- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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When the day comes that Linux runs all of my games, I will give the dual-boot the boot. :)
I had crashes on Linux because of defective hardware but first thought it was because of software/config/driver issues. I reinstalled the OS, problem persisted. I installed two other completely different distros, problem still there. To make sure it’s not because of Linux in general, I installed Windows…
Damn the installation of Windows (newest image) with updates and only the basic drivers for GPU and mainboard took longer than installing three different Linux distros, and I’m not exaggerating!
Linux: Boot installer, choose to use network installation so you get the newest packages, maybe add or remove some features, choose locales, enter login credentials, files get copied, reboot when finished, done.
Windows: Boot installer, workaround to use local account, installing files, reboot, installing more files, choose locale and login credentials, answer questions about privacy, install more files, reboot, login to Windows, download updates, reboot, download more updates, reboot, open edge (optional: install other browser), visit mainboard manufacturer website, search for correct drivers, install, reboot, visit GPU website, download driver, install, reboot…
And then it’s only the absolute minimum. No debloat or other software installed like office suite or steam which on Linux can selected and installed directly with the OS.
The trick is to learn to absolutely despise Windows before doing the switch, then everytime something breaks on Linux you reminisce about the olden days and decide that typing two or three commands in the terminal isn’t so bad afterall.
Waiting patiently for commercial software to be ported to Linux:
- creative suites, I think Canva is working on Affinity for Linux but they want to release their iPad version first. Wine is working right now but there are a few things I’m getting tired of (navigating folders and trying to print). I know, Gimp, Inkscape and Krita.
- 3D modeling software for engineers, like solidworks or NX. I’m trying Blender add-ons for CAD but it’s not as capable. Don’t you dare suggest FreeCAD.
- Music production software, esp. Ableton.
I wish I could just go in and use freecad but it just doesn’t make sense to me. the software I’ve tried before I could just go in and make something by winging it but freecad that seems impossible
Don’t you dare suggest FreeCAD.
I have a Hope/Hate relationship with FreeCAD. Sometimes I can get it to do something useful and I get hopeful. Then I try to do something simple and ruin the entire design and have to start from scratch and I curse the developers lineage for all of time. I want it to be great, and it is closer than it has ever been. But it isn’t a replacement for professional design suites.
- Music production software, esp. Ableton.
For what it’s worth, REAPER works great on Linux. Ik it doesn’t fill quite the same niche as Ableton but it is very capable, especially paired with yabridge for using VSTs via WINE.
And drivers too. Yeah, we’ve got the big stuff covered, Intel, AMD, NVidia all release Linux drivers. But peripherals manufacturers mostly target Windows, maybe macOS, but leave Linux drivers to be developed by the community.
Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems
Who was solving your problems before then?
Who was solving your problems before then?
Every tech company in existence, in exchange for all of your privacy and now subscription fee.
For the low low price of all of your money and privacy you can avoid having to figure out how to backup your own files and have a team of developers ensuring that any kind of difficulty that you have will be fixed before you even realize it was a problem.
Once it is ensured that you will never develop those skills you are completely dependent on their services and they can keep jacking up the price.
Hate Netflix’s price increase, or password sharing restrictions? Too bad you spent 8 years not learning how to setup streaming media that you control. Hate listening to ads in order to listen to music? Well, it looks like Spotify doing everything for you has paid off for them.
Everyone has traded their privacy for convenience, if you want your privacy back then you have to give back the convenience and learn to do things for yourselves.
To give the author credit, ignoring the other flaws with windows, most things “just worked” and generally either didn’t have an issue or if it did, fixed it’s own issues. I didn’t really have to resolve any issues or anything. Heck it even fixed itself if it failed to update, rolling back the changes and alerting the user next boot (which I usually just ignored and let fix itself which it generally did after a few days/tries! lol)
My current rig had Windows as the primary OS from 2016 to about 2024, during that time I don’t recall any times I had to actually look up any issues unless I personally created the problem. I think the most extensive issue I had was my 5700xt crashing under high load but that wasn’t something I could fix anyway as it was a driver issue, or when i made the entire system unbootable cause I messed up making a recovery partition
When I swapped back to Linux (Linux Mint at first, then Linux Mint DE, then Debian 12, now Debian 13), I had multiple hurdles from my headset not functioning, to my video card not being supported, no login screen(this surprised me as I had thought Debian was supposed to be stable), etc, these issues didn’t fix themselves, I had to fix them. Granted some were easier to fix (like the no login screen was a super simple edit to a config file), but it wasn’t something I had to deal with on windows.
