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A Windows user's experiences with Linux (should you switch?)

StueyDuck

Member
It is mainly an educational problem.
I think people just use windows and macOS because it's how they were taught.
Persons who would learn to work with Linux or BSD at school (and would not have to deal with macOS or Windows) would be much more likely to use it later in life.

At its core, this boils down to a basic reality. If teachers were gifted, education would be a very useful tool that would benefit people for the rest of their lives.
If teachers are mentally less bright, then there is a high probability that the majority of people will be educated to be imbeciles.

Why scholars should write in Markdown

Our IQ is steadily declining

There was once a study that tested the language skills of Linux, macOS and Windows users.
That test showed that Linux users had significantly better language skills than the macOS and windows users.

Educationally windows and macOS don't have a positive impact.

It is also not correct that windows is much easier. Suppose I were to run a test and time how long the following tasks take:
- Compare windows installation time with Alpine Linux installation time
- Time of installing packages with xbps package manager or apk package manager versus installing the same software with windows
- Time of configuration of many popular open-source software on BSD or Linux, versus configuration time of this software on windows

Etc.

What you will see is that in all these basic situations the windows users will be much slower and will need much more time. Is this because windows is 'easier'?

I once had my sister install the super useful and popular magic-wormhole package on windows. It literally took her almost 90 minutes to troubleshoot all the issues and configure everything correctly. On my FreeBSD/Void Linux/Devuan/mageia/.. systems it all installed completely in +- 20 seconds.

So much for the ease of windows in installing popular Python apps. I have a popular webcam manufactured by Microsoft. It works perfectly in FreeBSD, but windows10 has no working driver for it, although it is a Microsoft product with a 'windows10 compatible' sticker on it.

I just mean that windows is something made for and by imbeciles.
listen here tool, I have had to setup multiple linux server machines (Ubuntu mostly) across branches across multiple countries and multiple network setups, Don't you dare call me or anyone else here uneducated you piece of shit.

as someone who has had to develop across a multitude of OS and has a masters degree in Computer science, In my EDUCATED opinion, Windows and Mac are easier to use because it's not 99% garbage basement opensource that does everything but is a master of nothing.

i was willing to chat to you about this but don't you fucking dare call anyone who doesn't use Linux (by preference) uneducated. That's moronic and you can genuinely go fuck yourself.

it's like imagine instead of Pythagoras there was 5000 different ways to mathematically solve the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle, most of them don't calculate it perfectly, that is Linux.
 
Last edited:

FateTrap

Member
listen here tool, I have had to setup multiple linux server machines (Ubuntu mostly) across branches across multiple countries and multiple network setups, Don't you dare call me or anyone else here uneducated you piece of shit.

as someone who has had to develop across a multitude of OS and has a masters degree in Computer science, In my EDUCATED opinion, Windows and Mac are easier to use because it's not 99% garbage basement opensource that does everything but is a master of nothing.
I didn't call anyone uneducated. I said that education is not necessarily a positive thing. Look, for example, at Hans Zimmer, who has achieved much more musically than people who graduated from the music academy with the highest distinctions. Hans Zimmer had been expelled from various schools numerous times. A large part of the most successful American tech companies were started by individuals without a higher education. Think of companies such as Facebook, Oracle, Apple and Microsoft. And you also see that a large part of the PhD students and university professors steal other people's ideas, instead of doing the innovative work themselves.

Einstein's theory of relativity did not take into account the discoveries of Louis de Broglie (a nobel prize winner). We are now 2023 and there is not yet a physicist who has united both theories.
You also have the problem that quantum theory and relativity theory contradict each other mathematically. All physicists can say in 2023 is that they really don't have a clue about how the universe works.

Ubuntu used to be a good Linux distro but has been surpassed by most other distros in 2023. Canonical has not focused on the desktop for many years and is trying to focus on the Cloud and IoT. When will the average Linux user realize that Ubuntu is no longer an ideal choice for the desktop?

Easy systems for AMD/Intel users: Nobara Project, mageia, MInt
Easy systems for Nvidia users: mageia, Mint, Nobara Project

Moderately difficult systems for AMD/intel users: Devuan, Void Linux, Clear Linux, openSUSE, Alpine Linux
Moderately difficult systems for Nvidia users: Void Linux, Artix Linux, openSUSE

If you have intermediate skills and want to learn, you can also use FreeBSD for gaming on Intel/AMD/Nvidia GPU's:







most of them don't calculate it perfectly, that is Linux.

There are few, if any, results that Windows users can't achieve with a Linux app.

