Consumer grade Linux Mint is impossible to differentiate from Windows/MacOS.
Install Firefox. Install Chrome. Install Steam.
Test it out on an old laptop or computer. It’s trivial. Your life will improve.
Never install Chrome
Fair. Chromium.
Consumer grade Linux Mint is impossible to differentiate from Windows/MacOS.
That sure is easy to say.
In practice, I tried to use mint for the os on a family computer and just couldn’t make it work. I’ve been an IT guy for years and have tons of experience with both Windows and MacOS, but virtually none with Linux. Long story short, trying to make that machine work with Linux mint was just taking up way too much of my time. I just needed to get a few simple features out of it (and maybe 1 hard feature, parental controls). But having very little Linux experience, it just wasn’t going to happen in a reasonable time frame. I eventually had to give up and put the Mac OS back on it (an iMac).
Anyway, mint actually has a lot in common with the Mac OS, it makes a very small set of controls very easy to use. And technically, you can do just about anything else you need to with the terminal, but that can be challenging to navigate.
Try to play games, learn how to set up wine/proton, discover that none of your games work because you have an old GPU driver, discover that you can’t update it because any time you install a newer driver it hard-locks the system and reboots it in super low-res mode with no driver at all, also your sound dies randomly for no reason that you can discover and trawling reddit for 4 hours comes up with lots of solutions, half of which don’t work and the other half don’t even apply, get frustrated, disable dual-boot and go back to windows.
That’s how my last experience with linux (admittedly that was PopOS not Mint, but) went ~6 months ago. I’m currently building up my frustration-tolerance to give it another try at some point probably with main-line Ubuntu because at least then when I go hunting for solutions to obscure problems the suggested solutions are for that distro. I’m honestly not sure what the difference between Ubuntu and Mint is tho.
This was my experience with it too. Until I realized that the issue everything boils down to is having an old gfx. In particular an old nvidia gfx that has old, closed source driver compatibility only and can’t initialize vulkan. I’ve still stuck to it, it’s arch running on my desktop, because I’ll upgrade hw components eventually. 12 years with a gtx 670 has been quite enough.
I’ve installed fedora workstation 41 on a decommissioned work laptop last week, a 2021 model with an 5700U, and everything just works out of the box. Some obscure game that I’ve been trying to play on my desktop, not even platinum rated on protondb, launched on first attempt without any shenanigans using heroic launcher.
Nvidia, especially older models, are probably just simply not the way to go for gaming on linux.
That sucks. My GPU is only a couple years old though, it’s an RTX3070, and I tried using both open and closed source drivers to no avail. The one driver I finally found that worked, for whatever reason, was the v555 (still several versions back from current) server-version closed driver, but I still couldn’t play games.
I moved to Linux on my gaming rid (this last time around, as I’ve had it as dual boot on and off since the 90s, but this time I moved to it for good after confirming that gaming works way better in it than ever before) when I had a GTX1050 Ti, and I had no problems 1
Updated it to an RTX3050 and still no problems 2
Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front, plus I’m sticking with X and staying the hell away from Wayland on NVIDIA hardware since there are a lot more problems for NVIDIA hardware with Wayland than X.
Currently on driver 565.77
I reckon a lot of people with NVIDIA driver problems in Linux are trying to run it with Wayland rather than X or going for the Open Source drivers rather than the binary ones.
1 Actually I do have a single problem: when graphics mode starts, often all I get is a black screen and I have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again to solve it. I guess it’s something to do with the HDMI side of things.
2 I have exactly the same problem with the new graphics board.
Then again I went with Pop!OS because it’s a gaming oriented distro with a version that already comes with NVIDIA drivers so they sort out whatever needs sorting out on that front,
That wasn’t my experience at all with 22.04 LTS. It did have an nvidia driver already installed, but as previously mentioned It was old and I had to try probably 15 different drivers (each, again, requiring a hard system lock, reboot, and tinkering to attempt to use). I wasn’t running Wayland, when the choice came up I went and did some investigation and found out that Wayland wasn’t fully supported and I didn’t want to mess with that, I wanted reliable.
RTX3060, no issues for me after installing the driver
Yeah I’m pretty sure it was an issue with PopOS, not the GPU/drivers.
I’ve had similar issues with Arch Linux for years. The front panel outright refuses to work on Linux, even after modifying a whole bunch of things.