Linux isn’t going to hold your hand like Windows does with issues. So yea you need to resolve your own issues, Linux isn’t going to do it for you, the most it will do is post a command in the log saying “issue X expected, run this command to fix”
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case. If you have no interest in tinkering with ur OS windows or Mac is just a better option, if you want to tailor your experience how you’d like Linux is the way. I run W11 on my gaming PC because I don’t have time to mess with it and experiment anymore. I have played with so many Linux distros but never had one work flawless out of the gate, and always reserved it for my secondary fuck around rigs because if I wanted to fuck around I could but I do want something that i can press the power button and evrything works fine without use of my brain after working a 13 hour day where i might get lucky to play for 40 mins lol. My fuck around time these days is totally sapped by project vehicles and house issues the last think I wanna do is play around in terminal when I have 10k other more important things to do :c
Running windows is like playing with an action figure. You take it out of the box and it does what it’s supposed to. Linux I consider more like a Lego set. Sure you have to put some stuff together before you really play with it, but it’s YOUR creation by the time your done with it and you can modify to suit your use case
I really love this analogy, and plan to steal it for future use.
Fully agree. When I mention switching to Linux on the rare occasion it comes up I make sure to mention that you can do basically anything on the platform, but with that customization comes drawbacks. If you are afraid to research an issue then I would not recommend full stop. I also mention not to be afraid of needing to use the terminal if needed. Don’t expect a 1:1 it’ll do most things you can do on Windows, but there will be some things you just can’t
This is a common misconception I think. “Stable” from a development point of view (which is what Debian is) is not the same as “Stable” from a user point of view. It can be, as long as no other variables are changing. But a typical desktop user IS a variable, and they change other variables all the time. “Stable” makes sense on a server, where the server has a defined role and a specific purpose that basically never changes. It’s “stable” and if the OS is also “stable” that gives you assurance that nothing is going to break unexpectedly… ONCE you have it tested and set up properly to be stable in the first place.
But installing on a fresh system where you’ve never run this OS before is the antithesis of stable. You are initially in an “experimental” state, and you may need the latest updates and patches to even be compatible with the hardware you’re running. Then you’re going to use this system daily, downloading stuff, installing new apps and tools regularly, changing configurations when you feel like it. None of this is stable. And that’s fine, it’s not wrong, it’s just the reality of being a user with a desktop system. It’s not stable, it’s not supposed to be. It’s your daily driver.
To paraphrase George Carlin, a bad driver, driving a safe car doesn’t really make you safe, at all. First, learn to drive THEN get your safe car. A stable distribution like Debian is for people who already know how to find all the compatible-by-default hardware and do the configuration necessary to make things safe and stable and using Debian assures them that once they have got it into that state, Debian isn’t going to undo their work and make unexpected changes.
For users, especially on the desktop, you often want bleeding edge latest updates to fix these kind of compatibility issues as soon as they’re identified, even without absolutely rigorous testing and validation that it won’t mess up someone’s “stable” configuration. You really do want the opposite of “stable” development, in order to make your own system more stable as quickly and reliably as possible in the circumstances. It will never be as stable as Debian running on a server, but that’s normal, and expected. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Debian is a good OS, but as a desktop user, on your main system, it might be counterproductive. For what it’s worth, I run PikaOS, which is a gaming-focused distro derived from Debian (Debian’s stable foundation is a huge asset for people building distros on top of it) but provides prompt access to all the latest updates and patches needed for gaming and includes configurations and drivers for supporting the latest consumer level hardware and all the common tools and things that power users want, that are becoming popular day by day. This is the opposite of “stable development” but it’s perfect for a desktop system in my opinion and they do a great job.
Yea, I get that. Stable is from the developer POV, my expectation though was that I could at least finish the install process without running into an issue. I didn’t expect that a built in driver would decide to just black screen and the official driver to just not work period(Linux Mint), or that the installer wouldn’t be smart enough to properly configure the X server to allow for a login(Debian 12).
I somewhat expected it of Mint, but for Debian 12 I was pretty surprised to see it. You would think something that was good enough to reach a point where they did a package freeze would be able to at least reach a desktop before showing signs of an issue. But I guess considering that the installer itself crashes if you try to manually partition a server, and then decide to go back in and set up luks in the installer, I shouldn’t be too surprised.
Being said,
I have not heard ofDid not know that PikaOs it was a Debian derivative, I might actually look into that one then. (and yes before you ask it is exclusively because it contains “Pika” so I think it would be funny to try it 😂)edit: I realized after seeing the logo I had heard of it, just didn’t know it was based off debian.