I'll give some alternatives:
MS Word: Emacs Org Mode, AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, ONLYOFFICE, WPS Office, Coda doc, ghostwriter, Apostrophe, GitBook, Mark My Words, ..
MS Excel: LibreOffice Calc, ONLYOFFICE, WPS Office, Gnumeric, Coda doc, PostgreSQL, Julia, ..
Photoshop: GIMP, Krita, ..
Lightroom: RawTherapee, darktable, digiKam, ..
Visual Studio: Emacs, Vim, nano, Geany, ..
media player classic: mpv media player, VLC, ..
Foobar2000: music player daemon, Audacious, DeaDBeeF, Quod Libet,
Edge: Firefox, Epiphany, Nyxt browser, Chromium, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi ..
Adobe InDesign: Scribus, Polotno Studio, VistaCreate, SILE Typesetter (with CaSILE), ..
Adobe Premiere: DaVinci Resolve, Flowblade, OpenShot, Kdenlive
3D modelling: Blender, Houdini, Maya, ..

Conclusion: There is nothing important that windows has and Linux does not.
You can even use Word and Excel on Linux thanks to CrossOver. https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
 
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vdopey

Member
One thing I must say though.. Linux gaming works best with AMD or Intel GPUs. Nvidia's proprietary drivers i've heard are missing features & perform worse than on Windows. If you own an Nvidia GPU you're better off staying on Windows until Nvidia can get their shit together and open source their for Linux users to modify and clean up. Also for AMD guys, Adrenalin Edition is not available on Linux at all. ReLive is supported though.
This keeps being stated as fact, but it is actually pure fiction.

When it comes to gpu drivers Nvidia have had very solid incredibly performant gpu drivers available for Linux/Unix for an incredibly long time, ATI never had drivers on Linux and by Extension AMDs didn't either for the longest time - they have since open sourced them and made massive improvements - Intels drivers have always been rock solid on Linux as well.

The truth when it comes to Nvidia is two-fold from 1 side you have the anti-Linux crowd (The astro-turfers paid by a certain massive company) that like to shit on Linux as a desktop platform and from the other side you have the anti-OSS crowd that shit on anything proprietary (I suspect a great many of these are the same paid astro-turfers under a different guise, although there are a few genuine nuts).

Nvidia makes a bucket load of cash from Linux and the gpu rendering most Movie studios have thousands of these gpus in massive render farms rendering scenes for movies. The CGI movie business has been Linux dominated for a good long time, before that they were SGI Unix - the company that created opengl and 3d rendering. If you look at a lot of the movie workflows when they scroll around and show the desktops you will see KDE and GNOME running on the desktops doing the rendering - most of them have their own custom software all running on Linux desktops.

Nvidia also makes absolute bucked loads on Super Computer GPU compute again Linux dominates this market - cuda driven massive calculations carried out on stacks of gpus. This is why the Nvidia gpus always get Linux support, its not really about gaming its about the major businesses that make them tonnes of cash and use Linux. The same unified driver is used to drive everything so it makes sense for them to keep them updated - also if you look at a lot of the bug reports the nvidia linux team are hot on the case improving performance for various games on Linux and improving performance for protondb.

There is a lot more I disagree with in your post, but its ok its because you are new to the platform , I get that. The only thing I will say is that you have to realise Linux is not windows. If you treat it like windows it will be really difficult, leave what you have learnt and approach it like a novice computer user. You mentioned about the FHS (The file system hierarchy) actually the way Linux does this is so much cleaner and better than Windows - do you know why windows runs like shit after 6 months ? Its the registry - the registry is the most user hostile, computer hostile thing to ever exist - even the sites you visit gets stored in the registry (it keeps a record of the images you view - sites you visited etc etc its absolutely kludgey horrible shit)
The Linux filesystem by extension is childs play.

/usr/bin:
Application binaries go into /usr/bin

/usr/sbin:
System Binaries that require elevated privileges go into /usr/sbin which is also symlinked to /sbin you will usually need sudo to access these.

/etc:
Configuration all goes into /etc/ and oh look its all plain text and user modifiable without requiring some god awful registry editor.

Lets say we want to make a change to our hosts file to redirect some website to some internal location easy edit /etc/hosts add your entry job done - what about windows, where is hosts on windows ?

`C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc` wow so intuitive, makes complete logical sense right ?

/var:
System Processes that generate logs or spools or mail go into /var - you can even read into these mostly - remember the unix philosphy is that everything on the system is a file so it can all be manipulated
logging goes into /var/log system services generally go into /var so stuff like /var/spool holds the printer spool /var/mail holds mail etc

/usr:
The application home where applications and libraries reside
/usr/ is where all of the application data reside so /usr/lib contains the libraries etc - generally dont touch this your package manager handles this.
/usr/local - anything outside of the package manager goes here generally anything you install yourself as root goes here it even has its own binary directory /usr/loca/bin so its self contained and local to you.

