Yep and it seems to line up with the rise of the Steam Deck and all the discussion around how viable gaming on Linux is these days. I think there were/are a LOT of people that only stick with Windows due to gaming. Hopefully as gaming support continues to improve on Linux more of those people will make the switch.

Click the link. :)

It's some serious stonks. Not only the trend is very strong, it's also breaking resistance every few years.

Anyway, those trend-breaks have a curious proximity with Microsoft pushing new Windows versions.

On desktop it is 7%. On desktop in Europe it is 10%. On desktop in Finland it is 15%.

For Linux, it seems like Asia is pumping the numbers with 5.8%. Linux use in Finland is 3.25%. Norway is 12.3%

This blows my mind. I still daily drive Firefox on all 3 of my computers and my phone. I don't get the hate, and I feel it's the right thing to support in this monopoly market where the biggest browser is owned by an ad company.

The 3% is overall (including mobile). On the dekstop Firefox is at ~9%: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide

Ad 1: Try Krita instead of Gimp. I find its behaviour saner.

2. Had your same exact issue, and after jumping through hand-made solutions and countless clients i finally found a client that works perfectly out of the box for screen sharing with audio, has no other issues and comes with the big plus of having customization plugins Vesktop (i think its on flathub too so if your distro ships that probably get it from there).
3. Had the same issue here too and yes, while my "main" game got recently proton verified and i could finally get totally rid of windows, there are some few (BattleEye mostly) games with no anticheat support.

1. If you don't mind using an older version of Photoshop (CC 2021), you could try this installer: https://github.com/LinSoftWin/Photoshop-CC2022-Linux

2. I would recommend using Vesktop instead of the official client - it's faster, has better privacy, and best of all, screensharing including audio works like a charm.

4. You could run your games thru gamescope - and as a bonus, you can use features like FSR for better quality or performance.

I switched to VALinux in 1999 when I got tired of bringing my HP workstation home every day. Prior to that I has using various unix workstations running X10/11.

I had to use Apple MacOS for a year. It was horrible, I hated every second of it.

Apple isn't better. You are just used to it, and anything else feels awkward. I had the opposite experience.

No flaming here, but your first mistake was trying Ububtu - it's not the best in terms of hardware compatibility, and they (Canonical) often make controversial software/development decisions, which makes it one of the most hated distributions in the Linux community.

Your second mistake was trying it on a Mac. Now don't get me wrong, many people do run Linux on a Mac, but it's not quite plug-and-play (compared to PC), and not everything may work as intended. Since you're new to Linux, I wouldn't recommend your first experience of it to be on a Mac. And to be clear, this isn't Linux's fault - since Apple (or whichever chipset maker) doesn't provide Linux with any official drivers/code, the devs have to figure stuff out themselves by reverse-engineering stuff, and as expected not everything may work.

If you've only got Macs around and you don't have the patience to troubleshoot Linux issues / read manuals etc, then the easiest way to try it out is in a virtual machine like Parallels or VirtualBox. The performance might not be the best, but at least everything should work out-of-the-box. As for the distro, since you're a Mac user, you'd probably feel more at home with elementary OS. Other options you could try include Pop!_OS, and Zorin (the Pro edition even has a macOS-like layout).

Once you've tried Linux in a VM and decide you'd like to use it full-time, the best way to experience it is on native Linux-first hardware - basically PCs which come with Linux out-of-the-box, such as those made by System76, Slimbook, Star Labs, Tuxedo etc.

In case nobody has mentioned Asahi Linux yet, I'll bring it up. I haven't used it, but I have a friend who does.

Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform.

Asahi Linux is developed by a thriving community of free and open source software developers.

I believe they have a Fedora-based distro that should be solid for daily use, but again I haven't used this myself.

After years of using linux distros and settling on an arch based distro for my daily use, I switched jobs and they allowed me to have "linux" as my laptop OS.

They put Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the laptop. Admittedly I hadn't used it for a few years, maybe 18.04 outside of server use cases maybe.

The experience is horrible. It throws errors about Ubuntu, about Visual Studio Code or any program every hour, without those programs having any trouble whatsoever to function.

It reminds me so much of Windows, and even though I prefer it over that system, I can't shake the feeling I'm serving the OS, rather than the other way around, just like in Windows.

And don't even get me started on Snaps over DEB packages. Had never tried them before and I can say with confidence the hatred is deserved. Code didn't even start up in the snap version and Firefox was so slow and laggy I was thinking the laptop was broken somehow.

Why not join now? It's really easy to get Linux with Steam set up, and you can use Big Picture mode to get the same SteamOS experience.

So just pick a popular distro, install drivers (if NVIDIA; kernel includes AMD drivers), install Steam, and then play!