Why the hell is Gates on that image?? The guy stepped down as a CEO 26 years ago, and left the board of directors six years ago.
The enshittification is all Nadela’s baby.
The right never lets go of anything. Ever
Gee, I wonder what went wrong…
Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck
I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings
I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue.
why? other than not being a “main branch” os I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, it seems quite white glove.
It’s atomic and fedora, which are also the same issues with silverblue and kinoite.
Linux is at a point where we really shouldn’t be using distro specific installers.
shouldn’t be using distro specific installers.
We have Flatpak and AppImage, and space isn’t as expensive as it once was. The problem I have is the sandboxing and isolation can make plugins problematic.
I mean, obviously I’m not advocating that you install pipewire or pipewire plugins as appimages.
Yeah we should just choose a winner and go with their system.
This should be easy!
I think they were getting at Flatpaks, Snaps or AppImages (my personal favourite)
Yeah, I was referring to AppImages. But flat packs are cool too, they serve a purpose.
Yeah pick Gentoos installer. It can do everything.
i switched over to Bazzite about a week ago, and it has been super frustrating. though it’s not in where you think. the game my group is playing (Arc Raiders) worked without a hitch.
- but my speaker system, and microphone forced me to learn a whole lot about USB hand shakes,
- ghost usb profiles,
- usb cable choice,
- what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
- nano eccentricities (including how to save and quit, just labeling ctrl-o as save and not overwrite would stop so much bs),
- sink states,
- device name resolution,
- pipewire,
- pipe plumber,
- pipe wire holding devices hostage,
- usb power flapping because i plugged my speakers and my mic to close to each other causing the os to just give up on the both of them.
- the timing of when the os asks for usb identifiers, verses when the usb devices are given power
- out dated guides relying on depreciated methods and acceptable code used in modifiers to os procedure.
my experience and days of trouble shooting the “easy” replacement os for gaming has frightened my friend group far away from linux.
what a flatpac is and why people hate it,
Huh, most people actually like Flatpak, and for good reasons too.
If you know what flatseal is and how to set permissions, it gets a lot better.
I am super thankful for flatpaks. I do wish I understood things a little better in flat seal though. can do some basics but I don’t know or understand what 95% of the flat seal options are for a given piece of software or why some of the fixes I’ve put in from when I’m googling a problem actually work.
i could not get them to play nice with the hardware, pipewire, or each other. and they don’t like being messed with
Exact opposite experience here, coming from using Linux as toy desktops for the past few years. My main PC is EndeavourOS, and my gaming laptop is Bazzite. Bazzite has been a really good hands off “just works” distro that I don’t have to think about.
i think the real issue is my computer has been silently suffering for all these years as windows just didn’t tell me my hardware is borked and old. and just has a shot gun full of code that fixes whatever it can stick to. and Bazzite either does not have that, or i fell into an exception in use due to hatred and old hardware.
but getting into the weeds was very difficult, and my desk is not as flat as it once was
Literally every time im gonna go play a game with friends my computer decides to bw stupid, and it puts them all off linux even more lol.
nano is the Fishcer Price’s My First Text Editor and you’re expected to quickly graduate to something that sucks way more
I know I’m supposed to go that way, but I went the other 🙃. I’ve been using micro and it has been awesome working with my mouse when I want. What is more basic than Fisher Price? A teething set of plastic keys?
I tried to like vim. But nano just works.
i can only imagine the horrors of what button combination i need to save and close and get my terminal back on the next one…
This is actually an ancient UNIX trope.
q :q :q! ^Z # kill -9 $!from what i gather that means you reach for the 9mm when you don’t know how to say please?
Kill all 9 lives
I just installed cachyos after using mint for a year. Overall, was smooth until i tried to use VLC. Video played fine, but an hour of settings later and i could finally hear the movie. I was an inch from saying fuck it and going back to mint. I debug software for a living, last thing i want to deal with is debugging my personal computer when I just want to watch a movie.
May go back at some point, mint really is so easy and just worked, but the performance and aur are pretty great.
My sound doesnt work on cachy either.
That sucks! At least for me, mint just worked.
