this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I'm helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because "Linux can't play games" despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.

2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can't even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.

Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Yeah, it's a fricken nightmare... Windows is ok in a well managed corporate setup where all the crap is uninstalled

I bought a laptop recently which came with Windows. I was going to setup dual boot because I need Office365 for work... but in the end I just gave up, deleted windows and installed Ubuntu.

I hear lots of people used to using Windows saying "I tried Linux and couldn't get anything to work"... it's not that I don't believe them, but I really struggle to understand it. Windows is so much worse!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tend to get the kind of Linux issues nobody believes.
Currently my installation "works" but none of the text mode boot up stuff displays at all so I have to dig out a spare screen if it gets stuck there.
Another screen I could never get the display scaling to work no matter what I did - I tried swapping cables, editing the resolution manually everything I could think of but it would always output 640x480 native pixels unscaled as a tiny square in the middle of the screen.

Windows gives me issues but it usually just works with every screen+gpu combination.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What graphics card do you use, and also what kind of cable? Sometimes when using dvi in hdmi compat mode it cannot read the displays information and defaults to rendering with basic vesa drivers, or just defaulting to the smallest size to at least make sure that you have a picture

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No text mode is HDMI with a 3070, the options in a monitor do have an HDMI compatibilty option but it's off.
The no scaling was displayport, but AMD RX 5700 to a GSync display so that might have been the issue because it works fine with NVIDIA cards.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The no text mode could very well be a nvidia issue, I gave up on using their cards some time ago when Wayland came out and nvidia was slow as hell on the uptake. Nvidia cards in general have more wacky bugs outside of the normal gui environments they were designed for. I had a 1050ti that would only display text mode in 320x240 mode with the proprietary drivers, and then would only display on one screen with the open sauce ones. Overall after switching to AMD I havent had any driver bugs besides the ones related to ryzen APUs locking up when switching power states, and that's been resolved for a little over a month. But I do understand why NVIDIA is the preferred choice for a lot, the performance difference is very real

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I do love Linux, and after owning a SteamDeck and messing with it I'm on the road but I can easily see how people have issues with it.
My experience with everything borders on the cosmically unlucky and Linux is no exception.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's a completely different set of problems with both systems. Problems with Linux are usually related to missing drivers, or the whole mess with having 40 kinds of software stores (and it's 2023 and you still can't update stuff like discord without running a command on the terminal).

Problems with windows are usually things like "if I join a call my phones stop playing stereo music", or "there's 50 different programs launching on system startup and it takes 5 minutes to even display my wallpaper".

Folks get used to one of them eventually but when switching to the other all they think of is "I didn't have to deal with this sort of thing there"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Laypeople can and do have problems on Linux, sometimes due to defects or deficiencies, other times of their own making. For people beyond layfolk however, Linux is infinitely easier to troubleshoot and manage. I just came off such a troubleshooting spree I finished on my new corp Ubuntu workstation that would randomly go black screen and wouldn't recover without a reset. Without information on the web, I was able to track down the culprit and come up with a workaround. If that happened to me on Windows...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Is that a thing still? The last 3 companies I’ve worked for didn’t even remove the Xbox apps from windows. The most I’ve seen is disabling the windows store so installing Microsoft terminal and WSL becomes more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why, were you too stupid to configure dual boot? I don't imagine you're having a better time with Linux. This is not hard stuff.