/opt:
This was introduced by Sun I think - optional installation stuff goes here, Chrome installs itself here, its another /usr/local but alot of the commercial software vendors tend to stick their stuff here - it doesn't have its own bin

/home/
This is the users home directory - each user of the system gets their own directory - most services that are user customizable are completely customizable from within your home directory - in fact you should never really need to make any system changes, all of the changes you need to make should be here and they only effect you. (A true multi-user system)

/root/
This is the root users home directory - you shouldnt need to touch this unless you know what you are doing (generally even if you know what you are doing dont change things here) Ive modified a few things to do with vim / neovim text editing when making changes as root - just to make things cleaner / easier for myself - generally dont need to touch it)

/dev (I intentionally left this until last as its just the best):
/dev - this is the device store all of your devices get registered here - guess what you can directly communicate with devices as they are treated like files
want 19 random characters and to convert it into base64: head -c19 /dev/random |base64 here you go read the first 19 lines output from /dev/random and pipe that into base64
want to create an empty block device ? easy

```
time sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/test bs=1048576 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.562927 s, 1.9 GB/s

real 0m0.572s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.001s```
Half a second to create a 1GB file which can be used as a block storage device.

Lets now convert this into an actual disk, easy:

```
sudo mkfs.ext4 /media/test
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 262144 4k blocks and 65536 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 139caa18-0dc4-4246-b5d0-e6c49132a834
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (8192 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done```

Believe it or not /media/test now has an ext4 file system - lets mount it and see

```
mkdir /tmp/test

sudo mount -o loop /media/test /tmp/test
$ ls -al /tmp/test/
total 60
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 17 18:00 .
drwxrwxrwt 26 root root 36864 Jul 17 18:01 ..
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jul 17 18:00 lost+found

$ df -h /tmp/test/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop22 974M 280K 906M 1% /tmp/test
```
Do you see just how freaking powerful Linux is ? Try to do something like this on windows see how long it takes - in under a minute ive created a 1G block object with a valid filesystem and connected it to my machine - I can store stuff on here and unmount I can copy this block onto a usb drive - I can use the same dd to completely take over a usb drive if I wanted to.




Leave what you learnt about how to use a computer when using windows at the door and learn how to use your computer properly while using Linux - when you understand the operating system it will click and once it clicks you will not want to touch Windows again, you will begin to understand why it is just complete Garbage. I haven't run windows in so long I dont even know how half the shit works, what you said about the file system for windows and the registry made me chuckle its just a horrible kludge, also if you were wondering Linux smokes Windows in performance mainly due to the excellent Linux Filesystems (Linux even has ZFS support now - its just :chefskiss:) There is no comparison here the top tier Unix vendors built this amazing tech and all of it has landed in Linux and Linux has only improved on this stuff.
You turn on your tv its running Linux, Samsung has it integrated into its Fridges, even washing Machines, Android is Linux, ChromeBooks are Linux, your NAS is running Linux, your router is probably running Linux, the websites you visit are more than likely running Linux - it absolutely dominates and once you learn to use it you will shit on everything else and for good reason.

With this said MacOs is also a Unix and I also happen to Love Mac Os, just as powerful under the hood incredibly stable Like Linux I personally prefer the flexibility of Linux but I use both. Also Massive thank you to Valve for Making gaming on Linux viable.
 
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vdopey

Member
listen here tool, I have had to setup multiple linux server machines (Ubuntu mostly) across branches across multiple countries and multiple network setups, Don't you dare call me or anyone else here uneducated you piece of shit.

as someone who has had to develop across a multitude of OS and has a masters degree in Computer science, In my EDUCATED opinion, Windows and Mac are easier to use because it's not 99% garbage basement opensource that does everything but is a master of nothing.

i was willing to chat to you about this but don't you fucking dare call anyone who doesn't use Linux (by preference) uneducated. That's moronic and you can genuinely go fuck yourself.

it's like imagine instead of Pythagoras there was 5000 different ways to mathematically solve the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle, most of them don't calculate it perfectly, that is Linux.

I am sure you have, your tone and your response definitely shows it. The fact you think Opensource software is
99% garbage basement
:pie_disappointed: I don't know what to say to you, oh so wrong. No Comp Sci Masters Degree holder I know would agree with you - when it comes to the work place especially the development world I see Mac OS and Linux dominating it nowadays, but whatever.
 

Ozriel

M$FT
This keeps being stated as fact, but it is actually pure fiction.

When it comes to gpu drivers Nvidia have had very solid incredibly performant gpu drivers available for Linux/Unix for an incredibly long time, ATI never had drivers on Linux and by Extension AMDs didn't either for the longest time - they have since open sourced them and made massive improvements - Intels drivers have always been rock solid on Linux as well.

