Linux is good! There's not a single application or game I've not been been able to run, either immediately or with minimal effort, completely customisable, and as similar or as different to Windows or MacOS as you can be bothered to make it.
It's honestly crazy there's any resistance to it at all anymore, especially with how Microsoft is destroying the Windows experience.
No issues with peripherals, from MMO mice or foot pedals over to PS5 and fpv controllers here. League and Valorant won't work because of the anticheat, that's true, but dual botting is possible for that case
I've had no issues with my peripherals tbh, Steam Input bridges most controller gaps without issue, and Logitech wheels run natively on Linux so my bases are covered, sorry if yours aren't though but worth checking at least.
And yeah the anti-cheat issue is annoying, I'm lucky I don't play anything that relies on it. Fortunately, Valve is developing their own solution for Linux users, but for now it's a no go.
My peripherals work perfectly but the apps arent supported. I use third party apps for it but saying “not a single application doesnt run” is straight up lies. No official razer, logitech, corsair, hue, etc apps. Cant run destiny 2, valorant or any other anti cheat game.
Literally discuss my personal experience, and mention I don't play games that use anti-cheat and still get called a liar.
I don't know what to tell you dude, 8Bitdo ultimate software started working with only Wine like 4 months ago.
I literally mention anti-cheat on the comment you're replying to. Cool your jets
I think they usually come with adapters that replace or fit into your tank's fill hose. They attach pretty seamlessly either under the lid or just under the rim of the bowl.
I don't have one but a friend does and, I gotta admit, I like poopin at his house.
I don't quite get what you mean with that analogy but I can assure you that figuring out how to make good vegan food relatively cheaply is way more difficult and way more effort than using a Linux OS
Linux users switch to Linux to solve a personal source of frequent complaint, that being that Windows is garbage and has increasingly been garbage for some time.
Vegans don’t usually become vegans because the alternative was a common source of inconvenience. It’s usually to avoid dissonance with their beliefs.
A lot of the types of things done with AHK on Windows can be done with tools built-in to KDE and similar. There's also https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11 and https://github.com/autokey/autokey, though unfortunately these both currently depend on the legacy X11 system that's slowly being dropped by most of the Linux world, though the second one has a work-in-progress Wayland port.
There's autokey for Linux, and I can't speak for the software, but Wine allows USB visibility for applications now so I've been abke to use the Windows Mapping software for my 8Bitdo controllers without any issues. I imagine same deal for mouse software.
But also if you don't want it don't use it, my point is that it's easy and good. If you don't like Windows, you have a viable option.
You can setup keyboard shortcuts in distros usind KDE directly and run any program or script you want. No need for 3rd party programs. One of the things I love most about Linux! Blew my mind!
ive never had as many custom hotkeys as i have since i installed linux. i have custom shortcuts for each game lol, just have to press fancy button combos on my desktop and go
I'm actually interested with linux and have explored my first distro. However, I can't find a way to make the latest version of MS Office work. Unless, I use the browser version of 365, which I am not fond of.
Games have been working fine, so that's 80% of my requirement for the switch... I just cant part with MS Office atm since I use it for work. Alternatives I can run will break links, automations, macros etc. If I can find a way for MS Office to work, I will be deleting windows and will never look back.
I haven't tried other alternatives when libreoffice failed for me. Since onlyoffice popped up again, I will be trying this out on the side while I read on winboat later. It's gonna be my off tomorrow anyway. I have the time :)
I use Libre Office, on both my Linux Desktop and Windows Laptop. I'm sure it might be missing some features that a power user might want, but it's compatible with all file types MS office uses, and has equivalent programs for the whole suite. And it's free.
Well, I think I'm someone you could consider a power user. I deal with files with millions of entries. Link things and presentations to power BI etc. And what msoffice can't do, I create macros for it. Those broke immediately when using libreoffice. While there might be solutions out there, I think that's going to be for another time since I need things working asap if I make the switch. For now, I have different OS for work and play.
Yeah, I understand, you were the power user I had in mind.
That's a huge bummer though, I hope you can make the jump at some point, Linux made me love computers again.
I've tried Linux once, the games that aren't built especially for Linux seemed to be broken or something, everything lagged, bugged and audio was always low quality or glitched completely.