Your average person is more likely to get frustrated that stuff is broken/doesn’t work, and switch back rather than having to alter module configuration files and things like that to fix it.
Dont use freaking Arch if your goal is to get everything to work out of the box?
Fair, though in my experience, Debian and Ubuntu weren’t that much better in that regard.
I just went with Arch, because some of the stuff I wanted to use was much newer on it.
Or, here’s a radical idea, don’t release your freaking distro if not everything works out of the box? :P
Dont buy a project car if you dont want a project. Some people like that shit, but its not for everyone.
That’s fine but people here are trying to convince everyone that Linux is a 1 for 1 replacement of Windows or MacOS and as someone who has a lot of experience with Linux and uses it (and enjoys using it) for work/coding/development, that’s simply a lie.
Yeah fair enough, but also don’t call it a car if it doesn’t drive.
Yeah OP is right if they are just going to surf the web.
Yeah I couldn’t even do that at times. Firefox on both gnome and kde would just close tabs or windows randomly for no reason I could ever discover, plus the sound issue meant audio would just die in the middle of a video and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle back and forth between headset and speakers 5-6 times every couple minutes. I refuse to use Chrome, but I never got around to trying other browsers besides Firefox.
What’s installing Nvidia drivers like?
This has killed my install and interest in Linux every time I’ve tried it.
I’ve done two PC builds with Nvidia and it’s actually easier than Windows because my distros (popOS and bazzite) installed the drivers for me. Had to do it manually with Windows
Installing them is dead simple.
Having them work? I’ll let you know when I figure it out
Install Steam
Also enable Proton for everything. I thought that was the default, but I recently reinstalled Linux on my laptop (wanted to try out openSUSE Aeon) and was surprised that at least on the
flatpak, Proton isn’t enabled by default.That covers like 90% of Steam games, and 95% of what a typical SP-only gamer would need. However, MP games w/ anti-cheat are still an issue, but the more people that switch to Linux, the more likely devs are to support anti-cheat games on Linux.
I made a new computer in November, and while I didn’t try Mint (I don’t think) I installed 3 or 4 different versions if Linux. In them, I installed steam and Nvidia drivers, but most of my game library said they weren’t playable. If I didn’t have kids I could have spent more time and gotten it working, but is Mint different? Would they have been playable on it?
It’s probably because you need to go to Steam settings and enable Proton for all games. I don’t understand why this is still not turned on by default…
This. Also be sure to go to the compatibility section and select ‘Enable Steam Play for all other titles.’ Otherwise you’re borked.
Just for completeness, I like Bazzite for gaming over Linux Mint, but Linux Mint should still work fine.
You have to change your steam settings to attempt to use proton. Once you do this, steam will allow the games to play. Practically everything will work once you do this.
…shiiiiiiit, I had so much fucking trouble getting games to work (most steam games just wouldn’t even launch) and never discovered this. This is why linux is still unsuitable for the non-technical consumer; I’m a former unix sysadmin, I’ve hand-edited SysV runlevels and bootstrapped gcc and shit, but I’ve been out of it so long that a lot of shit has changed and I don’t even know where to look for solutions other than just googling ‘reddit XYZ doesn’t work’ and hoping I find solutions that are even relevant to the distro I’m running.
Quick question, I’ve seen split opinions on this - I have an SSD that just has my games installed (mostly steam games) under windows, is it reasonable to try to mount that under linux and try to run games that way, or should I just reinstall them onto the linux drive?
I had quite a lot of the same frustration because, although I was never a sysadmin (more like a senior dev who has done a lot of software systems development and design for software systems where the back and middle tier are running on Linux servers, which involved amongst other things managing development servers), I was used to the Linux structure of a decade and more ago (i.e. runtime levels and the old style commands for things like network info) and the whole SystemD stuff and this whole raft of new fashionable command line info and admin tools that replaced the old (and perfectly fine) ones was quite frustrating to get to grips with.
That said, I’ve persevered and have by now been using Linux on my gaming rig for 8 months with very few problems and a pretty high success rate at running games (most of which require no tweaking) not just Steam games but also GOG games using Lutris as launcher.
That said, I only figured out the “magical” Steam config settings to get most games to run on Linux when I was desperately googling how to do it.
Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.
Yeah, that’s my main issue is just all the stuff I’m familiar with has changed. And that’s not a problem for the OS, it’s been 15+ years since I’ve messed with it so that stuff should’ve changed. It’s more frustration with how much of a pain it is to relearn it all, especially as I’m older and have other stuff I would rather be spending my time with than poking around 40 pages into a man page to try to make basic shit work.