Interesting. I’ve been using Linux for nearly 6 years now, and I can definitely relate to pipewire and audio related issues (I’m a musician so I’ve suffered much in that area), but I can’t say I’ve struggled so much with devices. I wonder if those are Bazzite specific issues or if our setups are just different.
i’m my case i am using apparently old hardware, i ran into the following issues with my set up:
- my usb cable for the mic was crap. and because the signal was flaky, Bazzite put the port on low priority mode where it only checks in when asked
- the usb cable was insufficient to push the data, i swear it came with the mic. still thing this was a dubious conclusion, but a new cable was 5$
- Bazzite would ask my USB speaker and mic within milliseconds of receiving power what their designation was, and the controllers in the devices responded so slowly that Bazzite gave them new names and put them in passive mode. i had to bake in the command to treat that like legacy equipment (ouch) to sit and listen for a reply however long it takes.
- the speakers are flipped in meat space, due to outlets and the length of available cable, i can not change this, so i had to flip it in software, i was recommended easyeffects, but pipewire hated its guts, and i was better off learning to bake it in via the terminal after i was able to find the devices actual name once i got them out of passive jail above.
- i had to bin the flat pack versions of discord and my web browser Vivaldi. don’t want to get into a browser war i have had enough trying to siphon through redacted reddit posts about that
won’t lie i had to use AI to RTFM though chat GPT bricked my stuff more then i should have let it. gemini was better at this
Wow you certainly learned a lot trouble shooting that.
I haven’t had something that annoying happen, usually it’s been install and use.
BUT putting Linux on an ancient dell box was a learning experience. I installed the system on the HDD. After shutdowns the aystem would wake back up. The solution was adding kernel quirks line to grub boot with a numeric code, which told the hardware to ignore the self wake up event from the USB bus.
Then when I wanted speed the bios didn’t support NVME boot. So I had to add a small ssd for boot partition , but have rest of system on the NVME drive. I didn’t want to reinstall and resetup so I was learning a lot about gparted and copy pasting partitions and editting fstab to cobble together a replicated set of partitions. It was a great way to understand how formatting, partitioning and mounts all worked.
mine it set to never let the usb sleep. the hub or device ubs controls HATE going to sleep only to wake up on time
Another data point to add. I’ve started using Bazzite and introduced it to my brother. The only hitch I’ve noticed is not being able to play stuff like the new Battlefield.
It is by far the easiest operating system to install, keep updated, and run basic apps and play games on. Flatpaks are great. Brew is good for CLI tools. AppImages are another alternative to Flatpaks that work well. Steam comes pre-installed, and most games run well.
There are no ads, no AI, no dark patterns. It’s just a simple operating system that keeps itself updated.
Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with
rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite). But my examples of these are installing GhosTTY (non AppImage), Paretto Security, and 1Password SSH Daemon/op. Most people will never need to do these.I’m a software engineer, and I’ve found that for the most part, Bazzite is good enough to run on my gaming pc and work pcs.
I’m sorry you had such a bad first experience with it.
i think i learned that there was a lot wrong with my set up that windows just shoved under the rug. and maybe windows is right to do so, figuring i was willing to dig in deep this time, but my friends… not so much, and i don’t think i have the capability to help them if they run into issues like i did.
the reason ‘I’ learned to dislike flat packs is that it puts the software in its own little isolation bubble from what i understand. and i get where people are coming from. but they REALLY don’t like connecting to hardware, or sharing nice with other apps.
keep in mind i am a fairly adroit user of windows, diving in head first, so a lot of this is learning the hard way (nano anyone?) and i learned a lot. but yea bumpy.
i think i learned that there was a lot wrong with my set up that windows just shoved under the rug. and maybe windows is right to do so, figuring i was willing to dig in deep this time, but my friends… not so much, and i don’t think i have the capability to help them if they run into issues like i did.
When I was trying to use discord, my friends were confused why I was having issues getting my mic to work and were sorta teasing me for using linux. When they found out what I was trying to do (something I couldn’t figure out how to do in Windows despite looking into it multiple times over the last decade or so), they were more just confused why I’d even be doing what I was and they would have never even considered trying to do that. But I finally have my audio pathing set up the way I’ve always wanted to and I love qpwgraph.
very same with me, yea. though i was having so many problems with easyeffects i was gun shy using another program to manage the speakers when i just wanted the one change. so i baked in a rule for that named speaker only into the os
Sometimes, I just want to be able to easy switch some things to one playing from one speaker or another. Being able to do left/right separately is wonderful. Or use a virtual mic and feed a soundboard into it along with my actual mic. And easily being able to do monitoring each of the individual parts is wonderful. _
Agreed with having issues with EasyEffects in my limited experimenting with it. Was hoping it would be more intuitive to be to be able to add into my workflow to modify specific sounds (ie: modify my actual mic before it feeds into the virtual mic and leave the soundboard uneffected).
