Linux might won on quantity, but its quality is not comparable to BSDs.
A typical example is OpenBSD, to quote Michael W. Lucas:
Many open source operating system put a lot of effort into growing their user base, evangelizing, and bringing new people into the Unix fold. OpenBSD does not.
The communities surrounding other operating systems actively encourage new users and try to make newbies feel welcome. OpenBSD specifically and deliberately does not.
The developers know exactly who their target market is: themselves. If you can use their work, that’s great. If not, go away until you can.
They will not hold your hand. They will not develop new features to please users. OpenBSD exist to meet the needs of the developers, and while others are welcome to ride along, the needs of the passengers do not steer the project.
Run Debian testing or get packages from backports if you need newer packages. It’s still more stable than a rolling distro.
Debian stable is great if you value stability over everything else, for example on a server, or a desktop PC you want to “just work”. Major updates happen around once every 2 years, not 5 years.
But it looks like it can only do Pascal? Like. Sorry but you can’t just come out of the corner and say that coding is great on debian because my special IDE for only one single programming langauge exists.
What if I don’t want to learn a seventh programming language? What if I want to continue my C++ project in NeoVim? I dont want to rewrite something entirely. Same for PHP, Rust, C, Python.
Your IDE doesn’t even support the most important way of editing code. Vim mode.
I’ve only had bad experiences with debian. First off the installer is broken, second apt is a fucking mess compared to the best package manager, emerge, and third I’ve had bootloader issues(or lack of bootloader issues) when trying to install.
I’ve known some fantastic developers that used Nano as their primary editor. It supports syntax highlighting, linting, and bracket matching (jumping to the matching opening bracket when a closing one is selected, and vice versa), which is enough for some people.
Sure, it’s no micro, but it’s already installed practically everywhere.
Why we have to care much about software usage. This is the current issue of linux communities, which decrease user qualities.
Our enemy Microsoft and other “big tech” laugh people like these. They are using linux just like they use windows, even bring the bad, flawed windows culture to linux.
(Windows user that switch to linux and then say: we only need partition for / and /home are also enemies. Windows user that have switch to linux and use root for every task are enemies.)
Are those ex-Windows users slowing you down in any way?
And anyway, if you are talking about desktops, I’ve been using only / and /home for about 20 years since I noticed that /boot and /var didn’t bring me any value for a really long time. I’m currently wondering if I shouldn’t ditch /home.
Hate the irrational hate for Nvidia, Wayland or some desktop . I’m just out here trying to help others figure out their problem and some asshole comments"Nvidia doesn’t work on wayland", “just get an amd card”, “Wayland will never work” or “gsync doesn’t work in Linux with multiple monitors”.
All of them are equally absurd, the last one largely true on xorg for any GPU. Xorg doesn’t do mixed frame rates. Also it doesn’t help the person who is using an Nvidia card because there are solutions for most issues. Those issues are just not well understood because there was a time Nvidia drivers just didn’t work on wayland etc.
I hate gatekeepers and purist that just make anyone who might be new to the platform feel attacked or alienated. No one cares about your ideologies if they’re not asking and the idiots that parot it doesn’t prove anything other than your part of the loud minority. Just being kind to one another and being understanding of other peoples decisions can go a long way to growing a healthy supportive community.
I’m still a little frustrated about the behavior of people when I was trying to help someone setup hardware video acceleration in their browser. And another that wanted to use a different distro but found Nvidia worked best on arch for him.
As a developer, I really don’t like how Wayland has fractured the ecosystem. Competing immature protocols are still all over the place while the immobility of x11 has spoiled us for years. It’s getting better, but in the meantime I can still write an x11 app which will work mostly everywhere (thanks to xwayland), whereas a wayland app may not work everywhere (not on X11, and not on compositors which don’t implement the right combinations of protocols).
As a user I like no screen tearing, low latency, no soft locks from apps crashing, no softlock when a window is capturing the keyboard while the screen is locked, no weird artifacts from hardware accelerated effects, no app windows blanking out and lagging usually web apps (still happens in XWayland),etc.
I still miss being able to kill the screen locker from the terminal, made me feel like a hacker.
Yeah. I’m guilty of doing that to myself, I use Arch and neovim btw. Your perspective kinda changes when someone close to you that wants to switch to Linux she found windows frustrating or start getting into more than just animal crossing and the sims but finds camera controls disorienting or both. (Mother)
A lot of these new people who want a better experience for themselves but find certain technology issues daunting and they really get the raw end of the deal when they run into the loud minority. I also blame Linux Bros for promising the moon and with no issues.
It’s about as difficult and as exciting (for some) as switching to Macos for the first time, ask me how I know.
I also blame Linux Bros for promising the moon and with no issues
This is the one that I see the most when I’m in Linux communities. The guy that knows all of the ins and outs of the software and the hardware and has no problems, telling the person that only has ever used windows that it all just works no matter what. “ALL of your games will work right away AND run better than windows ever did.” but they fail to mention that all they play are games that had good linux support or something.