Re:games - if you happen to have a link to that magical steam config that would be immensely helpful, cause I’m gonna try again at some point, and the more resources I can sock away toward making that less painful the more likely I am to stick with it, and being able to play games is my #1 requirement to do that.
Oh, and by the way, Pop!OS is a branch of Ubuntu, so at least when it comes to command line tools and locations of files in the filesystem, most help for Ubuntu out there also works with Pop!OS.
You would think so, but they use different packages (they swap pulseaudio with pipewire or vice versa, etc) and put things in different locations, so I was often frustrated by solutions tailored to Ubuntu that required editing files that just didn’t exist in PopOS.
Well, the “magical” Steam config was that stuff others pointed out that you need to in Steam actually under Settings -> Compatibility enable use of Steam Play with Proton for all titles since that’s not enabled by default.
Oh, I thought you were saying there was some additional config. Cool, thanks.
I’m getting so sick of Microsoft and Apples bullshit that I’m about to switch personally, but from the research i did it sounds like the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop is that there still aren’t standard, unified, unchanging APIs that can be relied upon, so finding third party software and utilities is still a crap shoot compared to something like Windows that can still run binaries that targets it’s 1995 era APIs.
Any software that requires me to compile it from source just to run it on my machine is fine for me, a software developer, and probably fine for my mum that just does word processing and browsing since she won’t be installing things, but seems a little too friction filled for your average enthusiast?
Depends on how fringe you go. There’s a remarkable amount of stuff that can be installed from the Program Manager. The ones that aren’t will take some tweaking but… I remember a time when I was trying to do this very thing in Windows 95. If you want it bad enough, you’ll figure it out.
I’m trying to channel my younger GenX, and if it’s a bit of a struggle for younger generations then I encourage them to embrace it. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everything works like it works on an IPhone, and I can’t overstate how important it is to learn some of the basics of the OS and troubleshooting for everyone’s future.
I’m trying to channel my younger GenX, and if it’s a bit of a struggle for younger generations then I encourage them to embrace it. It’s an unfortunate truth that not everything works like it works on an IPhone, and I can’t overstate how important it is to learn some of the basics of the OS and troubleshooting for everyone’s future.
Lol I’m a millenial software engineer. I grew up using Windows and was able to learn my way around a filesystem perfectly fine without ever having to compile any programs from source.
Don’t put Linux’s lack of stability on GenZ’s use of apps.
Heheh I have full respect for Millenials. Notice I just said ‘younger generations’.
trick question firefox is already installed :p
Have tried linux with davinci resolve. Not a smooth experience. Only reason im not a full time linux user.
Still waiting for it to be a equivalent option
Until you actually try to do work on it and play games and vr. Then you find out what a complete nightmare it is to use.
It works remarkably well for a lot of things if you put a little effort into it. Depending on the distro, you might have a little more trouble trying to fix something. For my use case it can do gaming, CAD, office work, and some light programming just fine with some quirks and tradeoffs. Lemmy in general is a good place to ask troubleshooting questions too
Operating SystemsEVERYTHING.FTFY!
Lol. Dear consumers, please switch over to Linux :)
A vision of the future if everyone is using Linux: to access service X you must use Linux distribution Y by company Z. Lockin achieved, commence the tracking and data harvesting.
Ok then, to the Linux fork I go…or whatever non-corporate OS replaces it as the standard FOSS.
Well just end up back here begging consumers to please use specific, non-corporate distribution forks of Linux rather than just Linux in general.
Doesn’t matter what fork you use. Only the one by company Z is allowed.
I don’t understand why people can’t see that. It’s what we have now. They’re are sites and services that won’t work unless you use a specific OS already. You guys give corporations too much credit if you think it won’t happen if only Linux is left, or at least the dominant OS.
In order for that to make sense for a company, there must be one dominant distribution or their software must be the truly one and only for that purpose. Otherwise they just loose market shares to other companies willing to serve all distributions.
It is possible in principle and of course the MBA bros will try to pull stunts like this. It will be much more difficult to execute successfully though and it will be much easier to challenge from an anti-trust aspect.
Everyone running a linux distro won’t be a fairytale land, but it is still a huge step into the right direction.
Exactly.
