Posted by todsacerdoti 6 days ago
e.g. it took until 2025 for this RFC to be opened on moving PowerShell profiles and modules out of Onedrive: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell-RFC/pull/388. It should not be taking seconds for my powershell profile to load just because i have onedrive enabled by default.
I also had a non-technical friend recently get burned by a default MS Office setting where edited documents located in the OneDrive folder save directly to onedrive, and it only gets saved on disk when onedrive gets the new copy and uploads it back it to the user's disk. So if the MS office to onedrive integration fails your changes won't save. Apparently users have to enable a setting to first save to a folder on disk? That folder can even be the onedrive folder so onedrive will eventually sync it back up.
Steam has worked perfectly, clicking install and then hitting play, no futzing with drivers or weird updates. The only games I haven't been able to play are League of Legends and some of the new AAA shooters. I'm okay with that because I don't particularly care at this point, and it's not worth maintaining a Windows install to periodically play for an hour or so.
Linux has been unbelievably stable. This year, I fully upgraded the system and planned on reinstalling but I didn't even need to. On first boot, my old install was picked up and mostly just worked. On Windows I've tried that before, and it was an unrelenting shit show (that resulted in having to nuke the old windows install).
The only hitch I've had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers (open source vs proprietary); which, I was able to fix by booting into the command line then nuking both sets of drivers via apt remove and installing the one I wanted. Took me less than five minutes and my system was working. It also wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried being too clever (and Pop_OS! having some quirks).
I recently setup a MiniPC to use while traveling to game on and this time I tried Arch. To my surprise the install was ridiculously easy. The most recent installer makes it a breeze. My only mistake was not noticing I'd installed a few desktop environments and the default wasn't what I wanted so things seemed broken. After selecting KDE from the login menu et volia! It worked perfectly. I'm considering switching my primary rig to Arch, but I'll give the most recent Pop_OS! release a try to see if the newer LTS version gets me access to some new packages first.
Linux is great folks. If you stick with a major distro you're likely going to love it. It's really low maintenance and just works. 11/10 would recommend to anyone.
Even the smaller ones are unironically pretty fun to work with now-a-days. I'm currently rocking Gentoo on my stuff. After the painful setup, it's actually quiet easy to maintain.
I find that W11 just works: the multitasking is awesome (especially window and monitor management, huge improvement over W10), everything is snappy, the ARM64 battery life (especially in standby) is Macbook-like, I never have issues with USB-C docks and monitors (unlike Fedora where I always have to tinker with the terminal at some point), and the Windows version of Microsoft Excel is still unmatched.
Also, the UI is very pretty, but that's obviously subjective! And you get way more customization options on Linux.
I am not encountering most issues listed here, which I why I was confused, although I agree that Microsoft AI-bullshit-driven "vision" for Windows is a bit worrying.
(We use Windows 11 on plastic Thinkpads (L15s, intel) at the centre I work in, an educational organisation. They have ads, insist on switching to edge even though we need Chrome for single sign on and do seem a tad sluggish).
Hardware: HX370, 128G RAM, Radeon 860M iGPU, Radeon RX7700S dGPU, Xbox Wireless Cntroller, 2T + 8T SSD storage
Software (as of today, still making additions and refinements): Gentoo/OpenRC (I don't like systemd), Kernel 6.12.58 with additional module for the Xbox controller, Pipewire+EasyEffects 8, KDE Plasma 6.5.4/Wayland, Steam
Experience: KDE runs pretty stable, and only has the things I really need (and not the things a vendor thinks I need).
The first game I benchmarked today was Doom (2016), which runs smoothly on 90-120 fps on high settings.
The second game I benchmarked today was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (2024) running on ~56fps on recommended settings on the 7700.
The one game I tried today and could not get to run properly was Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl. I suspect that, given the many positives on ProtonDB, that's mainly either a configuration or Proton issue. I'll do some more research and give it another try in the near future. Right now performance drops to 5 fps immediately after starting a new game, and the CPU running on 600Mhz maximum when starting the game on Proton Experimental.
For now I am quite happy with the results, and the fact that I likely finally am able to eject Windows out of my life.
I started using Linux almost a decade ago; starting with Ubuntu, then I moved to Kubuntu and now I'm on Omarchy which is even more optimized for developers.
I feel very comfortable recommending Linux to people now though I would recommend a different distro depending on who is asking.
IMO Ubuntu is the simplest general-purpose one. Kubuntu is the same but more customizable slightly more developer-focused. Omarchy (which is a fork of Arch Linux) is very developer-focused.
It has a lot of nice-to-haves which I wouldn't have bothered setting up individually but having them altogether out of the box does improve the overall developer experience significantly.
Meanwhile, 84% is perfectly playable (some with minor tweaks).
Of course one point here is that MS owns some of the more problematic game studios. Anti cheat here might be less about users cheating and more about them using this as a control point to ensure gamers keep on preferring Windows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't think MS has much of a moat left for gaming. And it will be tempting for them as well to tap into the few percent of Linux using Steam users for selling them games. They've long stopped insisting on windows for things like Office or SQL Server as well. The whole of Azure is pretty much Linux based at this point. So, they might dig in for a bit but they'll be under growing pressure to give in.
Never had an issue with any game running through proton. Only issue was Stardew Valley that couldn't play online. Turns out the Linux version (was default) had an unfixed bug, and choosing the Windows version with proton "Just Worked". Hilariously, "Win32 is the most stable Linux ABI"...