The truth when it comes to Nvidia is two-fold from 1 side you have the anti-Linux crowd (The astro-turfers paid by a certain massive company) that like to shit on Linux as a desktop platform and from the other side you have the anti-OSS crowd that shit on anything proprietary (I suspect a great many of these are the same paid astro-turfers under a different guise, although there are a few genuine nuts).

Nvidia makes a bucket load of cash from Linux and the gpu rendering most Movie studios have thousands of these gpus in massive render farms rendering scenes for movies. The CGI movie business has been Linux dominated for a good long time, before that they were SGI Unix - the company that created opengl and 3d rendering. If you look at a lot of the movie workflows when they scroll around and show the desktops you will see KDE and GNOME running on the desktops doing the rendering - most of them have their own custom software all running on Linux desktops.

Nvidia also makes absolute bucked loads on Super Computer GPU compute again Linux dominates this market - cuda driven massive calculations carried out on stacks of gpus. This is why the Nvidia gpus always get Linux support, its not really about gaming its about the major businesses that make them tonnes of cash and use Linux. The same unified driver is used to drive everything so it makes sense for them to keep them updated - also if you look at a lot of the bug reports the nvidia linux team are hot on the case improving performance for various games on Linux and improving performance for protondb.

There is a lot more I disagree with in your post, but its ok its because you are new to the platform , I get that. The only thing I will say is that you have to realise Linux is not windows. If you treat it like windows it will be really difficult, leave what you have learnt and approach it like a novice computer user. You mentioned about the FHS (The file system hierarchy) actually the way Linux does this is so much cleaner and better than Windows - do you know why windows runs like shit after 6 months ? Its the registry - the registry is the most user hostile, computer hostile thing to ever exist - even the sites you visit gets stored in the registry (it keeps a record of the images you view - sites you visited etc etc its absolutely kludgey horrible shit)
The Linux filesystem by extension is childs play.

/usr/bin:
Application binaries go into /usr/bin

/usr/sbin:
System Binaries that require elevated privileges go into /usr/sbin which is also symlinked to /sbin you will usually need sudo to access these.

/etc:
Configuration all goes into /etc/ and oh look its all plain text and user modifiable without requiring some god awful registry editor.

Lets say we want to make a change to our hosts file to redirect some website to some internal location easy edit /etc/hosts add your entry job done - what about windows, where is hosts on windows ?

`C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc` wow so intuitive, makes complete logical sense right ?

/var:
System Processes that generate logs or spools or mail go into /var - you can even read into these mostly - remember the unix philosphy is that everything on the system is a file so it can all be manipulated
logging goes into /var/log system services generally go into /var so stuff like /var/spool holds the printer spool /var/mail holds mail etc

/usr:
The application home where applications and libraries reside
/usr/ is where all of the application data reside so /usr/lib contains the libraries etc - generally dont touch this your package manager handles this.
/usr/local - anything outside of the package manager goes here generally anything you install yourself as root goes here it even has its own binary directory /usr/loca/bin so its self contained and local to you.

/opt:
This was introduced by Sun I think - optional installation stuff goes here, Chrome installs itself here, its another /usr/local but alot of the commercial software vendors tend to stick their stuff here - it doesn't have its own bin

/home/
This is the users home directory - each user of the system gets their own directory - most services that are user customizable are completely customizable from within your home directory - in fact you should never really need to make any system changes, all of the changes you need to make should be here and they only effect you. (A true multi-user system)

/root/
This is the root users home directory - you shouldnt need to touch this unless you know what you are doing (generally even if you know what you are doing dont change things here) Ive modified a few things to do with vim / neovim text editing when making changes as root - just to make things cleaner / easier for myself - generally dont need to touch it)

/dev (I intentionally left this until last as its just the best):
/dev - this is the device store all of your devices get registered here - guess what you can directly communicate with devices as they are treated like files
want 19 random characters and to convert it into base64: head -c19 /dev/random |base64 here you go read the first 19 lines output from /dev/random and pipe that into base64
want to create an empty block device ? easy

```
time sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/test bs=1048576 count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 0.562927 s, 1.9 GB/s

real 0m0.572s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.001s```
Half a second to create a 1GB file which can be used as a block storage device.

Lets now convert this into an actual disk, easy:

```
sudo mkfs.ext4 /media/test
mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Discarding device blocks: done
Creating filesystem with 262144 4k blocks and 65536 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 139caa18-0dc4-4246-b5d0-e6c49132a834
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (8192 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done```

Believe it or not /media/test now has an ext4 file system - lets mount it and see

```
mkdir /tmp/test

sudo mount -o loop /media/test /tmp/test
$ ls -al /tmp/test/
total 60
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 17 18:00 .
drwxrwxrwt 26 root root 36864 Jul 17 18:01 ..
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jul 17 18:00 lost+found

$ df -h /tmp/test/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop22 974M 280K 906M 1% /tmp/test
```
Do you see just how freaking powerful Linux is ? Try to do something like this on windows see how long it takes - in under a minute ive created a 1G block object with a valid filesystem and connected it to my machine - I can store stuff on here and unmount I can copy this block onto a usb drive - I can use the same dd to completely take over a usb drive if I wanted to.