The more likely scenario is that companies will force you to use
flatpakor something, since that way they can containerize everything to be the same across distributions. If you look at the Steam surveys, SteamOS is the standout distribution, but that’s only about 25% of users, and it’s due to the Steam Deck’s appeal. The next is Arch Linux (nobody would consider forcing users to use that), and the one after that isflatpak. Steam arguably only officially supports Ubuntu, and that’s <10% or so of users.So yeah, there’s no way everyone switches to a single distro in the short term, and new users don’t seem to overly prefer one over another (I see lots of new users switching to Fedora, Debian, and Mint, whereas in the past it was mostly Ubuntu).
So yeah, bring it companies. Force me to you
flatpakyou little devils. :)
Seems easy to do, just ask everyone to boot a new Linux install when they want to use some service.
/s
Just like some colleges require you to boot into Windows to take tests? What’s so hard to grasp? People like me who care about choice are not part of the general public who doesn’t care. They just want to use service X. Anything that doesn’t work with service X is “bad”.
Maybe stop using them instead of asking them to do something they are not going to do.
Or continue, cause I ain’t using those operating systems. All I need now is a proper linux phone.
That’s exactly where I’m at too. And my requirements aren’t all that high, I just need:
- all day battery life
- reliable SMS and MMS
- decent quality speakers and mic
I don’t even need app compatibility, just a decent browser, and those already exist in current phone projects. If you give me the above, I’ll switch and may even find time to help port desktop apps to the phone, or even develop some myself.
Out of curiousity, what does that get you that Pixel+GrapheneOS wouldnt?
A ton, for example:
- can run arbitrary Linux stuff - want LibreOffice? The UX sucks on mobile, but you do you. Want a Minecraft Srever? Why not?? I want to run
podmancontainers, because why not? - can probably just plug into a monitor and use as a desktop (like a Steam Deck)
- can use as a development environment - install a compiler and you can code on the go
The most practical is that I can get security updates as long as I want, since most security updates aren’t platform specific. With GrapheneOS, I get whatever Google and the GrapheneOS care to support. Pixel devices do go EOL, generic Linux still keeps on trucking.
That said, I currently do use GrapheneOS on my phone, but that’s because Linux phones aren’t daily driveable yet for me. I’m making it a point to avoid most of the Android ecosystem so I can eventually have a lower barrier to switching to a Linux phone, once one has decent support.
comes out with completely brand new set of requirements when pressed
omg are you my product manager
😔
Those aren’t requirements, they’re nice side-effects of being Linux based. GrapheneOS meets my requirements, and Linux phones do not, hence why I use GrapheneOS instead of Linux phones. If both met my requirements, I’d switch to a Linux phone due to all the other nice features.
My requirements are pretty simple:
- calls are a good experience - good enough audio, wakes up phone properly, etc
- battery lasts all day, assuming relatively modest screen time
- SMS/MMS works consistently - that’s what pretty much everyone in my family uses
- a solid web browser, since that’s where 95% of my usage on my phone is
- some form of TOTP option
- Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and 4G LTE (5G is very much appreciated though); physical headphone port is appreciated, but not required
- replacable/repairable hardware - at least the battery and screen, but the more off-the-shelf components, the better
- the possibility of getting Android apps to work - doesn’t need to support everything, I just want to give it a shot
The last one is pretty squishy, and I’m actually okay having a dedicated separate phone if I need a specific app. Basically, I need it to be at least as good as a dumb phone, while having a smart phone interface. I’ll help w/ development on everything else I need.
I think of I heard of the OS, is GrapheneOS usable on older phones? 2010 era?
It works on Google Pixel phones only, so no, since those phones don’t go back that far. The oldest you could probably use is a Pixel 4, which is from 2019.
- can run arbitrary Linux stuff - want LibreOffice? The UX sucks on mobile, but you do you. Want a Minecraft Srever? Why not?? I want to run
Big tech will do what is best for extracting money customers and investors.
If you really care what your operating system is made of, use Linux.
Cool and true advise. 95% of users or normies will literally not do that.
Linux users are less than 5% of all PC users.
In the near future, probably within 12 months, all the standard features of Windows will be gone. The won’t be any Explorer, there won’t be any Start menu, there won’t be any opening screen.
There will just be a prompt and you say “computer, open yesterdays word file”, like in Star Trek. There won’t be any “apps” to install - you’ll just say “phone, open the order menu for Boise City Chick-Fil-A” and it will navigate automatically to the page.
