In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially. I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing drivers or mucking with configurations, multiple monitors with HDMI audio worked out of the box, and "going to sleep upon the lid closing" just worked. Granted, I'm a bit of a Linux veteran at this so maybe there were a lot of things I was tweaking that I just don't remember since I do them so often, but I do not think that was the case, since I got my wife (who is not a software engineer) using Ubuntu as well for awhile.
I think part of what made it better was using AMD hardware for everything. The drivers are just included with the kernel, and they work great out of the box, at least for me.
I realize that telling everyone to shop for a computer based on the drivers that will be available isn't exactly a great sales pitch for Linux for the average consumer, but I suspect if you frequent HN you probably have a reasonable ability to differentiate video cards and whatnot.
And "not going to sleep upon the lid closing" just works, too! I tried this when I hooked my laptop up to the TV. Closing the lid did nothing. It only went to sleep when you closed it and unplugged the HDMI. I really really liked that, despite it being a tiny detail.
I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the Linux desktop is unfriendly.
I think a lot of people would genuinely like the 2021 Linux desktop experience if they tried it, but I fear that it will be quite difficult to shake the (well earned) stigma.
Nor me. A lot of it has been small things in my experience though, like this trackpad being terrible, or GNOME crashing once in a blue moon. I've definitely not experienced the level of pain you had with Optimus, or the rendering issues, which seems like a good thing. Although... on the subject of rendering issues, Firefox doesn't like it when the system is woken from sleep and has a really weird glitching effect until you maximise and restore the window.
On this laptop Linux hasn't been that bad, honestly the worst thing for me is this genuinely bad trackpad driver that has massive jutter and is hilariously broken. I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I do agree on your last point(s). It's got substantially better, but as always there are little things that majorly hold it back (trackpad!) when the rest of the system isn't actually that bad. I'd much prefer it to Windows, despite its flaws.
Boring old Ubuntu with some DE customization works totally fine on a laptop, though. I don't know why I tried to do this hard-mode for years.
I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
> I might learn C so I can look into making my own.
I've thought about that too. If I weren't on Apple now I probably would have already started on that, but the closest thing I've done to any kind of "driver" has been to make custom FUSE mount.
I think the newest versions of Ubuntu are great. They've started to give me everything I like about macOS [1] while being FOSS(ish) and portable to any computer I want.
[1] Not comparing Ubuntu to macOS directly, but more of a macOS "feel" in the sense of how I use it.
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.
Nah, Steam deck got delayed to next year. I plan on going Linux then. :)
I used OBS when I was on Linux and it worked exactly as I wanted it to, but I’ll concede that I 1) wasn’t gaming and b) was using software encoding.
Ahh, interesting! Not sure why, but it seems that some people have a horrible experience with the trackpad on Linux, while others have a great time (from a quick observation, anyway).
As a dumb guess, maybe it's due to different drivers being used? It's exactly the same on Wayland and Linux, so I'm guessing it's happening a lot lower in the stack (I read something about libinput? Not sure where that lies at the moment.) Grr, so much to think about! Perhaps one day I'll have a much better trackpad...
> I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.
Ahh, what graphics card is that? I'm guessing it's not NVIDIA.
In regards to the graphics card, it was an AMD card, in an Asus ROG laptop. I sold that laptop off a year ago so I don’t remember the card version.
Windows is always getting worse, too, but still basically works on all hardware. I've been thinking of switching away, given how bad Windows 11 looks to be and how irritating Windows 10 has been. But then, Windows XP, Vista and others were also known to be terrible but still mostly worked.
On balance, I'd say that Windows is likely to continue a user-hostile decline but still mostly work and Linux on Desktop is likely to always have a lot of effort involved if you want everything to work well. But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware or Windows will be less usable by default.
Yep, no question here. While Linux compatibility has gotten a lot better in recent years, you're definitely rolling the dice a bit in driver-land if you don't research beforehand.
That said, since pretty much every big distro is free, it's not necessarily a bad idea to just download it and try it out, at least with a Live USB Ubuntu image or something. If it works out of the box, then maybe you should install it, and if it doesn't, just unplug the flash drive and restart the computer and stick with Windows. It's entirely possible (and even likely these days) that it will Just Work (tm), and that might influence your decision in switching.
> But there's probably no point at which Linux will work well on all hardware
Yes and no; I think Linux tends to do exceptionally well on older hardware. I've been able to breath life into decade-old computers by just installing Linux Mint with MATE desktop [1], and generally by the time a computer is designated as "old", drivers on Linux are often better than they are on Windows, and due to how stupidly customizable Linux has become, you can get extremely lightweight desktops that require basically nothing to run (e.g. LXDE, MATE).
On newer hardware? Eh, as I said, you're rolling the dice a bit. Generally if you stick with AMD hardware, you are fine, as I said, but that's by no means guaranteed, and to me getting WiFi to work out of the box is the scariest thing, since if you cannot get connected to the internet, it's difficult to fix any of the problems.
[1] I did this for my grandmother who is still running an old AMD64 single-core computer. All she uses it for is browsing the web and checking email (not even YouTube) and she refuses to buy a new computer. Linux Mint has been a godsend.