Leave what you learnt about how to use a computer when using windows at the door and learn how to use your computer properly while using Linux - when you understand the operating system it will click and once it clicks you will not want to touch Windows again, you will begin to understand why it is just complete Garbage. I haven't run windows in so long I dont even know how half the shit works, what you said about the file system for windows and the registry made me chuckle its just a horrible kludge, also if you were wondering Linux smokes Windows in performance mainly due to the excellent Linux Filesystems (Linux even has ZFS support now - its just :chefskiss:) There is no comparison here the top tier Unix vendors built this amazing tech and all of it has landed in Linux and Linux has only improved on this stuff.
You turn on your tv its running Linux, Samsung has it integrated into its Fridges, even washing Machines, Android is Linux, ChromeBooks are Linux, your NAS is running Linux, your router is probably running Linux, the websites you visit are more than likely running Linux - it absolutely dominates and once you learn to use it you will shit on everything else and for good reason.

With this said MacOs is also a Unix and I also happen to Love Mac Os, just as powerful under the hood incredibly stable Like Linux I personally prefer the flexibility of Linux but I use both. Also Massive thank you to Valve for Making gaming on Linux viable.

Nothing against Linux. Just bemused at some of the zealotry it inspires.
You see it in posts like this, you see it in the Steamdeck subreddit where angry little men swarm you when you talk about dual booting Windows…

Look, it’s an OS. Happy for people who get their joy doing all this stuff, but it’s also perfectly valid that tons of super smart people also get their needs perfectly served with Windows and Mac OS
 

Unknown?

Member
listen here tool, I have had to setup multiple linux server machines (Ubuntu mostly) across branches across multiple countries and multiple network setups, Don't you dare call me or anyone else here uneducated you piece of shit.

as someone who has had to develop across a multitude of OS and has a masters degree in Computer science, In my EDUCATED opinion, Windows and Mac are easier to use because it's not 99% garbage basement opensource that does everything but is a master of nothing.

i was willing to chat to you about this but don't you fucking dare call anyone who doesn't use Linux (by preference) uneducated. That's moronic and you can genuinely go fuck yourself.

it's like imagine instead of Pythagoras there was 5000 different ways to mathematically solve the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle, most of them don't calculate it perfectly, that is Li
He was saying most people are undereducated on Linux, not you. 1) The general public doesn't even know of its existence and 2) the ones who do think they have to relearn everything.

If you've done windows since XP like me, there are distros where you catch on like you aren't on anything different.
 

vdopey

Member
Nothing against Linux. Just bemused at some of the zealotry it inspires.
You see it in posts like this, you see it in the Steamdeck subreddit where angry little men swarm you when you talk about dual booting Windows…

Look, it’s an OS. Happy for people who get their joy doing all this stuff, but it’s also perfectly valid that tons of super smart people also get their needs perfectly served with Windows and Mac OS

I love seeing the word "Zealot" That is an instant red-flag an indicator that I am dealing with a paid astroturfer / shill. Looking at your comment history its pretty obvious you have a very heavy Microsoft Lean.

Did you happen to miss the part where I talk about MacOs ? I am typing this right now on my new 15" MacBook Air, but sure go ahead..

This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Müller_(author) who got caught astroturfing in this very forum for Microsoft against Sony has been doing the same thing against Linux and Open Source for a very long time.

The way you try to belittle my post with subtle digs about "angry little men" kudos - real nice nothing really to add to the conversation other than a bunch of veiled insults.

Microsofts absolute biggest threat has been and will always be Linux getting a foot hold into the desktop market - the moment Linux or any other os for that matter comes up and takes 10% market share, where they actually have to compete on merit for desktops is the moment they are in trouble. They tried so very hard to lock up the server market and failed miserably, literally tried everything in their dirty playbooks, but businesses unlike normal people aren't swayed by astroturfers making comments in forums - they work based on results, based on real world performance metrics, based on uptime / scalability and cost this is why Linux dominates the server sphere.

This is why the work Valve is doing with Proton and SteamOs is such a threat to Microsoft, even the fact this thread exists is because of the excellent progress Valve have made in getting games to work on Linux. Most games on / near day 1 getting released on proton in Linux with minimal performance loss. In fact sometimes even performing better / being fixed in the wine translation layer before the actual game gets fixed deserves nothing but respect.

