Look, if a guy at the Verge can use Linux then that means almost anyone can.
Remember when they had their guide ofnhow to build a PC? It was wrong on so many things, but apparently they edited the guide. I have not read the current version so it could perhaps be good now or at least now misleading.
“He not fighting static, he fighting cancer!” -lyle
Random blokes at The Verge do not have the same use cases as anyone else. “Works for me” is never the same thing as “works for you”. Linux doesn’t even have a good vector graphics editor. (No, Inkscape is not good.)
Indeed! This is why I always call to explore live images or a VM before making the jump. It won’t be indicative of the system’s performance (a regular install should run smooth as butter), but it will indicate what you might be lacking, what problems you may face, etc.
Affinity can be installed on Linux via WINE just fine. There’s even a repo for it. Fusion360, of all things, also works the same way. WINE is not just for gaming
Can you link what you are talking about for Fusion360 by chance? I’ve tried repeatedly and it always seems to be broken at the part where it wants to open a web browser so you can log in… I ended up running Fusion in WinBoat, but it just isn’t as performant so I would love a Wine solution instead.
@Crozekiel @bitfucker Maybe we should all just switch to FreeCAD (easier said than done).
I’ve tried it a few times, and like… it’s frustrating because I can get so close, but the missing bit feels like an impenetrable wall. Like, I can occasionally make something, but it isn’t anywhere near as nice of a model/part and it takes significantly longer to do. I tend to try it out again once every several months to see if new stuff makes it easier for me to use, but so far it hasn’t been a great solution for me.
Hey, I heard they addressed the topological naming problem in the 1.0 release. I’m gonna follow Digikey’s FreeCAD tutorial and see if it’s as good as they say.
Ahh, you have the new install. Yes that is a known issue. I was installing it before they did the switcheroo with their custom distribution QT6 webview (the root cause of the issue). If you have the old install it still works just fine
Or just use an OS that natively supports Affinity…
Or just use an OS that natively supports Affinity…
No, Inkscape is not good.
What are some areas that you think Inkscape can improve? (Other than “be more like what I’m used to”.)
I use Inkscape all the time, and have created amazing things with it.
I don’t rule out the possibility that a lot of it is simply down to what I’m used to. I’ve used the Affinity suite from the start, and the way Inkscape works (much like GIMP) isn’t quite so… how should I put it? “Idiot-proof”. I’m a hobbyist; I don’t do this professionally. A slightly more “normal” interface would be a strong argument for people like me to give Inkscape another chance.
Otherwise, I perceived the application as feeling unfinished; it crashed on me occasionally and/or felt sluggish. I get it: there’s little money behind Inkscape for quality assurance, and you can’t expect FLOSS to have people working full-time on optimising the user experience. But then why use Inkscape at all? Because it’s “the best there is on Linux”? That brings us back to my original point: why switch to Linux in the first place?
There are reasons why Wine exists. One of those reasons is that free software has a quality problem. Am I completely off the mark here?
it crashed on me occasionally and/or felt sluggish.
I am surprised to hear this. I have used Inkscape for years, and I do not remember it ever crashing on me or it feeling anything but snappy. But I am using it on a very capable machine. I am not saying what you say is untypical (or untrue), just that our experiences with it are very different, and that could explain our different views on it. Do you remember how much free RAM Inkscape had to work with when you used it? Maybe that could have been a limiting factor for Inkscape that caused the sluggishness and the crashes.
Sometimes developers simply do not know about bugs or limitations that only happen with specific hardware, that they just do not own. That is why they really value people telling them about these things.
But then why use Inkscape at all?
The value of Open Source is more than just “it is free” and “you can look at the code”. It is the only software that you truly own. It is the only software that humanity truly owns, forever. It is the software that emerged from humanity, yours to use however you like. Nobody (not even the developers themselves) can ever take it away from us, not even a little bit.
Developers contributing to FLOSS often just want to help make really good software. That is their end goal. Not profit, not user numbers. Just good software. Is it going to be the best software there is, right from the start? Of course not. But when you keep working on something with the sole goal of making it good, it will become better than anything that is made for profit.
I believe that in the long run FLOSS becomes un-compete-able. Free and Open Source Software can have years or decades of hard work put into it. Trying to compete with that is an uphill battle right from the start, even within the Open Source world. Proprietary software trying to compete with established Open Source Software? Forget it. Nobody would switch to a proprietary for-profit SSH, even if it were faster. What if something breaks? How do you maintain it? If something breaks 10 years from now? 500 years from now? With Open Source Software, people can look at the code, and fix it. Unlike with proprietary software, where you rely on the original developer maintaining the software.
why switch to Linux in the first place
For me it is reliability.
