Another month down according to Statcounter at least, Linux on the desktop is doing better than ever. Take it with your usual little pinch of salt like any survey sampling though.
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.
I don't even think much when running games anymore. Even DRM-free games I get from Gog I can just click on and run with Wine most of the time. It's so awesome.
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.
You have to understand, this late into the slow motion apocalypse the writers were starting to get eaten by hellhounds and so there is a lot of rushed writing/plot arcs that just doesn’t much sense when you look too closely because it isn’t like the lizard people were going to reduce the apocalypse guild writers quota just because some of them (most of them) had been eaten by hellhounds, the lizard people SENT the hellhounds so that would have just made the lizard people look incompetent.
I mean, it’s the same old enshittification thing and all you know the story.
I hope it's one of those phenomenas where it takes a long time to bridge one gap but an exponentially shorter time to double or triple that previous gain. Like it takes 32 years to crack 3%, 1 year to break 4% >> 15% in the next few years? A man can hope.
Got a new M.2 drive and installed Linux on it, still run windows on my old disk (no dual boot, only go to bios when I need windows).
Experience has been amazing so far, biggest issues for me are the following
Had to get used to Gimp instead of my very legally acquired version of Photoshop
Discord screen share does not have audio and is laggy as hell (an alternative discord-screenshare application exists but gives my voice a 1-2 second delay which upsets my gf when we're in voice, although it can stream entire desktop with audio which is amazing for watching shows together)
Some games with anti-cheat don't work, so if I want to play those I still have to jump on windows.
No HDR (but it looks to be coming to KDE and Cosmic soon)
Apart from this the experience has been amazing. I'm using Nobara and mostly gaming. As a dev terminal, scripts and ssh to my raspberry pi:s is just such a seamless and nice experience.
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).
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.
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.
Will probably get flamed to death for this, but... a few months ago I've decided to try Ubuntu on an older Intel MacBook Pro, just to try it out after many attempts in the past. (Mac user here)
Then I tried to use the trackpad. After 30 minutes of fiddling I gave up. Say what you want about Apple's UX choices, esthetics and business practices. But boy do they know how to produce a computer and UX combo that fits like a glove.
In comparison, the Ubuntu experience was like eating nails.
And before y'all go off; I would like to switch. I'm getting tired of Apple's business practices.
Same. I hate the unintuitive keyboard shortcuts, the nonsensical drag and drop everything UI, and their ridiculously over complicated development system.
Yeah, I have a similar experience. I used a bunch of operating systems in my years. From C64 GEOS over Atari TOS Amiga OS, DOS, Windows (pretty much all of them since 3.1, except Vista and 8), Android, MacOS and iOS to Linux (several distros)
I don't know why, but MacOS and iOS are for me just the worst user experiences. I feel completly trapped and helpless when using either one. Guess they are just not for me.
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.
I don't know if I'm ready to switch my main PC over to Linux just yet but I may give it a try with my media server PC. I mostly just torrent and run Plex on. Would be a good environment to test it in. It's basically just a PC made from old parts and it's running windows 10 right now.