Personally I don't give a rats ass what OS anyone else uses, if some one is interested in using Linux I provide them with some insight and analytical tools to be able to investigate the os properly, very rarely do I engage in discussions over this stuff, education releases us all from ignorance.

Some day there will be a much wider choice in operating systems and we will all be the better for it, because competition is good.
 

Codeblew

Member
I am a software dev and I do most of my work on my Linux partition. I sometimes go weeks without booting up windows. I mainly only load my windows partition to play games (or modding for games).
 

Tams

Member
Windows hasn't stayed the same over the years either. A fair number of things have changed in the XP -> Vista -> windows7 -> windows8 -> windows10 -> windows11 cycle.To learn to work with a user-friendly Linux distro is not a step much bigger than learning to work with a new windows edition. You have a lot of apps in the Linux world that work very similarly to Word. And you also have a lot of apps that work similarly to Excel. If I remember correctly, most of the functions in Gnumeric work exactly the same as in Excel. But Gnumeric has higher performance and unlike Excel, it makes no or far fewer calculation errors.

The problem with windows is that it is meant for old people and non-technical users to hold their hands. So what you see with 98% of windows users is that after using it for decades, they have learned next to nothing in terms of operating systems. Systems like windows and macOS encourage stupidity in the IT world. I also very often notice that the best IT apps don't work as well on macOS and windows. Think of RawTherapee, which crashes all the time on macOS, but is completely stable on Linux and BSD systems. Think of mpv media player which works perfectly on Linux, but works much less well on windows. Although it has better picture quality and efficiency than all windows alternatives. Many apps also have higher performance on Linux and BSD. And most malware is still developed for windows. So windows users fall victim to malware very frequently. Furthermore, Microsoft also has a very long history of privacy abuse.

People who are not pathetic do not stay stuck in abusive relationships for years.

And people like you wonder why most people suck to Windows and MacOS (plus iOS and Android).

Read your post again. Then you might understand why.

Edit: after reading more of this thread, you are either a parody or in need of some mental help that this forum can't provide you.
 
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Bry0

Member
If you have any games on the microsoft store or use gamepass they wont run.
Yeah if it wasn’t for this and Bungies weird anti-Linux stance I would probably switch over. Linux is a pita sometimes but I don’t entirely mind, and what valve has done is incredible. Still I’d lose accessibility to too many games and I’m not willing to take that loss on my main pc.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
I just mean that windows is something made for and by imbeciles.
this is fucking stupid and you should feel like shit for writing it. I've used Windows all my damn life, but it doesn't make me an imbecile nor does it make me low IQ. I switched to Linux because it's what i like more.

this guy is no representation of the general Linux community, there are much nicer people here on the forum like Crayon Crayon who are willing to educate you on Linux without riding in on a high horse.
 

Closer

Member
Funny thing is I started to use Nobara some months ago and never went back to Windows. All of my games work out of the box or with some tinkering. My work stuff can be done on OnlyOffice or LibreOffice no problem, and GIMP have everything I need also. I think it's fun to learn new stuff so I'm really enjoying my ride.
 
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64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
One of the reasons for so many different flavors of Linux is due to the community's inability to rally around a consistent purpose and focus on it.
You really keep saying this but I still don't really get how it's an issue- infact that's the whole selling point. The fact that everyone has a different vision for what Linux should be and what you should use it with is a good thing. Means that there's always a distro available for your specific purpose and you could go out and find it.

and like i said, Linux really ain't that fragmented. There's like 3 major distros everything else is built off of, Debian, Arch and RedHat. Most stuff is compatible with all 3 thanks to having support for them or having flatpaks/appimages for them. Nothing you really have to worry about. Selecting a Linux Distro to use on your PC really isn't that different from selecting what laptop company you want to buy from, or what Android company you want to buy from- They still run the same OS and the same apps, they just have different features for different people.

And with apple coming to the party now in a more meaningful way you are going to see alot more people jump ship to Mac
This is also a heavy doubt since Mac's biggest issue is that you have to buy a hyper expensive computer or laptop to even get into the ecosystem, and once you're in they will do everything in their power to keep you in. It's a major investment that does not like to let you go. I doubt many PC gamers who love the freedom of PC gaming and the customization of it would be down for giving that all away when there's a much cheaper solution.
 

Soodanim

Gold Member
This thread took a bit of a turn.
People who are not pathetic do not stay stuck in abusive relationships for years.
I just mean that windows is something made for and by imbeciles.
How to make people think you're an elitist cunt in two sentences.
want to create an empty block device ? easy
(User followed this statement with a bunch of complex scripting that is in no way user-friendly or at all easy)

You can't have an "I know it so it's easy" attitude then accuse anyone that goes against you of being a paid shill. You have to have zero self-awareness to think that's an acceptable way to present a point you want seen as reasonable.



