Yes, if you don't have a computer that literally came out this year, don't have 2 separate graphics cards and don't need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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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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And sometimes the Windows only software is more "Windows only" and works with Wine
Windows 3D Builder though is firmly in the Windows Only category though. Which is a bummer because in my experience it's the best at repairing 3D models for 3D printing that have errors like holes, redundant geometry, inverted faces, etc.
However, some older programs may actually behave better in Wine than say on Windows 11.
Oh, it also supports ancient 16 bit programs which Windows doesn't anymore.
I didn't know about the 16-bit support, which is really cool to say the least
I see myself as still somewhat of a noob to Linux
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The dual GPU problem has actually for the most part also been solved; Optimus rarely poses a problem these days
Yup. Fedora on my laptop defaults the internal GPU and you can run any program with the dedicated card with a right click. Pretty nice compared to last year where I had to throw my laptop across the room 😂
You probably won't be able to run an LTS kernel on a brand new PC that just hit the market. But using the most recent kernel for arch or a derivative like endevorOS should work after like a week maximum.
I did have an issue like this on Ubuntu and its what made me actually start distro hopping since it worked fine on fedora and Arch using the latest kernels.
Huge shout out to the people working faster than some do at their jobs and for 100% less pay.
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There's plenty of laptops with 2 separate graphics cards (mine included) and I'd say it's the ideal experience if you need an NVIDIA card. Everything related to your system is done in the integrated Intel/AMD GPU (which works perfectly) and games and GPU intensive work (like CUDA) gets done in the NVIDIA one.
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In my experience the VAST majority of people that say things are hard on Linux have never actually tried it ...
Same with people that complain cats are not LoYAl lIkE DOgS... They have never had cats
Cats are just as trainable as dogs, just takes longer and different incentives for them.
Exactly right!.... It's like saying dogs are dumb because they don't learn words like a parrot would
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I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.
The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn't work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.
Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn't have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn't have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That's when I was truly impressed by Linux.
We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.
You've given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won't hibernate & restore.
HA! True. Remember when Google was always right and always exactly what you were looking for?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I 'member
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I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.
TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!
No surprise it feels a lot snappier. You only run the shit you have purposefully installed, and not endless layers of telemetry, candy crush silent installs, game bars that somehow make the performance worse, and mandatory online service accounts
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Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.
Yes it literally has come a long way, all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
I know that's not quite what you meant, it was just a thought I came to think of reading the headline.
But apart from that, it's also become quite good, but IMO it has been for more than a decade now.
It kind of was what I meant. My first Linux experience was in 93 - I wanted to run X on my 486 so I could use maple and other Unix programs from the mainframe in college. Thank god for my comp sci roommate-I don’t think I could have figured it out on my own back then.
Flash forward through the decades and here I am running all the games I want through steam and bottles. Win10 updates are crapping on themselves requiring a reload - I try linux on it expecting it to mostly work, but having a few annoying issues that will be a bear to solve. Nope, it just worked.
It’s impressive to me. A bunch of nerds on the internet mostly volunteered their way into a better OS than the big boys have made.
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1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
Also the various BSD-based OSs. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc. are still around, and MacOS is based on BSD too. And since BSD (1978) is a Unix, you can trace these all the way back to 1969.
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When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they're supposed to do?
HP laptops--at least business-grade ones--are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.
They do! I checked all of them. I couldn’t believe it!
Hibernate works
Yah, I'm not buying that.
I left I alone, it went off. I came back and wiggled the mouse, nothing happened. I pressed the enter key snd it came back to life -same behavior as my desktop.
Did it again, this time I tried closing the lid and opening it - it sprung to life when the lid opened.
You’re right - not the most thorough tests, but that’s what I did/saw.
Sounds like sleep. Hibernate is when it turns completely off, such that you can leave it unplugged for a weekend and still have battery when it pops you back into your session. It takes longer to save and restore the session than sleep does.
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EndeavourOS has been a wonderful experience for me, can't recommend it enough.
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This has been my experience since 2009 :) I've been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I've only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That's it.)
The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that's almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.
I'm happy you're having a good time :)
Secure boot is still problematic, but it has also become much easier thanks to sbctl; in the best case you only have to delete the keys in the bios and run 3 or 4 generic commands.
And there are distros where it works out of the box with no extra steps needed: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE IIRC
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Installing Linux is really easy these days.
Funny enough, I also flashed my (probably much older) HP Spectre X360 to endevourOS last week, works good, feels more responsive then PopOS was on it.
I then tried Bazzite on my desktop and the experience went much worse, seemingly because of Nvidia driver support still being pretty bad on linux. Oh well.
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Did you get your audio volume fixed? My ThinkPad is so quiet on Linux (Silverblue) that it's hard to use it for anything with media.
I recall that at least on KDE, in the audio settings you can enable the ability to go WAY past 100% volume.
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Not with the volume buttons on the keyboard. Alsamixer helped a little - it was set to ~70% (whatever the line between white and red is). But it’s still quiet. But you can drive it way beyond 100% through software. The problem is pushing the volume button stops at 100%.
The lazy way is to open pulseaudio, grab the slider bar and put it to say, 150%. You can also do it with a terminal command. Somewhere close to the top of a Google search somebody mentioned they bound their volume keys to that terminal command/script where each press resulted in a 5% increase or decrease in volume - allowing the button presses to go beyond 100%. I may or may not do this.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t work - merely one of the annoyances I was expecting. Except I expected many of these and this is the only one I encountered.
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