Hi all,
I made this post about a year ago: https://lemmy.ca/post/31760258
At the time, I was going to switch a couple laptops over and if all went well, put Linux on my main rig.
I just wanted to provide an update on my own experiences, and wanted to see what other people’s experiences were like.
I put Mint on both my laptop’s, and enjoyed it. Familiar enough to Windows where I could mess around with things, but different enough that I could learn. After 7 or 8 months of rocking Mint, I finally put Bazzite on my main rig. I did during the work week, which on hindsight was a bad idea because I also run Windows on my main rig as my work requires Windows, but I accidentally deleted my Windows bootloader (lol). After an evening of panic, I was able to recover the bootloader, set Bazzite up with dual booting, and it’s been smooth sailing since.
I’m a pretty big gamer, play lots of games with a bunch of friends, and after about 3 months of using Bazzite, I have not run into a SINGLE issue that has prevented me from playing anything. I have been shocked at how smooth everything has been. In the morning, I boot into Windows, work for the day, and then when I’m done I just run boot-windows through Steam or reboot to get into Bazzite and then I’m gaming.
I have done a little bit of tinkering with audio to get my desk mic to work correctly, but it’s been great!
For others who have recently made the switch over, what was your experience like? Any issues? Any tips or helpful suggestions to share?
Cheers!
I mean I can imagine, but I think it’s fair to say there’s been significant gaming progress and user friendliness to happen over the the past <5 years. It was unthinkable to switch over a decade ago and now it’s practically no different than windows. To me that means a different bar for what maturity is i guess.
In my experience, it [(several distros)] was[/were] already easier than windows over 20 years ago. Easier, and better, by a long long long way [… many ways].
What’s changed for user friendliness in the past <5 years? ~ (I’m struggling to conceive of anything, and only coming up with stuff to confound new users, like some distros adopting wayland by default, despite it not yet being feature complete, and having a more complicated structure than X11, and like whatever GNOME are doing to inhibit user choice).
What made it unthinkable to you to switch over a decade ago?
I’m probably thinking of a bigger timeline, don’t recall the last time I tried to migrate but it was probably between 5 and 10 years.
Biggest improvement is Steam+Proton. Gaming in Linux was a huge PITA in the past and nowadays it just works automagically.
Wayland was a big deal to me since it supports some features I needed like per-screen scaling, using my 13’’ notebook on a desk without that gets really straining. I’m using KDE and I also think Linux GUIs have massively improved in usability.
Hardware support improved a lot, though there are still gaps like fingerprint readers which honestly still suck in Linux. But at least all the essential stuff works very well out of the box.
Docker standardizing deployments made it easier to use any OS you want for coding… which is probably a bigger win for MacOS to be honest. More cross-platform support for development tools (including .Net on Linux) also help since that avoids the need of dual-booting when your day job involves these.
Though we have lost the cube being widely available. ;)
I swapped a laptop over maybe 5 years back at this point and bricked it within a week. I tried a total of 2 or 3 times and something always went wrong (this was Arch btw). I converted it to Mint maybe a year later and it was stable but I wasn’t convinced it was stable enough for my main computer.
I’m also pretty sure before that majority of games were not easily compatible like they are today.
Even as we speak Steam is not constantly resetting my keyboard as of some recent patch and I’m positive this wouldn’t happen on windows. Like Linux is great, it’s come a long way, and I would say it’s mature enough for most of friends to pop over without issue - but there are still clearly situations where I’m fighting the OS’s minority status or hodgepodge structure.
I love it, but claiming it was better than windows for the past 20 years is a bit of a bubble. You must not game, because 20 years ago it would have been worse - to name the one niche I care to point out right now.
LOL! Yeah. Arch will do that. XD
Which is fine if you like that. LOL.
Maybe try e.g. a devuan-stable based respin, if having your OS half-backflip and faceplant is not your preference. ;)
Ah, that’s maybe true.
When I gave up Windows, I basically ceased being “a gamer”[1] (at least for (most) windows games) ~ because it was free software philosophy that was the winner, and the games were proprietary licensed, and so I became much more productive. That’s probably what I was missing from the equation… for those unwilling to give up their addiction to the games they’ve been playing, it would have seemed non-viable, if something failed to run in wine or whatever. … Though, even then, most things would. Sometimes even better (especially since not having to run windows bloat ~ even, optionally, not even needing to run the rest of your desktop environment etc in linux, could make your game launch from init). I hear (after my prior reply) that wine (and so on) stuff is improving leaps and bounds in the recent years… games companies contributing to wine and such a lot more now.
The thing is though… Linux is fine, totally usable. Windows games on linux, is a peculiar steep ask, to judge it by. It’s like saying a bread maker sucks because it isnt a toaster. Y’know? We’re asking it to do things it’s not designed for. (Or rather, that those things are not designed for it~ and it’s going out of its way to accomodate). Linux native games run fine. :3 I stand by the point that Linux has been better than windows for decades. … How well does windows run the linux things? :P And can we check the source code to remove the malicious features and release forks without those malicious features to benefit everybody else too?
[1: I did still run d2lod in wine for about a decade after switching, no problemo.]