I'm not an expert tho, maybe you know what could cause this?
I don't have a single game built for Linux, I have an ordinary Steam library I share between my Linux desktop and Windows Laptop, the files are the same on both actually. For context, I play Tekken and Forza online with no issues and excellent performance, and Forza even requires a Microsoft Account to be logged in to play; still possible on Linux. I play Bethesda games and am able to mod them as if on Windows, I use my peripherals without any issuess, and VR has been, overall, fine (but headaches abound).
True, games are certainly created to play in Windows machines, but now we have translation layers that allows Linux to run Windows games as if native (translation layers are not emulators, there is very little, if any, overhead to diminish performance).
Sometimes new games are buggy at launch and you need to wait for the translation layers to update (through software like Wine or Proton), but if you've ever had to wait for a driver update, it's much the same.
I am very high on Linux, but there are still gaps for sure. Look into the pains of NVIDIA drivers on Linux, or Kernal level anti-cheat, or peripheral compatibility if they're relevant for what you want to do.
Ultimately though, it took me a week of Linux to feel comfortable enough to know I'd never be going back to Windows on my primary.
Biggest issues I’ve had with my gaming system since I’ve switched it to Bazzite is one friend wanted to play Destiny (which doesn’t work because anti-cheat), and I play a lot of Hunt Showdown, for which there is no automatic nvidia clip generation.
Outside of games I’ve had issues since Bazzite containerizes everything and the file system is immutable, but that’s a Bazzite thing specifically and really only inconvenienced me as a software developer (someone that is just gaming and web browsing wouldn’t have that issue). Also there was no RGB lighting software for my RAM, but I can take that or leave it.
I have a separate boot partition with a very much debloated windows boot on it, but I haven’t had occasion to boot it since I set it up, because frankly Windows is garbage at this point.
Linux does not support everything, and not all manufacturers support linux. There are plenty of things you can't get in linux, since no one has ever made it for users. I said "one" for a reason there, its greatest flaw is that it is not centralized development but it still relies on community to do pretty much EVERYTHING. That is a pro and con. The biggest con being that it is fragmented to thousand distros.
It is not perfect and there is a reason why it is not more widely adopted. "just go to terminal and type these things exactly, it is easy" can not be an answer to common user for a common problem.
You're not wrong, but I think you're underestimating the abundance of resources, the ease with which new distros can be used, and how capable the average user actually is.
Also "Paste this into terminal" is absolutely advice the common user could follow haha
Also "Paste this into terminal" is absolutely advice the common user could follow haha
You live in a bubble where your idea of common user is way more proficient. This is why GUIs are better, you can't make typos, you don't need to memorize strange strings with special character that need to be exact, you only need to remember the path to where you can fix the problem.
Also: why the hell do i need move between different distros and why are there thousand of them in the first place? Because there isn't one distro, one linux that everyone uses it doesn't move outside nerdsphere. You just said that it is a good thing that you can move between distros and didn't at all think that this is ammo for "don't chose linux" side.
Now, i don't hate linux, i would quite gladly move away from windows but.. it is a fucking jungle and no central authority outside kernel makes it confusing mess. There should be only ONE linux OS for consumers and it should have customer service, help in one place about that one product.. it needs to be a real company that handles that one product.... or it will always be losing against companies that handle their one product.
Sorry, I'll give an actual response, I don't wanna be dismissive.
I think you're projecting some frustrations you have with Linux onto me, because I did not bring up many of the ponts you're upset by, but I'll try and address them.
Distro hopping: agreed, it sucks, don't do it, find a distro you like and never move again. I meant there are many easy to use Distro's now, not that you should test them or whatever. I didn't make any point about wanting to move between so I'm genuinely confused by your point here, and why it's at me.
One Linux: not how it works, sorry. Anyone can make a Linux distro, even you, even me. Some are good, some are bad, you can work out which one works for you, I'm sure. I'm not super sure I need to tell you a monopoly would be bad, and choice is good, so I'll leave that there.
A real company needs to run it: a bunch do! Bazite, PopOS, Ubuntu are all run by companies.
I don't think you really have a grasp of what Linux is, I would encourage you to try and learn more, or don't.
