Linux is good now

Unless one has a rack of older GPU hardware that uses an abandoned EOL NVIDIA kernel driver difficult to install past kernel 6.12.x Then one faces the harsh reality of Windows users rightfully laughing at a perpetually Beta Linux OS, as Win11 still boots with the older drivers. while the dkms build randomly implodes at some point.

People dual boot SSD OS for very good reasons, as kernel permutation is not necessarily progress in FOSS. Linux is usable by regular users these days, but "Good" is relative to your use case. YMMV =3

Honestly I loved it a lot more pre-2022, when Ubuntu added a super aggressive OOM killer that only operates on the level of an entire systemd run unit. Meaning that if you are running computation in, say, a shell and one for your subprocesses running computation takes too much memory, it takes out the entire shell and terminal window, leaving no trace of what happened, including all the terminal logs.

And if you are running Chrome, and something starts taking a lot of memory, say goodbye to the entire app without any niceties.

(Yes, this is a mere pet peeve but it has been causing me so much pain over the past year, and it's such an inferior way to deal with memory limits tha what came before it, I don't know why anybody would have taken OOM logic from systemd services and applied it to use launched processes.)

What pc would someone recommend as someone who just wants to toy around and dont necessarily need the power?

I use a Linux PC every day but I wouldn't recommend it to normal people. They're not going to feel any renewed sense of ownership from it, just annoyance at having to think about technical gibberish when they just want to get on with using the computer.

I wouldn't mind and wouldn't be surprised by Valve phone at some point

2026 YOTLD?

Only compared to windows. Sadly, we're still stuck with a PC clone for the near future.

What amazes me is that on Steam they no longer make the distinction (in the standard library view) between Windows and Linux: every game is assumed to launch in Linux, using Proton behind the scenes it needed. There's still a "Linux games" toggle but now every game appears ungrayed by default.

And it mostly works! At least for my games library. The only game I wasn't able to get to work so far is Space Marine 2, but on ProtonDB people report they got it to work.

As for the rest: I've been an exclusive Linux user on the desktop for ~20 years now, no regrets.

I would be 100% off Windows if it weren’t for Adobe Suite and Ableton Live not being ported to Linux. I’m guessing both of these companies are avoiding it not for technical reasons but because Linux is a support nightmare given all of the distros and variations of the platform.

All Linux desktop has to do is stay still and it will catch up with Windows, which is progressively getting worse.

What makes Linux a viable desktop for so many people now is the fact that they don’t need to run very much software anymore. It runs Chrome so you’re good.

Tried to switch to Linux plenty of times over the past few decades, this year it finally stuck. I can confidently say I’ll never install Windows again. Everything pretty much just works and any issues I’ve had have been quickly resolved with the help of LLM’s.

I've been giving Linux a go as a daily driver for a few months.

I tried Cinnamon and while it was pleasantly customizable, the sigle-threadedness of the UI killed it for me. It was too easy to do the wrong thing and lock the UI thread, including several desktop or tray Spices from the official repo.

I'm switching to KDE. Seems peppier.

Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse, which is a huge jump from the old days of fighting with Wi-Fi and sound support. Sound is a bit messy with giving a plethora of audio devices that would be hidden under windows (like digital and analog options for each device) and occasionally compatibility for digital vs analog will be flaky from a game or something, but I'll take it.

Biggest hassle imho is still installing non-repo software. So many packages offer a flatpak and a snap and and build-from-source instructions where you have to figure out the local package names for each dependency and they offer one .Deb for each different version of Debian and its derivatives and it's just so tedious to figure which is the right one.

Linux is not suitable for the average user. I use Xubuntu on all my old computers, but I am 100% sure a normie would not tolerate the tedium of it. People want shiny icons with animations and a bunch of garbage on their computers to make them feel they are doing something. Linux is too static for that.

If I have an issue with an application or if I want an application, I must use the terminal. I can't imagine a Mac user bothering to learn it. Linux is for people who want to maximize the use of their computer without being spied on and without weird background processes. Linux won't die, but it won't catch Windows or Mac in the next 5 decades. People are too lazy for it. Forget about learning. I bet you $100, 99% of the people in the street didn't even see Linux in their lives, nor even heard of it. It is not because of marketing, it is because people who tried it returned to Windows or Mac after deciding it is too hard to learn for them to install a driver or an application.

I get people are tired of Year of Linux on Desktop, but I feel like last year it actually started happening for real. Mostly due to Arch which is not what I ever expected.

On one hand we have Steam that will make 1000s of games become available on easy to use platform based on Arch.

For developers, we have Omarchy, which makes experience much more streamlined and very pleasant and productive. I moved both my desktop and laptop to Omarchy and have one Mac laptop, this is really good experience, not everything is perfect, but when I switch to Mac after Omarchy, I often discover how not easy is to use Mac, how many clicks it takes to do something simple.