I don’t think you get how dxvk and wine work. All games that don’t require rootkits and have Linux support in their flavor of anti cheat will start, about 80% playable potentially with some tweaking or hardware specific fixes and about 20% pretty much work out of the box which is nice. AMD users are probably feeling smug about the aggregate 50% playable with 10% verified steam deck compatible.
It only runs better as a result of the optimizations done to translate Windows calls to Linux calls as well as translating Direct X into Vulkan or just uses vulkan. So if the game is well optimized Linux is a lot less likely to have an advantage and often suffers in performance a little bit until optimizations for that game are patched into Wine or DXVK about the same as video card drivers in windows.
On the other hand some poorly optimized games still run just as bad as they do on Windows if the game has issues not related to the graphics stack. Things like Elden Ring play to the strength of the optimizations and presented good results but I like to think of it as the exception and not the rule.
On average you see a delta of at most 10fps with windows beating Linux or Linux beating windows which even I find surprising sometimes. Maybe lower CPU overhead, the game just runs better being translated into Vulkan, or shader cashing in DXVK has gotten better than some in-house solutions; it’s hard to say.
Clearly, I don’t use Linux. I should have specified that it was an example of the type of comment I see rather than the absolute reality of it. My point was that there’s always a something that the loudest proponents of linux don’t mention simply because they took care of it so long ago that they forgot or its so routine to them they fail to mention it.
Yeah, I totally agree. Sorry about that. I got pretty excited about the topic because it’s amazing how all my games have worked so far and how it works is interesting. If I was using Windows or MacOS I’d be paying attention but I generally wouldn’t care about the progress.
It’s not absurd at all. People who buy Nvidia cards to use with Linux are actively supporting a shitty company that is causing them problems.
Not helping them and recommending they return or sell those cards is turning the tide against the company, regardless of how small.
This is not about “ideologies” or “being kind”, this is about improving the situation for everyone.
We should not work to pick up the pieces for a shitty company that doesn’t want to support us, we should encourage people to buy from companies that do, because that will improve things for everyone.
I am going to continue to tell people “just get an AMD card”, but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven’t committed to any yet.
Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.
I am planning to shop for new parts (well, strictly speaking I continue to plan for more than a year already, but life gets in the way). I can’t decide between the better compatibility of AMD and (supposedly) more features of Nvidia
I have just started trying to make sense of the situation searching the internet, but I would appreciate it if you can sum up what’s the pros and cons for my use case: I mostly use GPU for gaming, consider participation in ML crowd sourcing like AI horde, sometimes edit images or video. Plus, I mostly use Win now and want to use Linux in dual boot on the new machine
There's basically only 2 reasons to go for nvidia, rtx and cuda, figure out if you care enough about it to get an nvidia gpu.
As for postponing shit, just get it over with, there'll never be a perfect moment to buy your gpu.
No need to rush it. I moved recently with an ultra wide 32", 24" and 2 midsized desktop. I ended up with scuff on my ultra wide screen and a gouge on the interior plastics because I closed my hatch on my pc by accident.
Now I have a lil squiggly dead center of my screen but thankfully no tempered glass mess in the back.
Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn’t.
If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that’s when Nvidia should be edging out.
ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.
Yeah, researching the last point now, thanks for the heads up about the rest. Probably not going to be running super mega ultra, not potato is already a big step forward 😅
Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.
Many fresh users don’t seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.
It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don’t even own.
If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.
Technically nVidia chose that fight, not Linux users. nVidia is chocked full of proprietary implementations meant to bog down competition, for example all CUDA technology including translation layers are technically illegal to even look at without nVidia proprietary drivers. All alternatives are free open source, afaik.
Technically nVidia chose that fight, not Linux users.
nVidia is chocked full of proprietary implementations meant to bog down competition, for example all CUDA technology including translation layers are technically illegal to even look at without nVidia proprietary drivers.
This already described that Linux user started that fight, and they chose it.
But they cannot do anything than using the proprietary drivers, screaming about moral, propagating GNUism.
Well, I’m not a Linux user and I say that as well. Nvidia does not just not care about Linux, they actively try to act against their open source driver implementation and working with an Nvidia graphics card on Linux is much harder than using the alternatives.
Well, I’m not a Linux user and I say that as well. Nvidia does not just not care about Linux, they actively try to act against their open source driver implementation
No. It’ll take a while lot more than a few. Nvidias IP is worth a metric shit load. They will never open source the entire thing. At best you’ll get small modules of support.
We can drop nVidia and also talk about how evil they are at the same time. nVidia sells hardware, you would expect them to provide drivers for their hardware, instead they are actively preventing anybody else from making drivers for their hardware.
This is my point. Telling people to just drop Nvidia is delusional. It’s Linux desktop contributers problem to fix. Doesn’t matter if it’s fair or right, but Linux DE is never going to be mainstream with Wayland type issues and having to ditch the top hardware makers.
We can tell people that is going to buy a new computer to avoid nvidia :)
It’s Linux desktop contributers problem to fix.
We can’t write drivers for platforms that we don’t have documentation. linux desktop contributors dropping support for nvidia entirely is not a bad decision, though
AFAIK, AMD is not as good as nvidia on Windows. Also because they are less popular, they get less support from program/game developers, which is probably why people are picking nvidia.