Those nutters aside, I'm actually considering going dual boot when I build my next system. I've always been interested in Linux and the learning, tinkering and tweaking seems like the sort of thing that would grab me. Hell, even on windows I've started doing my software installs through winget and chocolatey (command line interface package managers). Then you have the odd thing that has performance benefits in Linux/VK like Elden Ring and it gives me even more reason to keep a distro handy.
 

FateTrap

Member
and like i said, Linux really ain't that fragmented. There's like 3 major distros everything else is built off of, Debian, Arch and RedHat. Most stuff is compatible with all 3 thanks to having support for them or having flatpaks/appimages for them. Nothing you really have to worry about.
Fragmentation is one of the biggest problems in the Linux world. There are quite a few excellent distros that don't belong to any of these three groups.
Think of popular and high-quality operating systems such as Alpine Linux, Clear Linux, Void Linux, NixOS, Slackware, GNU Guix, Solus, Gentoo, ..
 

FateTrap

Member
An article that may interest readers of this thread.

VALVE IS ACCELERATING THE VALIDATION OF GAMES FROM 2023 FOR THE STEAM DECK LIKE NEVER BEFORE… INCLUDING GAMES NOT EVEN RELEASED YET
 

FateTrap

Member
Funny thing is I started to use Nobara some months ago and never went back to Windows. All of my games work out of the box or with some tinkering. My work stuff can be done on OnlyOffice or LibreOffice no problem, and GIMP have everything I need also. I think it's fun to learn new stuff so I'm really enjoying my ride.
siduction is another excellent option.
This operating system is based on Debian so it has very good compatibility with most Linux software.
It also has new drivers as it is based on Debian Sid.
I think siduction along with Void Linux and Clear Linux are the three most underrated gaming distros.
 

Hudo

Member
I've been pretty happy with Fedora Silverblue for quite a while now. No major problems getting games to run. It's even easier to get some old-ass games to run on it because there are Lutris scripts that take care of most settings for you. For example, I had an easier time getting MechCommander to run on it than on Windows 10.
 

FateTrap

Member
I think F2FS (on Linux) can load games and game maps at least 2x faster than NTFS (on windows11).

This is my startup time for 0 A.D. on PCLinuxOS with F2FS as root partition. I hadn't opened any apps before I did this test.
vdnWURS.png

Result: 0.658 second total startup time

If I reopen the game I can still obtain slightly better load times of course. (0.570 second total startup time)

I also tested OpenArena's load time and it is consistently between 0.4 s and 0.5 s.
OpenArena pretty much always opens in less than half a second if I skip the first movie.

I have an Intel 12600KF and an old Samsung EVO 850 500GB SSD. With a powerful new SSD I can load these games much faster on F2FS.
 
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Duchess

Member
I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years, and would never go back to Windows. Even switching to a Mac is a push for me; tried it for a week, and returned the machine.

I can get plenty of games running thanks to Proton, but I'll be the first to admit that Linux is definitely not for everyone.
 

Laieon

Member
It is mainly an educational problem.
I think people just use windows and macOS because it's how they were taught.
Persons who would learn to work with Linux or BSD at school (and would not have to deal with macOS or Windows) would be much more likely to use it later in life.

At its core, this boils down to a basic reality. If teachers were gifted, education would be a very useful tool that would benefit people for the rest of their lives.
If teachers are mentally less bright, then there is a high probability that the majority of people will be educated to be imbeciles.

Why scholars should write in Markdown

As a teacher, I think this is simplifying the issue way too much, is incredibly naive, and conveniently ignoring the simple fact that teachers aren't choosing the curriculum and capitalism plays a massive part in what is taught. Linus/Linux doesn't have nearly the lobbying impact that Google or Microsoft has, which is why digital curriculum and available tools is often based around Windows/Microsoft or, more recently, Google based stuff like Chromebooks, Chrome OS, and Google Workspace (and they offer enterprise level product support to back that up). If you're in the US, it's the same reason your local schools are probably teaching with curriculum created by Pearson or McGraw Hill; they have the reach and impact to get their products into schools.

If you want Linux taught in schools to the point where it replaces current tools and curriculum, start showing up to school board meetings with others who feel the same way en masse, lobbying for it, and get the public/politicians on your side.
 
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Crayon

Member
I've been daily driving Linux for well over 20 years, and would never go back to Windows. Even switching to a Mac is a push for me; tried it for a week, and returned the machine.

I can get plenty of games running thanks to Proton, but I'll be the first to admit that Linux is definitely not for everyone.

Wow, 20. I switched more like 10 years ago because it got easy enough to not have to learn much. And now ten years later I still hardly know anything lol.
 
