Me: I’ma install mint and stop using Windows. Bullshit OS locked me out one too many times
Steam voice chat cracking sound: u sure 'bout that?
Gamepass: we got literally every game you were looking forward to this year except like… one. Sure, you could wait 10 minutes in line to play them on X-cloud, but you won’t hit decent FPS.
Civ 5 starting in 4:3 and crashing as I join a game: you should boot into windows my friend. This ain’t it.
(edit: as a preamble - I recommend against using Mint as a new user, since it leverages outdated technologies. Fedora uses newer tech that has a lot of rough edges from the past already smoothed out. But the following comment still applies.)
I’m a heavy Linux user who has dropped Windows but I agree. It’s fundamentally based on luck: a combination between your hardware configuration, the games you play and the software you use. Linux gaming is gaining popularity because for a lot of people it mostly just works, minus a couple papercuts that are tolerable, especially when you factor them against all the jank you left behind from Windows.
But if you get unlucky enough… as another person said, it’s death by a thousand papercuts. Or, like The Linux Experiment put it, a permanent state of 99% there. Things working, almost fine, but never quite perfect, and enough things being rough around the edges that it does put you off. I am going to be completely honest: the fact that Microsoft has been seemingly self-sabotaging the user experience they offer and murdering the UX with their bare hands with Windows 11 is helping bridge the gap a lot.
Personally I have gotten quite lucky. I don’t use any NVidia hardware - and this alone already wipes away 60-70% of the common issues that people complain about. There is a lot of weirdness that doesn’t even look like it depends on the GPU (like buggy standby behaviour) that depends on the GPU and that is not reproducible - NVidia setups are a toss up that could go anywhere from “just fine” to “a total disaster”. Not only that, but Linux support means that if any of the dozens of components on your computer doesn’t quite support Linux, there is so much seemingly unrelated stuff that breaks that you wouldn’t believe. I had a friend who was incredibly unlucky on Linux and had mysterious sudden system crashes and some very exotic errors that I had given up debugging. We finally got down to, literally, trying to unplug device after device for an extended window of time out of desperation - and we found out the culprit was a small USB audio card that he used for headphones. A small USB audio card that was misbehaving and had a poor quality Linux driver caused a lot of issues that never would I have traced back to an audio card. I have also used a laptop that had a lot of mysterious issues like erratic sleep/wake behaviour and system hangs / freezes that were caused by the Wi-Fi card. Would you ever think that your Wi-Fi card is causing your computer to randomly crash seemingly out of nowhere? Exactly. This is why I think the “luck” factor is huge for your success on Linux. Sadly, hardware manufacturers mostly target Windows. Linux works well with simple setups with hand-picked components from a handful of brands that are known to work as intended. But the more complicated your gaming setup is, the worse it gets. Hell, multi monitor setups with different resolutions and refresh rates can already be a challenge, whereas Windows has a good handling of them now. If you mix GPUs and have a GeForce and a Radeon in your system, just forget about it. You will get a lot of erratic behaviour unless you exclusively run AMD.
The Steam Deck is an example of how well a properly supported Linux system could work. It’s custom hardware with parts picked with Linux support as the utmost priority. The Steam Deck experience is, in fact, much smoother than the average Linux desktop experience, with a hell of a lot less rough edges that show up.
I still encourage you to run Linux, but also understand that it’s still growing, and this means that hardware and commercial software vendors are yet to support it properly still. It’s going to be a d20 throw between “perfect”, “horribly broken” and “mostly working well but with some rough patches you can work around”.
Oh yeah I’m still trying, not giving up on this. I really want to make this work. I can’t stand the way Windows locked me out from my PC because I upgraded my CPU the day I was gonna play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a friend for the first time.
Gamepass being better than it has any right to be is absolutely making me keep a Windows partition until they pull some BS move that sours me. I will try some other distro another person told me to give a shot for my general usage. I hope that it will help me get the AMD FSR stuff running because I feel like I’m not getting everything out of my hardware if I can’t use the upscaling.
Your description of 99% describes perfectly the last time I tried to start using Linux. Since then, I had to learn to navigate GitHub for work so a lot of things were easier. My friends look at me like I’m an alien when I try to explain them what I had to do to make the Xbox wireless controller work. When they saw me run a command in the terminal to initiate the pairing, they were…unimpressed.
Death by 1000 papercuts, there’s always a thing or two that won’t work perfectly. Sorry to hear that man. It’s really nice for those of us that don’t have any issues like that. Hopefully when/if you try again in the future things go more smoothly.
Yet all the issues on Windows are not painful to work with? It seems like Linux issues are becoming largely simple as using a more up to date distribution like fedora. Could try to replicate the steam os configuration to get better gaming performance and stability. The biggest thing about Linux is that you are in control. There are too many people who don’t want to have any control and act like pets to these corporations.
Not what I said at all. But when you are switching from a platform whose issues are familiar and already factored into your workflow to a new one, the new platform has to justify itself despite those new issues. I’m an avid Linux user and could not imagine going back to Windows for work, but we can’t expect people to deal with new issues when they are already exhausted by old ones. The experience has to be better in basically every way to convince people who aren’t actively interested to switch. I think with the dust settling in audio and video stuff and the new crop of sleek DEs we are getting close to that, but for many people Windows is a better experience despite all those problems, because everything else is still that much simpler. Control does not necessitate complexity, and Linux is still more complex.
The “gaming” issues in Windows are almost non-existent. I can easily plug 4 wireless controllers, set them up in 5 minutes max without command line to play Tape2Tape. I can buy and download my games on another platform than Steam. I can play Valorant. I don’t, but I can…
To me, Linux seems great, until I want to play games. Looking up what to use for gaming, pop! os, manjaro and mint are all that appeared in search results. I didn’t want to get in the deep end with Manjaro and I don’t really like the pop! os vibe, so I got Mint.
So for anything other than gaming, I agree. Linux is better. It’s more performant, it’s more convenient in most cases (looking at you, keyboard layouts that can’t be removed in Windows for no reason).
For playing games however, without both Gamepass, or being able to just click Play and start the game, instead of installing GE Proton, then go to protondb every time you start playing a game to check which version of Proton you need to run, it will never truly compete with Windows.
It’s those damn computer makers! Damn them all to hell. They won’t pre-install, so clearly that’s what is keeping the far superior OS with single-digit marketshare. Clearly, that must be it!1!!
Because it is packaging regression. 497 megs for GIMP vs 49.7 is very bad. For graphical libraries this is very bad. Why many games don’t support wayland? Because libSDL shipped with it does not support wayland.
It’s a tradeoff. You have to include more in the image but being able to target way more linux users is an obvious win. I would call the horrible state of linux desktop fragmentation “very bad” as well.
Flatpaks have finally made most distros interchangeable for me, they’re a wonderful tool. Not every single thing should be installed with them, but the current compromise of shipping core system components (including DEs in here) as native packages and user apps as flatpaks has drastically reduced the amount of troubleshooting I’ve had to do. When the vast majority of your tiny packages have no overhead, you can eat a few gigs for a nicer user experience. Even on my 120GB laptop that hasn’t been a practical issue for me.
I disagree with those critics that moving to flatpak is somehow worse than distro repos. At the same time, flatpak and docker are not the endgame. We know that a better way is possible (take a look at BSD jails for an example), it will just take linux another couple decades to get there as it always does.
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