I just put my desktop on pika, its nice. Maybe a little better performance than stock Debian in games, but i could be imagining things.
I like the bird sounds it uses as system sounds. Drives my dog crazy looking for whats making tge sound.
Haha I just noticed your name, that’s a funny coincidence. But yeah I’m a big fan of Debian in general. The problem, as you noticed, is often it doesn’t have great support for the latest hardware. On the other hand, it often has great support for older hardware, and PikaOS refuses to install at all on some of my older, less capable systems, so those are running Debian right now. So it’s kind of a “right tool for the job” sort of situation. They have their purposes, it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.
Some random Indian guy on YouTube with a tutorial that somehow perfectly solves your weird issue.
I switched months ago after some full screen pop up for Windows 11 took over my whole screen in the middle of me doing stuff. In a blind rage, i plugged my usb in and downloaded Pop. Did a full clean install and never looked back. There have been some hiccups, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed right away.
Linux can be intimidating. And there is going to be a learning curve. Especially if you’re the kind of windows user who’s familiar with gpedit and has custom .bat files.
But what get’s left out is the joy and satisfaction that comes with learning how to Linux. I just re-installed my OS a week ago, and I was able to recognize and resolve dependency and permissions issues without having to look anything up. I also finally learned and started using rsync for backups over SSH/SAMBA. I know it’s not much, but it made me feel like a real hackerman.
The only thing I learned in my last few years of Windows was how to disable features that annoyed me.
i was that person. i had custom windows isos to remove the bloatware and tweak it to my liking.
its frustrating as fuck at first because linux does some things completely differently, it a way that does look weird as hell for power-windows people. i banged my head at it for a couple of years before i had that level of comfort again.
but once you get the hang of it oh boy. it’s a blast and you ask yourself why you didn’t do this sooner. it truly changed computers for me and renewed my love for them, who would have thought computers can be so awesome when they aren’t enshittified.
I would think someone who is taking advantage of bat files would feel right at home with shell scripts in Linux. In my experience, shell was much easier to pick up than batch
Batch is probably the same, but what always made me laugh about shell scripts is you could ask a bunch of people how to do something, and they’d all have a different way, it’s like there’s always a new tool to learn and try to fit into your workflow if you want, I love it
I think I agree with this. I believe that if you are heavily into group policy or a centralized registry it would be a harder conversion. But you can even “hack” bat files to work for both Linux and Windows depending on what launches it. I had to do that with a testing bot that I sometimes ran on windows, sometimes ran on Linux. It involves abusing the label system on bat (which translates to a command true which accepts no arguments on sh). Granted you are still writing both files but, using this method you can have the windows version of it on the same page as the bash version so you can go line by line instead of having a second file open
Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems
This is a good takeaway from the article. If you have a problem, you need to at least try to search for a solution.
Since joining The Verge in October, I’ve started using a MacBook for work
Imo that The Verge requires MacOS (or windows) for their workflow is a huge red flag for anyone who is using Linux.
Everyone there has to use the same something. Linux isn’t exactly the brand for simple easy and usable on all devices, tbf
Those simple and easy devices are not simple and easy inherently.
That is a result the company paying a lot of developers and designers to anticipate your needs and fix your problems before you have them. Those companies want a return on that investment and they get it in the form of your privacy and platform-enforced dependence on their services.
Yep. I’ve been during linux as my main desktop for maybe a year or two now, and it’s been fine. I don’t tinker with it. Most things just work.
The only thing that’s been a little dicey is mods for games, but I think I just need to figure out how like wine and proton prefixes work. It’s probably not hard, I just haven’t had a need lately.
This has been 100% my experience as well. Even convinced my spouse to switch!
I think i had to boot into my windows partition 3 times last year. twice for the battlefield beta, and once for a discord quest because I really wanted the points for something in the shop.
That’s with a steam recap saying that I played 100+ games last year so I think that’s a pretty solid indicator on the progression of the linux ecosystem.
archive link
Anyone else facing captcha loops whenever they try to view an archive.is link? Haven’t been able to read subscriber only articles for months now
LLM-driven web scraping is intense for some sites, so their bot detection software is tuned in a way that creates a lot of false positives.
Obscuring your browser fingerprint, or blocking javascript, or using an unusual user-agent string can trigger a captcha challenge.
If you’re not doing that and seeing a site suddenly start giving your captchas then they may be being DDoS’d by scrapers and are challenging all clients.
A site that archives content is especially vulnerable because they have a lot of the data that is useful for AI training.
It is incredibly annoying, but until we have a robust way of proving identity that can’t be gamed by bad actors we’re stuck with individual user challenges.