“Where it starts to get complicated is if you want to do anything off the beaten path. In fact, Bazzite is much more complicated than something like Fedora or Debian if you need to do anything like this. Because you need to worry about either layering with rpm-ostree, or creating your own base image with a Containerfile (FROM bazzite).”
I’ve had a similar complaint about bazzite. Some obscure things are just harder to install because of it being immutable. But I also haven’t managed to accidentally break it, like I have with other OS’s. Also, sometimes my problem has simply been looking up instructions for fedora and assuming they’d apply to bazzite instead of just looking up the bazzite instructions (which actually existed and were fairly distinct and didn’t involve rpm-ostree stuff).
I made the move to Linux about a month ago, and it’s been super smooth (and yes I have an NVIDIA 3080). I went with CachyOS though. The ONLY thing keeping me dual-booting windows though is Cubase (DAW), which is unfortunate but whatever. I don’t really play any games that use EAC / kernel-level anti-cheat so it doesn’t affect me, but is a bummer.
Nice 👌
Have you looked into using Wine or Proton to install Cubase on CachyOS? I see the wine page for it has a few garbage rating for the app, but I imagine that some of the work being done to get the steam games working might carry over to other desktop apps that didn’t work well on Wine in the past.
I’ve attempted to install Cubase using Bottles with no luck. I think the difficulty revolves around audio drivers and such.
Yeah, Linux audio is great when it does work, but a real pain when it doesn’t. Looks like there is some work being done to bridge the DAW gap like https://github.com/microfortnight/yabridge-bottles-wineloader, but I image getting it working will be a bit of a rabbit hole.
Sweet. Well hopefully in the future I’ll be able to get Cubase running and ditch windows entirely.
Cubase works great for example in Hatari
I installed Bazzite on my gaming pc this weekend. It runs Cyberpunk 2077 just fine.
This immutable Fedora + Gnome 49 is a bit weird coming from Xubuntu; seems to work though.
Did this last May & haven’t missed much. I don’t play AAA slop though.
I’m thinking about going dual boot mode soon, as Manjaro is a godsend so far on my ThinkPad.
Just remember to have your installs on independant hard drives, not just partitions.
If you have set your mind to Manjaro I don’t want to dissuade you, but if you are not yet strongly convinced of the distro I always like to point out that there were some issues with the distribution in the past (someone collected them here).
If you’re just after an Arch-like distribution I think EndeavourOS is a very friendly distro without adding their own repositories on top of Arch. But again - if you’re happy with Manjaro by all means also stay with it.
EndeavourOS, CachyOS, and Bazzite are back-up options in case I need to distro hop.
I have been over 1 year in EndeavourOS and I can’t complain, no issues at all except when I screw up.
What does screwing up mean in this context?
I’ve only been using it for a few weeks now, but I’m having a great time with EndeavourOS. I’ve tried Linux every now and then for over 20 years now, but always bounced off for one reason or another. This time, I’ve never felt any desire to go back.
For me, my use case, and my hardware, EOS has been significantly less of a headache than Windows 11 was.
I am a Debian user, most of my homelab is on Debian but my desktop is on EndeavourOs, neither has any bullshit.
Which distro did you end up going with? Wanted to change my tower over from Windows. Guessing bazzite is appropriate?
I’d suggest trying a couple through live ISOs to see what works best out of the box with your hardware. I settled on CachyOS and definitely recommend it. Bazzite is ok, very stable, but keep in mind it is immutable which may hamper its abilities as a full desktop.
Oh it’s immutable? Damn.
That explains some shit.
How do I go about switching to CachyOS? Just wipe the NVME and run an installer?
Yeah I’d wipe it if you’re going to switch, always less headaches that way. CachyOS has a lot of options so I’ll throw my 2 cents out there, I set it up with btrfs file system and the limine bootloader because it automatically sets up snapshots so you can roll back if something gets borked. It’s also easier to get secure boot working with limine if you’re trying to dual boot.
Kubuntu on my main workstation & Linux Mint on everything else.
Not OP. Around same timeline. Went with bazzite for gaming. Have been using bazzite daily since. Stuff just works super easy to install. Also tried and have mint still installed on another partition but haven’t used it much besides the initial installation. And installed dual boot bazzite and mint on my old gaming laptop. Use mint on there daily for internet browsing and such, no gaming. But I’m certain it would work just fine as it’s all pretty much the same besides Debian (mint) Vs Fedora (bazzite).