I think both Microsoft and Apple need some serious competition and again, came from Arch who turned out to be more stable and serious then Ubuntu.

Between this and the dual boot diaries podcast it's great to see mainstream PC outlets covering Linux more broadly.

> actually own your PC

It's funny they would choose this phasing.

This is exactly the way I described my decision to abandon windoze, and switch to linux, over 20 years ago...

Can I run Solidworks on Linux yet? Excel? Labview? Vivado? Adobe products? Altium Designer? (Matlab is mostly yes) Not everybody is just writing Javascript and PHP.

Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?

Not that long ago the answer to these questions was mostly no (or sort of yes... but very painfully)

On Windows all of this just works.

It is interesting and fascinating to see the growth of Linux.

As many have pointed out, The biggest factor is obviously the enshittification of Microsoft. Valve has crept up in gaming. And I think understated is how incredibly nice the tiling WMs are. They really do offer an experience which is impossible to replicate on Mac or Windows, both aesthetically and functionally.

Linux, I think, rewards the power user. Microsoft and Apple couldn't give a crap about their power users. Apple has seemed to devolve into "Name That Product Line" fanboy fantasy land and has lost all but the most diehard fans. Microsoft is just outright hostile.

I'm interested to see what direction app development goes in. I think TUIs will continue to rise in popularity. They are snappier and overall a much better experience. In addition, they work over SSH. There is now an entire overclass of power users who are very comfortable moving around in different servers in shell. I don't think people are going to want to settle for AI SaaS Cloudslop after they get a taste of local first, and when they realize that running a homelab is basically just Linux, I think all bets are off as far as which direction "personal computing" goes. Also standing firmly in the way of total SSH app freedom are IPhone and Android, which keep pushing that almost tangible utopia of amazing software frustratingly far out of reach.

It doesn't seem like there is a clear winner for the noob-friendly distro category. It seems like theyre all pretty good. The gaming distros seem really effective. I finally installed Omarchy, having thought "I didn't need it, I can rice my own arch", etc, and I must say the experience has been wonderful.

I'm pretty comfortable at the "cutting edge" (read, with all my stuff being broken), so my own tastes in OS have moved from Arch to the systemd free Artix or OpenBSD. I don't really see the more traditional "advanced" Linuxes like Slackware or Gentoo pulling much weight. I've heard interesting things about users building declarative Nix environments and I think that's an interesting path. Personally, I hope we see some new, non-Unix operating systems that are more data and database oriented than file oriented. For now, OpenBSD feels very comfortable, it feels like I have a prayer of understanding what's on my system and that I learn things by using it, the latter of which is a feature of Arch. The emphasis on clean and concise code is really quite good, and serves as a good reminder that for all the "memory safe" features of these new languages, it's tough to beat truly great C developers for code quality. If you're going to stick with Unix, you might as well go for the best.

More and more I find myself wanting to integrate "personal computing" into my workflow, whether that's apps made for me and me alone, Emacs lisp, custom vim plugins, or homelab stuff. I look with envy at the smalltalks of the world, like Marvelous Toolkit, the Forths, or the Clojure based Easel. I really crave fluency - the ability for code to just pour out - none of the hesitation or system knowledge gaps which come from Stack Overflow or LLM use. I want mastery. I've also become much more tactical on which code I want to maintain. I really have tried to curb "not invented here" syndrome because eventually you realize you aren't going to be able to maintain it all. Really I just want a fun programming environment where I can read Don Knuth and make wireframe graphics demos!

I have a Windows 11 PC strictly for gaming. Nearly every-time I interact with Windows it infuriates me with garbage code, Microsoft business BS and anti-privacy. I’d love to switch but has Linux gaming solved the anti-cheat requirement issue? Do Epic and EA games work on Linux?

I also play a decent amount of Flight Simulator 2024 and losing that is almost a non-starter for switching.

If people put half the amount of their time into fixing Windows as they do installing software on Linux, it'd be way better.

Instead of distro upgrades, spend 3 minutes disabling the newest AI feature using regedit.

But, as the author rightly notes: It's more about a "feeling." Well then, good luck.

Anybody that plays games (e.g. ages 1 to 30) will be hard-pressed to use linux. It's just not an option, and dual-booting has high friction.

Linux is a viable alternative to Windows/MacOS if you stand back and squint.

Not up close due to the vast number of inconsistencies.

This could only be fixed by a user experience built from the ground up by a single company.

The article's title - and the original title of the submission - was specific, bold, and contained a call to action. The new title is bland and unspecific (Linux has been "good" for servers for decades now).

Please revert this submission to use the correct title.

When I got a steamdeck I open excel and started playtesting a few games, to many bugs, so I sold it

It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.