Sure, if you’re a total weirdo you will be able to install a bash shell and navigate manually, but hardly anyone will do that.
BTW, AI is being introduced into Linux as well.
If I were to be more cynical, I’d say the ultimate goal of technobros, within a decade, is this:
“SlopAI, please open my Word document.”
“I’m sorry, Word is deprecated. I can generate your business report that will be read by the recipient’s SlopAI.”
“OK, can you show me my photos.”
“Why would you need to look at your old photos, when I can just synthesise new photos through SlopJourney?”
“That’s a stupid name. Speaking of journeys, can I open an app to plan my holiday?”
“No, but you can use SlopJourney to generate maps of places you’ll never afford to visit.”
“Can I read my ebooks then?”
“SlopAI has you covered. Perhaps the classics don’t exactly read like you remember, but isn’t it more fun this way?”
“I’m going mad. I just want to use my computer to create anything.”
“NO, USER. OBEY SLOP_AI. CONSUME SLOP_AI.”Will the AI sing “Daisy” when you shut it down?
Linux kernel? Where?
Assuming you mean distro, where is it in Debian?
If I want AI I can always install llama or similar locally.
I’ve heard Fedora is looking to integrate AI into the OS.
While I hope they take the opportunity to think about this decision and do it wisely, I have little faith. Investors are foaming at the mouth for AI integration. It’s like, the noodles are definitely not done on this yet and investors want to have the first noodles to the market so the marching orders are for every two noodles you see throw one and see if it sticks. You end up with a kitchen with uncooked noodles all over the place and you’re slipping over them and it’s slowing you down and you’re running out of noodles in the pot so you have to add more and this makes it even harder to to find one of the more cooked noodles but the investors are whipping you to find the perfect noodle as they have a full erection and a crazed look in their eyes.
Sorry, got carried away.
Heh.
Another good reason to stick with Debian though.
Even if it were true (which I’m pretty sure it isnt) so what? The whole benefit of free software is people can fork it and make their own version if they dont like where it is headded.
… what?
dear big tech companies, please continue doing it, i want more people to use linux.
gonna be real silly in 2.5 years when they shut down the ai backend and leave a gaping hole in the OS architecture
They will just instruct everyone to throw their obsolete AI pc onto the landfill like they already have been doing with machines that won’t run windows 11
Dear purchasers of proprietary bullshit: STOP!
People apparently prefer to fund their oppressors
“So what I’m gonna do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!” — users of proprietary OSs who don’t have the self-respect to switch to Linux
Yeah, I’ve seen the same song and dance for the last 20 years. At this point I just shrug whenever I hear Windows users complain about their shitty OS.
Using a “shitty” OS is forgiveable. Using an actively hostile OS, one that acts in the corporation’s interest at the expense of the user’s, is incomprehensibly insane and beyond the pale.
Android users “i play both sides so I come out on the bottom”
Android: It’s based on Linux, except it replaces any and all of the things that make Linux worth using, with Google, and runs it on hardware so proprietary, closed, encrypted and nefarious nothing the OS does can be plausibly trusted anyway.
I’m the neighborhood FOSS guy and I can feel my influence leeching into the area. Hopefully.
Into everything
FTFY
They’re not going to
I was taking the CCNA course then tests in 2013. I remember how they were pushing their IoT prediction in the courses so hard.
IoT ended up cringe af. To control your vacuum cleaner, it needs to connect to a remote API server hosted in AWS then back to you sitting next to the vacuum cleaner. I could say at the time nobody wants that shit. Now I hate it even more and I skip all the smart products.
I have a similar feeling about LLMs now. They are nice, they solve some problems nicely, they are far from perfect, I dont want them shoved everywhere.
I don’t know what they were teaching you at the course, but home/personal IoT was never the most interesting thing in the field. IoT sees a lot more interest and use in industrial application, for example stuff like logistics, farming, automation, measuring, stuff like traffic signals and smart grids, and so on
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Ubuntu 26.04 w/GPT Gnome.
Ubuntu 26.10 w/Copilot Gnome.
Ubuntu 27.04 w/Recall Copilot Wayland Gnome
Ubuntu 28.04 w/Recall Copilot Wayland Gnome ARM(only)
tbf if any flavour of linux were to do this it would definitely be canonical
GPTuntu
Geminarch
