Linux: Your topic title must have at least 10 characters.

Simple question, what are your general thoghts on Linux?

1. It's free.

2. It runs well on my old laptop that stubbornly refuses to break so I can buy a new one.

3. It's usable, though not exactly user friendly out of the box. Picking distros help, but troubleshooting or even installing anything not handled by the package manager will be a bit complicated.

Overall, it's nice but takes some getting used to. I run Manjaro (Arch Linux) on my laptop, and quite happy with it.

I want to try it out some day as it seems pretty neat, but the community around it makes it really hard because they make it seem like you have to be some sort of programmer to make any sense of it lol

Still, I love the idea of a free, open-source...anything, really.

Maybe one of these days I'll get a second hard drive and try a dual-boot type of deal or something.

This is something that surprised me. When I heard it was faster (like many claimed of things being faster) I thought it would be imperceptible, but it is significantly by a long shot faster on this older laptop.

The Mint version is also easy use in part due to a similar interface.

Though annoying scaling issues on the screen.

use it daily for work and have no issues.

went down the use it at home route years ago, just ended up getting pissed off I couldn't do simple things, got tired of trying to track down endless software package dependencies. Like if I wanted to to A, first I needed to do B and C, but I can't do C because I need D and E first, but D doesn't work anymore, so you really need to do F,G,H. But H doesn't work w/ my version, so I need to update the entire OS to a new version first.... You fucking troubleshoot for 3 hours and don't even remember that you were trying to do A in the first place...

maybe it's better now, I don't know and I don't care.

It’s more modern. I took a Linux class once and dropped out. It was a pretty difficult class

Tbh.

As I understand it, Linux lets you look at its operations and what’s going on.

It seems nice to have an OS without nags and ads and bloatware, where the UI doesn't have disruptive changes just for marketing, and it fundamentally has all the openness and flexibility that people feel are advantages of the PC platform. An OS that tries to respect the user's choices and lets the user do what they want instead of trying to steer them towards using certain tools and solutions that someone wants to promote, or mess with the user by fighting over their defaults and preferences. It has good game compatibility. It can probably do most of what people want and also be much more headache free. With more support it could probably do even more of what average end users and niche professionals would want.

@comp_atkins: I know you said you don't care, and feel free to ignore this if it's not worth your time. But I know what you are talking about, and I wonder, were you using an rpm based distro, something redhat derived?

Things on debian based distros seem to just work. Everything seems standardized across distros derived from debian. The policies for releasing debian involved testing everything in the software repositories to make sure it all works together properly before it can be considered a new stable release of debian. When you install something, all of the dependencies are resolved for you. It that point they only do security updates. New feature updates and new packages go in a testing branch, and when everything is resolved, that becomes the new stable release of debian.

Nothing gets put in the repos unless all dependencies are resolved and everything is tested. And if you need to test a specific esoteric software package that isn't in the repos, you can get a monolithic package (such as flatpak, snap, etc) that contains all the statically linked dependencies and is run in a sandbox so it just works. But generally everything is in the repos and you can even just download .debs and install them.

When Ubuntu came on the scene, there was commercial backing specifically put towards making desktop linux easy to use. They based on debian, and started making GUIs for everything that didn't have one, and not to dumb it down because they made sure to keep console fallback, started getting the desktop in a usable state, made graphical installers, made easy to use tools for standard desktop tasks. It was really focused on the end user and helped bring up the quality of life for every day use.

It has come a long way. Mint seems like a really good daily driver for the desktop that everyone keeps recommending.

With rpm based distros, it seemed like there were certain vendors that wanted to create complete support solutions for their versions of Linux, and have their own repos and specific versions of packages with their own specific security fixes and dependencies and also deviations. But these deviations seemed to have been made to enable support solutions that weren't available, and they weren't designed in a generic way but a specified way to address the problems of their customers and their use cases. It can create cross compatibility hassles. These seem to be more for servers and workstations that need specific vendor-backed commercial grade support. They've been around for a long time and are entrenched. I've experienced the same thing as you when it comes to that. Even when I was staying within one specific distro's repositories, it was still necessary to pin some certain versions of certain packages to get some software to work.

A lot of that can just be resources being eaten up the security features Windows uses... a big one is the virus scanner that scans your files regularly (like Defender), or indexing all of your files for specific desktop search solutions, different background apps that seem to install with each driver and each app you install to check if that specific software is up to date, Copilot, Recall, telemetry stuff, whatever else. Some drivers are even bloated. Sometimes you are installing like 200MB or 500MB worth of stuff just for one driver. There are different "fast start" apps that are loaded in the background in Windows. For example if you have Microsoft Office installed, a lot of it gets loaded into memory just in case you want to launch the app so it has a faster startup time. Edge is probably mostly loaded all the time because of "startup boost" which is a similar feature for Edge. There is also a lot of legacy tech debt there in the form of workarounds and quirks for the sake of compatibility. If part of Windows was broken and then that app depends on that specific behavior, then that thing has to remain broken for it to work and workarounds are done to maintain that. It's impressive in a way but also staggering in another way.

Tried it out on a laptop I had very long ago. Could make it work and like it's simplistic approach. It gives you much more control over the operating system and it's literally cleared of unnecessary bloatware and programs that would bog a computer down. Even with that in mind, I still prefer to use Windows just for convenience. Just because you can drive a manual car, which gives you more control over the driving experience, doesn't mean its entirely a more enjoyable experience...

I have two laptops, the one using Linux was around about 2012, low end, the newer one can run games like RE7 at 720p smoothly, far more powerful.

This decade old one on Linux is faster still as an operating system, even after went in and manually tried to remove as much bloatware as possible.

I can see your point about inconvenience, while managed to set wine up for Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, it was a pain due to scaling issues on, loading up with completely unreadable text where had to manually lower my resolution and go into the terminal and edit it.

On Steam this is inherently much less of a problem due to Proton and steam bypassing the windows installing screen stuff.

But even if that's 10-15 faffing about, this stuff builds up.

Having said that, for older hardware I would go for this over windows still.

Regarding above ^ Scaling issue on Linux is caused by incremental scaling i.e. experimental .... have 100% or 200%, which is super limited, but it solves many problems in one go.