Something that can be maintained and patched by anybody is much more reliable than something that can only be maintained by a few. Open Source can always be fixed. Does Open Source Software break? Of course it does. Every bigger piece of software has bugs, or develops bugs with changing hardware. But with Open Source Software anybody can fix the bug. Being able to rely on this, is very valuable when you need something to work, and can not afford it to break forever. This is why Hollywood loves Open Source Software.
free software has a quality problem.
I am reading this as “a quality control” problem.
I do not think FLOSS has a quality control problem. The most reliable software in the world is FLOSS. It has a lack of variety in contributors problem (including bug reporting for when something does not work on specific hardware!). Most contributors to FLOSS are software developers, not UX/UI designers. I do not want to say that software developers can not make good UX/UI designs, but the limited time that FLOSS contributors dedicate to this results in users experiencing a lack of polish in many smaller projects.
Go make one then?
Sure thing, because that’s exactly a one-person job.
Seriously, please try to not be that person on the internet.
I’ll be whatever person I like thanks.
And most open source software starts as a one person job. And as you approach something that other people see the value in, you’ll likely attract people who will help.
For the most extreme example, see the Linux Kernel itself.
Someone has to start the ball rolling, and if it’s something you want, it may as well be you.
There’s ridiculously little difference between Windows, OS X and GNOME nowadays. Once you realise that most of your Steam library works and you’ve hated Office for at least ten years anyway, that leaves browsers, which are exactly the same. Most users don’t want to fiddle with settings, installers and drivers, they’ll just accept what the machine comes out of the box with.
There is more to it though. The one feature i miss from windows is casting.
I dont mean chromecast, i got that working. I mean wireless casting to a tv or projector. The windows + k feature.
Ive yet to get that working in linux…
Besides that, im a happy linux personEveryone’s got something they’d miss. For me it’s Affinity (though that’s on the way, it sounds like) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s insane, but MSFS is the 800-pound gorilla; it’s not just visuals, but almost all the new stuff (like Beyond ATC) is targeting MSFS.
Affinity works using WINE. I think there also exists a repo where they packaged it into .appimage
In theory yes. Not in practice though; unstable and slow.
I imagine if you play MSFS you have a beefy PC to handle Affinity through WINE
Sure, but that doesn’t fix the many crashes and hangs. Most of the GPU effects in the adjustment layers grinds everything to a halt. It’s not really all that usable in practice, IMHO.
When my college classes went online because of the pandemic, I’d sit in my parents basement and cast my homework to their TV. Those were the days.
Life is more than browsers you know…
Most software can effectively run in a browser at this point, and the bit that can’t can be self hosted on a server and then cast to your browser.
Really not how most of the software works. I install ton of apps locally like games, Libre office, ect. Running all in browser is a pipe dream. Also extremely memory and CPU inefficient
It really is. WebASM is miles beyond what you’re probably thinking of in terms of browser based performance, and most companies these days do not have local applications installed for their office workers. Office 365 is by far the most popular version of office, and it’s entirely browser based. Most in-house corporate IT work from the last decade is electron wrappers of internal company websites acting as simple interfaces for actual heavy lifting.
While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days. I’d say blender and other 3d rendering would be inefficient just because WebASM has weird interactions with anything other than OpenGL and Vulkan, But even Unreal 5 can export to WebASM and do it fairly well (as well as OpenGL can perform, that poor outdated thing).
Heck just go to itch.io or any website that has ported over games to WebGL/WebASM. You can run Half-life directly on your browser these days. Half Life of all games. That’s more demanding than anything not 3d that you’d run in an office.
I know what web assembly is. It’s not a golden one-for-all solution you try to paint it to be. There’s a reason why you won’t see any modern AAA games in Wasm except ancient stuff like half life or Quake 3. It’s just not fast enough and not memory efficient enough.
While there’s definitely some apps that are a bit too heavy for WebASM (or just javascript/.net for the above examples) this list is vanishingly short these days.
Jesus no. It’s obvious you don’t play games. Unreal engine can export to Wasm but noone does this. Everyone develops games natively with DirectX 12 api in mind (and very rarely Vulkan like in case of Doom or Red dead redemption 2) You’re just blatantly wrong with this.
What’s web assembly is good for is what’s in the God damn name: Web apps. You can squeeze in office into it, because office is ultra lightweight use case, that back in the day ran on 486dx4 with 16Megs of ram. It now runs on 3ghz CPU and requires hundreds of megs of ram, this is insanely wasteful. We can afford these resources, but it’s still wasteful as hell.
