I’d like to hear people’s journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
I’d like to hear people’s journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
… it’s been a journey. TLDR: Wayland is super broken, NVIDIA makes it worse, Ubuntu doesn’t come with the right drivers out of box, UI inconsistency is everywhere (only Mac gets it right, at the cost of everything else) but major feature upgrades in most regular stuff.
I switched to Debian +Plasma X11, which makes most things work out of the box, but KiCAD crashes Plasma and logs you out of you open a large enough file. If I use Wayland, all of the windows open in a giant pile in the center my screen and OrcaSlicer segfaults when opening a webkit embed. Also no 3d views.
NVIDIA breaks all the rendering stuff, so no 3d model previews in your icons :( and the install defaults to unsafe mode on high refresh screens for Kubuntu, which cuts off the top half of your screen. Print previews are broken on Kate (NVIDIA)
Older Unity Engine can’t run controller input natively on linux, so you still play games under proton.
Login screen wallpaper and Wallpaper waking up from sleep and “wallpaper” are three different wallpapers on Debian/Plasma.
Plasma Desktop is not considered an active window so creating a new file and pressing enter doesn’t open it, but rather selects a foreground window, But if no window exists, it will open the file.
Now, the better stuff:
Printer drivers work out of box on basically everything I’ve tested and adding printers is plug and play unlike Windows. Printers on? You’re done!
Separated home and root partitions, I nuked my install 4 times and didn’t need to copy over my data. (Auto partition doesn’t give round numbers to the partitions and this irritates me why 61.73.gb root partitions why not 62???)
Snapshot backups - I no longer care if I accidentally need some older file I deleted, if I ran a backup recently, it’s there. Restic
Updates: I can reinstall and uninstall without rebooting - takes 2 minutes max. (Downloading is the bigger portion of it)
Faster boot times, way better keyboard input support, more customizable, integrated file management zip/rar support (very cool) Files open faster, dark mode everywhere, I can compile C firmware about 6-8 times faster without windows scanning my code every time. Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?
They fixed rounded corners!!! Firefox still likes to be special and ignore window decorations, not sure what’s up with that.
No Copilot and no “my computer fans suddenly spun up for no reason whatsoever”, although I miss task manager, I have htop now,
Wait, what? I’m using NVIDIA and Plasma 6.5 without issues.
Ohhhhhhh
I suggest Btop as task manager.
Thanks for this writeup. CAD is one of the several professional workflows that I really wish could work better on Linux, but it is hard to compete against software that costs thousands per year per license.
So generally Linux has relied on having open and auditable code to avoid exploitation of bugs and ones found can be easily discovered, reported and mitigated. The variety of configurations makes it much less appealing for hackers as an attack surface. So for the average user the biggest danger to breaking your device is yourself (but very occasionally the package manager messes something up too). ClamAV is one antivirus application Linux has…
But depending on what threats you want to mitigate here is what else you can look into: