and 16% Playable, so your 5% number is just demonstrably wrong.
Cheers.
No matter how you twist and turn things, this is just flat out wrong…
Speaking of delusional. You don’t seem to have a whole lot of ideas about Linux gaming if you truly believe this ignorant nonsense.
79% of my library has a Silver or higher rating on ProtonDB, 65% are Gold or Platinum rated. For the Top 100 in Steam it’s even better with 89% Silver+ and 79% Gold+. Of the Top 1000 Steam games it is 87% Silver+ and 75% Gold+. Even if we look at the entire Steam catalog we have 13% & 11% respectively, and that’s only so low because there’s literally just no reports. Only 1% of the titles are considered to be “Borked”, another 1% are Bronze rated.
You can check the data for yourself here: https://www.protondb.com/
And again, that’s just Steam and what has been tested by people. Most titles just run, others require minimal tweaking, some require a little tinkering.
I’m curious what the number is excluding top games with DRM or anti cheat incompatibility
DRM isn’t really an issue. The main one that’s used nowadays is Denuvo and that has no issues with Linux. Anticheat usually only for competitive games, which I personally don’t give a damn. Other multiplayer games and their anticheat work fine, since they aren’t on a kernel level type rootkit.
Most of what you are missing out on are games that require some form of anti cheat. Most other stuff just runs. Most new triple A games just run these days.
For me it’s the basic things that drive me crazy in Windows: the Start menu doesn’t work half of the time, and it shows web results above the program you want to run. File operations are slow and the File Explorer crashes a lot. Application windows constantly steal focus from the one I’m typing in, leading to passwords being typed into code, documents, web browsers or other unsafe places. Background indexing is constant and eats up CPU, and the file search still takes forever despite all this indexing.
These are all basic things that Microsoft has had decades to get working, and they’re all still broken. Microsoft always seem to be paying attention to anything but the quality of the user’s experience.
By contrast, Linux is just relaxing.
Man that MS indexing is so terrible. I shut it off because it was robbing my system when trying to work, and as you said it is slow anyway. Compared to GNOME desktop where the indexing is invisible to user, I hit the Suoer key type a few letters it instantly shows me results as you would expect indexing to work.
I don’t understand how Microsoft manage to make it so bad. What kind of index is it building that it can be so slow?
Asking the real questions
I’m still dualbooting Windows to play games with a controller until I can get off my ass and buy a USB hub. Reason being that the Xbox Series controllers has issues with my mobo’s Bluetooth chipset, even when updating the firmware. Bluetooth support is particularly inconsistent with these.
But outside of the odd app that needs Windows (and I can just boot a VM for that), Linux has been really good on the desktop.
I invested in an Icy Box IB-AC6110 powered 10 port usb hub a while ago too, but it is more for additional controllers, specifically joysticks and the likes. Mainboards just don’t have enough USB ports for all that. Dual sticks or a hotas? Two gone. Maybe some pedals? Now it is 3. How about a camera and a head tracker? Well, 4-5 depending on your product solution. Defo gives me some peace of mind to be good on USB ports.
yeah, thankfully I can go a bit more basic than that, I just need to figure out what hub, or even cable, I wanna get.
I have been using this hub. Works fine in Linux and windows.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0871ZHCKK?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
I also use this usb dongle for my Xbox controller. It works fine in Linux. I really should try playing a few games on Linux.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0785SFKYF?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
Mine is VST’s and games. Never had much luck using a vst bridge/wine, so i just went back to windows.
Steam+Proton is pretty impressive. I can play Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Thelio. Does get a little toasty, though …
I always see people say this but does no one here use professional apps like solidworks or revit? Are there good Linux alternatives? I’d switch to Linux but I need solidworks for work I do.
Windows is the defacto standard for desktop PCs for a reason. In a corporate setting it’s kind of the ideal.
Because of the sheer number of users, most software is built with Windows in mind and therefore has the most support. It’s pretty rare that you find an application that doesn’t have a Windows build available.
On top of that tools like Active Directory, and group policy makes managing thousands of machines at scale a reasonably simple affair.
Microsoft is a corporation rather than a community so you can always expect their main goals to be profit-driven and that comes with some nasty baggage, but it’s not enough that it’s easy for professionals to make the switch.
Linux has made lightspeed progress over the last decade, especially with Proton making games mostly work cross platform, but outside of specialist use cases, the vast majority of business PCs and by extension home PCs will be running Windows for the foreseeable future.
I work in software and I haven’t touched windows in a very long time. Even back whenever I worked on FPGA development all of that software ram on Linux, so I think you’ll find that this is very field dependent.
Closest thing I use to a professional app is DaVinci Resolve Studio on a distribution that is not officially supported by Blackmagic. Not only does Resolve Studio work perfectly, I am able to use Blackmagic hardware (Intensity Pro 4k, Speed Editor) without having to mess around with settings, config files, permissions, packages, etc.
The caveat here is the initial setup: I use an AMD GPU, and it’s a bit of a pain to get the free and licensed versions of Resolve working with those under Linux. However, once that’s out of the way, it’s completely seamless.
As for CAD…yeah that’s where everything falls over. There are tons of FOSS alternatives out there but I have yet to see any of them in a professional setting. Even Fusion360 is hit or miss under Wine, I spun up a Windows VM just to use that for my 3D printer tinkering.
deleted by creator
Onshape web based CAD from former SW employees. or if work is paying licenses you can run Siemens NX12 on linux (REL, SUSE, or OpenSUSE)
Idk is it CAD software? I know there are webapps for that now
Windows with WSL became a lot better to what Windows used to be but with the TPM requirement Win11 became factually less compatible that modern Linux (at least without fiddling to override that requirement).
And even WSL is essentially just a Linux VM.