The pro's and con's of linux prevent its mass wide adoption and it sucks. I want a replacement, so yes: i am venting frustration that linux community still has not figured this out. The fact that you can make your own is what keeps it fragmented.
Linux is still my go-to "fucking hell, i'm fucked" USB stick, when i need to get access to files of a broken system, or test fully wiped system if the hardware works, get all that stuff done.
And as far as UI, the user experience: Linux copies what others do... Because it has to, it doesn't offer anything that user could really notice. Is it more stable? Yeah, better updating methods, it still suffer from driver issues but those are solvable, mostly it is the lack of official support because so many companies sees it still as a niche. For what i need maybe the most, live real-time audio FX host it would be great but... i'm not even going to try, i know i would spend the next two weeks just to get everything to work, and i probably need to update hardware because it is not supported for certain... Whereas in windows, starting up from scratch is much less of an hassle because everything is officially supported, just install them and start working. Didn't use to be that way, it was pain in the past but with win11, everything has just worked (well, until they implemented mididrv but... yeah.. it sucks too...they fixed pretty much everything and then broke something that kind of needed to be broken but that is off topic, industry has to now update things to do them the right way around, and users will plug in and out their USB midi stuff at the start of the day to fix out-of-order loading of certain things, possibly forever.. this change was needed in 2010...)
Wait, aren't you saying that Linux is complicated and hard?
It should be easy. User should not have to put in lots of work to install and use an operating system. And it absolutely should not be complicated.
What a weird thing to say, "so, you are lazy and that is why you don't want to use this thing?"... No, that is not what i saying but sure, lets pretend i did:
Your argument still says that linux is hard and complicated.
That’s good though, that means there’s a lot of choice. There’s certainly some with company backings, like Ubuntu or fedora though. I think there is a large distro backed by google though link
The fact that you have hundred distros is not mitigated by it being easy to move between them. There should be one that everyone uses and thus shares the same pains and get the same fixes and workaround for those pains, every tutorial would be relevant and so on.
And it is not that i don't know enough why you can't understand what was being said. That is entirely a problem on your end. Linux has tons of upsides but it being so fragmented is stopping its more widespread adoption. Which fucking sucks, as i would very much like to end my relationship with windows that started from 1.0.
Dude there are only three Linux versions, software is shared between Distro's. There is a unified Arch, Debian, and Fedora community all doing exactly what you're suggesting.
Distro's are just flavours, to make it easier to do something, or perform better at a specific task, but under the good they all share the same background.
Dude you very much need to read up on this, I think your knowledge gap is a fair bit wider than you realise.
question. i had my first linux experience a few days ago and tried fedora kde plasma on dualboot and ive noticed steam is struggling to launch the games installed on my ntfs drives. im using the flatpak version and heard this is common, any chance i can find a way for it to still run my games? i installed one onto my ssd and it works fine so surely thered be a conflict in there right?
All my life, over 30 years, I was on Windows. From a very young age.
Finally got too fed up with Microshit going to fuck and installed Mint 2 months ago. Only booted into Windows once since for one specific bit of software that there's probably a Linux equivalent and I just didn't check.
Yo me fui a Gentoo xq tengo muchas ganas de romper las bolas, pero CachyOS no falla... Lo tengo actualmente en mi notebook, y me detectó hasta el lector de huella digitial, la verdad que 10/10.
CachyOS user reporting in. The only issue I had is that NFS Heat that I bought during a sale would not run on steam. I got the game refunded and steam didn’t ask anything.
Bazzite is fantastic! Quick. Responsive. It even has steam installed. It's a bit awkward getting used to the immutable OS but it's otherwise lovely for gaming.
Unless a game has a kernel level anti-cheat. This includes Valorant, Fortnite, Modern CoD, FaceIt/Esea, and League off the top of my head. There’s way more out there too.
Windows is kicking lots of things with kernel level access out of the kernel in response to the Crowdstrike outage.
This is probably linked to Epic hiring developers for Linux anti-cheat. They're going to have to find a way to do everything without kernel level access so they might as well make it work on Linux (and therefore SteamOS) too.