Office 365 also refers to the desktop apps as well as the web versions, has done for many years now. Though I suppose it’s all copilot 365 now.
Source: Am office worker where we use office 365, and we all use the native system software, with the browser versions as for quick editing when elsewhere.
Counter-example: secure encryption. You can’t do that in a browser.
You’re all over this thread posting bad takes. Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser. There’s absolutely nothing stopping you from using any encryption algorithms within a browser whatsoever. I don’t even understand what you could possibly mean. There are so many ways to achieve it.
There are numerous ways to place decryption backdoors into a website’s JavaScript. How would you make sure that there is no MITM when trying to safely encrypt (e.g.) an e-mail in your browser?
Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.
Talking about “bad takes”, aren’t we? There is no way to ensure that your end-to-end encryption is not decrypted on the fly when done by a website (= a potential attacker).
Who said anything about a website? You said browser. You can run fully-local resources in a browser, such as browser extensions, locally hosted tools, even just running in a .html file on your local disk somewhere. Javascript also isn’t the only option available to solve this problem.
Not sure if you’re just trolling at this point.
You said:
Of course you can do secure encryption in a browser.
No, you can’t. I explained why.
Counter-point: Cubeless and platforms like it are close enough to a browser and handle that. Also by the very loose definition of secure encryption, https.
That’s a very loose definition indeed.
“Close enough to a browser” isn’t a browser. GnuPG in a browser just won’t work and most other encryption facilities aren’t quite as secure (and transparent).
that leaves browsers,
That leaves audio production (with a bunch of Windows-only plugins), video production, photo editing, CAD…
Sure, you can re-learn your entire stack and get by, but that’s a far shot from “ridiculously little difference”. Dropping familiar complex piece of software like Ableton is a hard sell for folks (and it’s OK).
I think once you’re into concepts like a “stack”, you’re working with very niche specific software that most users will never touch. And absolutely, use what fulfills your needs. The vast majority of people I know that ever use a computer, just use it as google chrome. Web browsers work great in Linux. Depending on your needs, a lot of creative software works great on Linux too.
Your situation is legit, and I honestly wish these things were better because I wish all things were better, but I do feel like these are specialized programs that “most people” never touch in their entire lives.
But yes, for people who have a technical or creative career based on a proprietary tech stack, the story is more complicated.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine. If you have a desktop PC from the last decade and it cost more than $1k, you can also run a VM (or Winboat) specifically for your software with nearly 1:1 performance to bare metal (if you get the passthrough right.)
Which isn’t a permanent solution, mind you, but if it’s just one piece of software holding you back and you don’t care to play with alternatives, then the solution isn’t to keep Windows despite its terrible performance in 99% of things, it’s to switch to windows and emulate or compatibility layer the 1% of software you might use that requires windows.
Most likely your software will work via bottles or wine
No, for the examples above it will not. Quite a lot of professional software will not run under wine (and a lot of hobbyists use professional software) - games work particularly well because they mostly do their own thing and depend less on Windows-specific APIs. And if you use a VM via Winboat then you’re just using Windows in the background, which is a workaround, but kinda defeats OP’s argument that there’s “no difference”.
To be clear: I’m daily driving Linux and I’ve not booted into Windows for more than a year. But it’s just wrong to say that they are on par with each other for a lot of usecases.
If you need an emulator (yeah, “Wine Is Not an Emulator” yadda yadda, it still makes your software think you run a different OS) to run much of your most important software, you chose the wrong operating system.
If it works completely fine with Wine - in many cases, better than under Windows - why do you care if there’s a translation layer? Seems like a weird hill to die on. Do you also feel like running 32-bit applications on a 64-bit architecture means you chose the wrong architecture?
If you use a Windows “translation layer” for your software anyway, why would you choose Linux as the host platform in the first place?
There are so many reasons. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:
- Windows isn’t free, Linux is.
- Windows isn’t an open platform, Linux is.
- Linux doesn’t track your activity. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t come bundled with a bunch of shovelware crap. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t push cloud products onto you. Windows does.
- Linux doesn’t use your hardware to force-feed ads to you. Windows does.
- Linux is infinitely more customizable than Windows.
- Linux lets you choose when, how, and if you download/install updates. Windows does not.
- Windows constantly pushes/forces AI slop products onto users. Linux does not.
All of that is true for most other operating systems, some of which are even more customizable than some of today’s Linux distributions. My question was “why Linux?”, not “why not Windows?”.