Not every time, but far too often. They don’t seem to care that they’re discriminating against people with AV impairment, plus locking out some secure browsers.
Dang, yeah it’s probably my strict browser settings. Thanks for the confirmation of shared experience.
Sometimes I’m able to get around it by tweaking some ublock permissions, but once I was surprised to discover that changing my user-agent with user-agent switcher seemed to do the trick. It’s really strange. Cloudflare’s captcha loops are inscrutable.
I haven’t faced a captcha but, it just took a solid 2 minutes to resolve and load the article for me. Maybe they have something else happening behind the scenes impacting performance so they are locking down certain routes?
No but I do get about three or four challenges. I can paste the article for you if it helps?
I don’t have this problem; You probably are using TOR or a VPN and it triggered the captcha, if it’s not then it’s def strange, never seen this happen to me
Nope
I keep forgetting that I use Linux, since everything feels … normal. I switched from Win 11 to Fedora a few months ago.
The Linux/Mac combo covers just about every computing requirement, even for corporate users. You do not need Windows unless you play competitive online multiplayer games.
Me:
Mac -
- Music production software
- Adobe software
- Some corporate VPNs and VDI access required by some clients
- Corporate MS software required by some clients
Linux -
- Everything else
You do not need Windows unless you play CERTAIN competitive online multiplayer games.
True
or unless something cryptic breaks on Linux and no one on the inner net can figure it out.
I left Windows 15 years ago (still have to use it for work every so often)… I have yet to encounter something cryptic breaking on Linux
When the things go wrong on Linux, which in my experience is rare, you are basically in Windows territory: reboot if you don’t know how to fix it or reformat/reinstall which is 10 times faster anyway
Right now, my daily driver is a branch of a branch (Garuda Linux which is fork of a branch of Manjaro which itself is a branch of Arch)… it comes with KDE as desktop which is awesome but I felt like experimenting with Hyprland which is not even at version 1.0 yet… and I basically configured it from scratch myself… I also share this box with my son who does use KDE as his desktop which is actually not recommended (KDE Plasma and Hyprland in the same box, I mean)
As per any advice you will find out there, this machine should be like the crazy robot in Futurama that explodes with no warning at any little thing and yet, it’s my daily driver for work, daily gamer for my son… rock solid and smooth… I have had 1 odd freeze I chose not to wait out and just rebooted the box in 9 months, and the freeze happened accessing Windows365 Desktop… go figure
Depends on what end of the corporate world you are working in. I do industrial automation, and there’s no way you are getting out of having a Windows VM at the very least.
I mean, for that pretty much everyone uses Windows VMs on Windows as well
For sure. I actually detailed our VDI setup in another thread. We use linux minipcs running VMWare and Win10 IOT LTSC VMs to connect to clients that require Windows or “secured Windows” where they install all sorts of bloatware.
EDIT: I should note that the vast majority of our clients have since moved to VDIs, which can be accessed from Macs. Unfortunately, they mostly use Citrix and I have not found a way to get that citrix client to work well on Linux.
Macs can also make a good home server because the m chips are quite powerful relative to their power draw
We tried. Unfortunately, M chips require ARM operating systems as VMs, and they perform very poorly.
Linux servers are still the best option.
Yes, I just have simple needs so I run some services bare on it
How does Asahi perform, have you tried?
I have not tried it. Once I upgrade my M2 MBP (might be a while), I will.
They all have their drawbacks. If I could install MacOS on my laptop I would. But you can only install it on overpriced, irreparable, disposable hardware.
The right tool for the job is what I always say. Macs, especially on Apple Silicone, are next to impossible to beat for music production. The performance of those chips and the universal support from hardware and software manufacturers make it the best tool. What I find is that the number of scenarios in which Windows is the best tool is rapidly approaching zero.
Seems like an overpriced, irreparable, unupgradeable, and disposable tool would be the wrong tool but what do I know.
I get your point but the truth is that Apple’s M processors do a far better job than Intel and AMD processors do when it comes to this type of work. I started on Linux with Reaper and BitWig but the Macs performance was significantly better. Also, software and hardware support is key. All music gear manufacturers and software vendors support apple, including Apple silicone. You can run many VSTs through comparability layers but the latency is a huge problem and the alteady high CPU demands get exacerbated.
I have been on Linux since very early days and have always been a proponent of it. Music production is just not an niche that is currently as well covered by Linux as it is by Mac. We need a Linux push in music like the one Valve did in gaming. If Abelton and Native Instruments went all in on Linux, I think much of the industry would follow.