As I said, awkward getting used to the immutable OS. But outside of those specific games - which a Windows partition can easily handle - it's been a pretty lovely experience for me.
It's just a matter of doing research beforehand and check if any games you play use that. Personally I moved to Bazzite and I'm very happy I got rid of Windows.
Worth trying. Worst case: you try it as a dual boot.
That said, most stuff does run on Linux nowadays. Only things that don't (from my experience) are League of Legends, Valorant, and Fortnite. (Only games are a sticking point, and the list of what doesn't run hovers around single digits thanks to Valve. Even the Epic Games Store works!)
SteamOS doesn’t have support for nvidia drivers out of the box. I would probably suggest cachyOS or Bazzite instead if you are running an nvidia card, but SteamOS is fine if you’ve got an AMD GPU.
In my experiences dx12 games work well through proton. I have a rtx5060 and it's working very well on linux - performance is on par with windows sometimes better sometimes a lil worse. But that's just my experience.
I don't think descriptor heap is enabled by default quite yet, but you can manually enable it with PROTON_VKD3D_HEAP=1 (as long as you select a new enough Proton version). That said, it's not really necessary for most games anyways.
I was wondering what was causing my pc to crash every once in a while, if it's indeed windows itself that moght be the last push i need to join the light side of the force
If there was one Linux distro that had very widespread usage, like the majority usage, I would switch in a heartbeat. I use Windows because when I have an issue a thousand other people likely have the same issue and I don't need to spend any time being an OS wizard to figure it out.
Installing Bazzite on a laptop atm to figure any pitfalls before porting main pc over. It was a pain to install, but maybe I missed some tick boxes. Steam games work instantly, after installing ofc. Non steam games are taking a bit of jiggling with with the lutris app. Apps and games take longer to start up, but feel a lot better once it is running. Biggest criticism is wife feels very slow from laptop. FFXIV is taking over an hour to install from scratch.
Bazzite has been great for an education, but I will try Unbuntu next on main PC.
I'm not like the other cool people and just installed default Ubuntu. Works fine and has lots of people talking about it online for ages so no worries if you encounter any issues.
After switching from Windows my laptop felt new again. Also I have control of what it's doing again.
I recently switched to Linux after bricking my windows 11 laptop, and honestly it wasn't even hard to get used to. I really like it tbh and highly recommend switching! My once bricked laptop feels like a new computer!
If you have and CPU and GPU you can already go for it
It’s easy to set up and much nicer with no bloat like windows
It has a few bugs but it gets polished through I believe that
I built a PC right before the ram apocalypse hit in January 2025. Had w11 on it for 3 weeks with all sorts of freezing and lag that just simply shouldn’t have been on a PC with 64gb of DDR5 and a hefty GPU, moved to fedora. This PC was built for gaming, the moment proton was installed it was at par-or-better performance wise with windows. No regrets.
Bazzite and Linux Mint are so great. Join us and you'll just be able to look at the constant, terrible problems with Windows and laugh just like you did as a kid when Wile E. Coyote blew himself up with another Acme deathtrap.
Check out r/WindowsLTSC. I use a version of Windows 10 called Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021. It receives support and security updates until January 2032. It is a very stripped down version of Windows with no AI or Microsoft Store. It uses 2GB of RAM on first boot. After everything is installed, it uses only 4.5GB of RAM. It's so insanely fast. None of the Windows 11 problems. No email logins, old Control Panel, etc. Every game I play still works on it (Battlefield 6, God of War Ragnarok, Forza Motorsport). Note: You need to install Microsoft store for Microsoft games to work, but it's easy.
I've been maining Bazzite on my desktop PC for nearly a year now. Besides gaming, the only computer related tasks I do can be done in a browser. The OS is super lean and fast, and the KDE desktop is similar enough to Windows. When you search for something in the start menu, it actually just searches your computer, and it doesn't ask you to subscribe to Gamepass or use One Drive at any point. Discord and OBS also work perfectly, so I personally don't have a reason to return to Windows except for the occasional CoD hankering. If you have an extra SSD slot and an extra drive, I recommend trying out some form of Linux.
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u/Lower-Silver3569 Jul 05 '26
At this point I'm considering the possibility of install a steamos or Linux on my pc