There are converters that do wonders for a lot of VST plugins but some critical ones (Kontakt for example) are unfortunately stubborn. If I made music that didn’t use sample libraries I’d uninstall Windows today. I have got it on a very minimal partition at least.
and various Linux distros have gotten so good at this now. You can install something like Bazzite, PikaOS, hell even CachyOS with their recent update of switching from Octopi to Shelly and you can be up and running within a matter of minutes without having to worry about drivers or fiddling around with settings. PikaOS for example is probably one of the smoothest linux installs I’ve ever tried. easily within 15minutes I can have steam open and downloading games. within 30 I can be playing. and that’s without downloading drivers or playing around with settings.
I feel the same. Its been 20 years though.
There’s so much good advice here.
On the other hand, sometimes problems solve themselves if you wait. I wanted to find a way to add text extraction to the screenshot utility in KDE Plasma — a feature I missed from other operating systems. The solution was to wait a week until Cachy updated to Plasma 6.6, which added that feature.
Preach.
“Wait a week until its fixed” has saved me from screwing up my own CachyOS install, even if I identify the issue well enough.
But if my browser in Linux can’t find my webcam mic because I installed EasyEffects without bothering to read the docs, brother, that’s on me.
YES.
Distros like this are pretty great out-of-the-box. If you start installing stuff from the AUR and things break, that is your fault, as now you are the system maintainer.
The only thing I hate about Linux is not the fault of Linux. It’s Microsoft and Akami’s fault.
Blocking of random sites by Edgesuite when I’m using Linux.
I ran into this recently lol. You can avoid it by changing your user agent. You can do this is dev tools but there’s probably an extension that makes it easy
I tried that. I tried setting it to Chrome and Edge on Windows but it didn’t help. I cleared the cache and restarted too.
I checked my IP and it wasn’t marked as a threat so I have no idea why it happens.
Thanks for trying to help! I appreciate you!
Media coverage of Linux today is wildly different than the 2010s. It used to be vitriol to entertain the idea of using Linux. It was hoping that complaining about Windows enshittification and Apple pricing while still buying them would produce any results. More and more people will learn that they don’t need the software they grew up with for their hobbies or indie projects. Don’t need o365 to write your novel
I’ll never go back to windows. The only problem I had with Linux was mint didn’t like two monitors on hdmi and one on the other kind of cord. Once I figured that out, games ran no problem. I can live with only two monitors.
I need to look to see if nobara has something similar. I mostly use 2 displayports for my monitors, but occasionally also want to use an hdmi for my tv, at which point it wigs the fuck out
the verge
I hope as hell they didn’t build that rig themsrlves
Imagine you’re having a conversation with a stranger. He seems cool, you guys share some interests, even some controversial opinions. You two are on track to becoming friends! …But then right before the convo ends, he starts talking about how the earth is flat, and flouride in the water supply is a CIA conspiracy to make frogs gay.
That is the same visceral reaction I get when I read a sentence like this:
When I last wrote about my experience with CachyOS, I bemoaned the absence of the Arc browser.
I don’t get it. What even is Arc browser, is that the conspiracy equivalent?
A no longer developed chromium browser that inspired the design of Zen browser.
Arc was also Mac exclusive at first so I never tried it. Didn’t even realize it had released for windows.
Took me a week to say “welp, never coming back”
same, and i have had this annoying problem with network drivers that my internet cuts off randomly and i have to restart. Linux with problems is superior to well functioning windows for peace of mind alone.
I have also been daily driving Debian for about 4 months now.
Admittedly I do still need to hop into Windows - I haven’t been able to get Space Engineers or AFOP among others to run stable or with proper performance through the built in steam proton layer. But when I’m browsing, working on CAD, writing documents, playing Minecraft, or basically anything else I just stay in Linux and it’s fine.
Check out the proton rating site for space engineers. I forgot the specific but there’s a command line and proton version that works best for it. Another valid option is to have dual compositor (I use plasma and gamescope) since you can easily choose that on the login screen.
If I can get Cachy to work with the fourth monitor on my setup at the office I’d be rid of windows entirely
Do you have a quadro or something? a bunch of gaming GPUs only support 3, worth checking it might not be a driver thing
I’m kinda sure it’s the docking station at this point but I ran out of free time at work to get to the bottom of it.
Edit: thanks for the advice though, gives me another avenue to research
I’m running with quad monitors, no problem. Running 6 (4 on the GPU, 2 on the IGP) was fine except for gaming.
The only thing windows has for it is compatibility with certain software. Fortunately this gets better and better all the time, being able to run windows software under Linux has been great. Steam with it’s proton has done wonders for gaming under Linux.
After three months on Linux, I don’t miss Windows at all
Me. 2004.