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Crayon

Member
If there is an official steam os release one day then I will switch.

I was really hoping that they would have had that ready to go within a few months of the deck launch but here we are. :/ One of these days... There's at least one distro that is based on the deck recovery image but that's not the same as having a big company backing it.
 

Roni

Member
Next PC I build is probably gonna be Linux since last time I updated (changed from an HDD to an SSD) I had trouble re-activating my legit Windows copy and the support lady had the gall of warning me I can't keep my Windows 10 key forever and will have to re-purchase it if I want to keep using it when I change my hardware further.
 
If there is an official steam os release one day then I will switch.
I dont recommend you that, steamos(version 3) like in steamdeck tends to work with with flatpack and doesn't have enough updated libraries in their repositories, it works very well but its limited if you want to install other things like dev environments or things like stablediffusion(directly)its not bad depending what you want to use, you can of course have no problem using blender, gimp, krita, even running godot but its preferable a debian based distro like ubuntu or linux mint(what I use) I recommend xfce4 as desktop since its very well customized and lightweight but you can change or have multiple desktop environments and choose your preferred when logging in whenever you want they you dont require GB's of data for another desktop(100 BM or a bit more)
 

Cryio

Member
It basically reached a point where on AMD GPUs, ANY DX12 game just runs faster on Linux than Windows now, which is hilarious.

Other APIs run mostly 1:1.
 

StereoVsn

Gold Member
It basically reached a point where on AMD GPUs, ANY DX12 game just runs faster on Linux than Windows now, which is hilarious.

Other APIs run mostly 1:1.
How are Nvidia drivers for gaming now days? I know on GPU Compute side/CUDA they are very good, but gaming ones used to be kind of crappy.
 
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Duchess

Member
Wow, 20. I switched more like 10 years ago because it got easy enough to not have to learn much. And now ten years later I still hardly know anything lol.
I started working in IT back in 2001, and a couple of peeps at work suggested I install Linux, since it came bundled with lots of tools and applications that I would be using, so it would be a good learning experience.

It could get very painful back in those days, but I powered through.
 

Crayon

Member
I started working in IT back in 2001, and a couple of peeps at work suggested I install Linux, since it came bundled with lots of tools and applications that I would be using, so it would be a good learning experience.

It could get very painful back in those days, but I powered through.

Actually, now that I remember, I did get rammed through one of those scam it courses around 2000. There was a brief Linux module, primarily so you can work with routers. So I learned to move around bash, and I liked that enough. Never had to solve any real problems. So I got a taste of it and I liked it, and that was a big part of me trying it a few times over the years.

When it came time for my ultimate switch, I didn't have any issue bigger than not being able to drag over a file to make a desktop shortcut at the time. Shortly after that, steam for Linux came out. So I got my first desktop in many years. Just some junk I pulled out of somewhere and threw a 750 tie in it to see how things were going with Linux gaming. It turned out the driver that would support Maxwell cards was just barely getting finished and to so much as get video out of the card, I had to do SSH into the machine and do some hairy s*** to get the driver in. Looking back, that might have stopped me had I not done that before with routers. It was just following a bunch of steps, after all. But at least I wasn't afraid of the terminal even though I could hardly do s*** in it. To this day, that was by far the trickiest thing that has come up and everything has only gotten easier since then.

So I've had it easy since then and now look at me. I'm the fabled Linux gamer who is nowhere near an expert. I haven't met many other people who have been long-term daily driving without ever learning that much. Well, except to not go copying and pasting commands that you don't understand off the internet.. yeah. Don't do that.
 

FateTrap

Member
Earlier I had said that F2FS is possibly the fastest file system for game startup and load times.
I have (now) tested the startup time of 0 A.D. with ROSA Fresh Desktop 12.4 and XFS.
I had not opened 0 A.D. a single time before getting this result. Result: 0.396 second total startup time

I then tested OpenArena on XFS and it also opens in 0.3xx second the first time I open it.
Red Eclipse also opens faster on XFS (than on F2FS).

These are three different games that all open much faster on XFS than on F2FS.
LibreOffice Writer, on the other hand, does open faster on F2FS than on XFS.

I use different operating systems so the results are not directly comparable in a transparent way.
My overall impression: XFS is much faster for opening games, and F2FS is faster for opening 'standard apps'.

I have an Intel 12600KF and an old Samsung EVO 850 500GB SSD. With a powerful new SSD I can load these games faster (on XFS).
Maybe 0.2xxx second total startup time is possible for 0 A.D and OpenArena depending on if I have a CPU or IOPS bottleneck.
This does seem like something nice to know for gamers, that XFS can load games many times faster than NTFS, Btrfs and many other file systems.
 
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