I think even if AMD is strictly better than nvidia, it will still take years for nvidia to fall unfortunately. Look at the AMD v.s. intel problem, Intel has been strictly behind AMD for many years now, yet intel still dominates the laptop market, and doing okay in the desktop market.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean open-source supporters all need to cave to nvidia. Personally, I will avoid nvidia hardware when I can. But I think we have a long and hard battle ahead of us.
Lmao, Linux developers aren’t allowed to use the proprietary software and firmware unless they’re completely non-profit, and even then if it is too similar to nVidia’s intellectual property it can still be taken down. Only nVidia are authorized to create drivers which use CUDA.
The hardware manufacturers are intentionally making it difficult to use their own hardware, that’s got nothing to do with Linux, Mac, Windows, or any other Operating System because it was never their job to create drivers for every hardware in the first place.
It doesn’t matter if Jenson takes Joe Biden hostage and signs an executive order to make reverse engineering illegal. It’s still the Linux communities road block to adoption.
different distribution fights. Different display manager/desktop environment/window manager users fight.
Why can’t they just left (stupid, means user that want a friendly and lagging desktop environment; ignore this word) users to use things like gnome and kde and other desktop environment, they can still use their wm for maximum productivity and performance.
This is a very stupid fight.
Look at the BSDs, OpenBSD users can laugh on FreeBSD for having to support wine, running ia32 binaries on amd64, broken at securelevel 1, having so many extension for ls(1). FreeBSD can laugh on OpenBSD for using giant lock (doesn’t take advantage of multiprocessor machine), …
Congratulations, you just called someone stupid who actually understands what a zygohistomorphic prepromorphism is.
KDE is perfectly sufficient for my needs. Used it even back in the days where I used XMonad as wm because it takes care of the 100000 tiny things that aren’t worth optimising.
Well I’m still going to tell you that gnome is bad software both from the user experience and their unwillingness to implement basic features, and that you should be using helix.
I also don’t like systemd but nixos happens to use it and I usually don’t have to deal with it so meh.
Look at the BSDs, they care about technical issues.
I do, too. But only when I’m working on it. Otherwise, as long as stuff just works, I’m perfectly happy to keep the bonnet closed. That was quite different in my early days, I actually daily-drove linux from scratch in the early 00s, but at some point you either decide to become an OS developer, or you lose interest.
Well I’m still going to tell you that gnome is bad software both from the user experience and their unwillingness to implement basic features, and that you should be using helix.
I should?
I use what I want. (understand that you are advertising software here.)
I do, too. But only when I’m working on it. Otherwise, as long as stuff just works, I’m perfectly happy to keep the bonnet closed. That was quite different in my early days, I actually daily-drove linux from scratch in the early 00s, but at some point you either decide to become an OS developer, or you lose interest.
(See what technical issue I’ve written. See the pdf slides above.)
Side note there’s actually a project brining the glory of nix to the BSDs.
It’s very much a technical issue. Skimming your pdf it even talks about package building and delivery. Nixos is so good at that that I gladly put up with systemd is what I’m saying, depending on what you care about more it might even make you tolerate linux.
>Gets (in my opinion rightfully) mad that someone called their preferred software dumb and says that it works just good for them
>Literally does the same for different software in the next statement
Why are some people like this… No, Gnome, KDE or some other stuff is not obviously bad, otherwise there wouldn’t be tons of people that really do know the different options be using and enjoying it. Just let people use it. You can list advantages and disavantages and why you personally prefer something else, but don’t call it outright bad or insult the users…
OP called users of the software stupid, not the software. While some of what gnome is is defensible and I just don’t like it, like having very little in the way of configuration options, the other part, like being unwilling to implement server-side decorations, makes it plain bad software. There’s a reason you hear people reply “well just don’t use gnome” to claims of “wayland is broken”.
Software can, indeed, be objectively bad. “Oh tastes just differ” is an appeal to false civility: No, if your bridge doesn’t get people across the river I don’t care how pretty it looks it’s broken. It might be a beautiful art piece, but it definitely isn’t a bridge.
OP called users of the software stupid, not the software.
(in my opinion the software is stupid, and users of stupid software are stupid :) because desktop environment is inefficient compared to pure window manager, and keyboard-based wm)
Crap is still insulting them though, personally I think gnome is really good. I use hypr and love it but it’s also taken a gargantuan amount of effort to get it how I like it which not everyone wants, and before I switched gnome was doing perfectly fine
KDE and cinnamon I’m sure are similar boats, though I haven’t daily driven either of those yet
When you embrace Linux, you - sadly - also have to embrace the fiddling. Still, even in 2024. It’s gotten worlds better, but it still exists. But as it is a choice to swap to Linux - usually from Windows - you do not perceive this fiddling as a shared plight you can bond and laugh over, instead you see it as the “cost” of embracing Linux.
As a result, whatever setup you end up with has to be mentally justified to your own brain. A bit like a post-purchase rationalization. So you mentally consider your specific end result to be vastly superior to all other possible ones, after all, this is why you did it! You put in the work to create this, it must be superior.
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