I don’t play AAA slop either, and a few older easy anti cheat games don’t work. Such as Fawkes revival of Defiance.
Everything else works pre installed with Steam+ proton, Or Ludis + wine, Or the Heroic launcher for GoG, Amazon and EGS.
I do get higher FPS and better temps and less hardware usage than I ever did on Win11 for the same exact games.
Arch was described as hard mode but I installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma about a month and a half ago and it’s been smooth sailing. Given all the programs I use have native linux clients and I don’t play kernel level anti-cheat games at all.
The ArchWiki is the best hand-holding that you’re going to get on Linux, it’s the finest system administration documentation that the OS has available. But Arch doesn’t “do things for you automatically”, that’s not their ethos. So it’s hard mode until you’ve developed enough sysadmin skills to understand what the docs are telling you, and then it’s easy mode because it all works great together and you’ve a phenomenal reference source.
We run SUSE at work; and when SUSE is working, it’s a damn fine Linux - secure by default, up-to-date, efficient. But if it stops working, man alive, I wish we were using Arch instead. (Admittedly, we just redeploy anything on SUSE that stops working, which takes moments, whereas fixing Arch takes a while but at least you can fix it.)
i’ve just installed cachy, yesterday. been working fine so far. I can even double click to install .exe files, but… it didn’t handle installing battle.net that well, so… i had to do it manually, but that worked fine.
So far no issues. Fast, and easy. even more customizable out of the box, than windows.
if you haven’t tried it, i highly recommend you give it a go. it’s free.
I’ve been using CachyOS for a few months now and it’s mostly been great, and so so much better than Windows.
I should probably just try to run .exe installers more. That might solve some of the challenges I’ve had with the transition, particularly since getting devices working correctly in my Windows virtual machine while still keeping full functionality in Linux has been challenging (webcam, sound, microphone, mouse4/5 and dpi buttons).
Docker has solved my biggest other challenges, for apps that have a Docker image anyway. They just work.
88 comments and nobody has noted that the article itself looks like AI slop?
Lots of signals here: the writing style, bland and wishy-washy use of statistics, bullets and formatting that arbitrarily organize without adding value, the rule-of-threes clauses, and redundant details, the intro summary list, the lack of sourcing links, and “written” by an author whose bio specifically mentions AI.
I specifically looked for backup to the assertion about higher FPS and it’s just a random unsourced percentage. Maybe it’s true but this article has no value as a source.
but it confirms my preconceived biases…
I’ve noticed that AI slop articles tend to have a a TLDR right before the table of contents. I’m an aquarist and they’ve made it damn near impossible to get good info on fish, taking the first few pages of results before I get a forum post with useful info.
God damn slop fuckin everywhere. Tnx man.
i made the switch to linux about 2 years ago(2024,stopped dual booting on dec 2024), so far it has been ok (except for one hiccup where My TF2’S fps would tank but there is a workaround, i use Nvidia),apps are okay but i hate how basically the only option you have is GIMP, which i dont like how it doesnt have Content-Aware Scaling i think its called?,shapes would be nice too but its optional, i just use photopeas for the time being)
and video games:
i mainly avoid kernel level anticheat things so its really good here.
Proton/DXVK is very good and nice,but it would be nice if game devs made native Linux versions.
and GNOME 49 looks really nice i love the UI/UX,CachyOS is also a nice Distro(i did try Arch but mehh probably not for me i did install the de and utils but disk stuff was annoying),BTRFS is really handy and nice(i love snapshots).
devices i run desktop Linux on:
I3 12100F + GTX 1650 + 16GB RAM (gaming pc)
Raspberry pi 5 8GB ram (backup/home server pc, running debian/armbian with ext4 on this though)the only option you have is GIMP
I’d say that’s hardly the only option but surely the most well-known.
Does krita fit your purposes?Does krita fit your purposes?
ohh yeah,i didnt mention/dont use it cause its more meant for “art” then “image manipulation”
I switched to Linux full time almost two years ago when Win 10 started saying my CPU wasn’t supported. My CPU is in the i7 family and I think they all got that treatment. Since then I’ve had no major issues with Linux Mint. As for gaming, I do get some frame drops with my Nvidia 3060, but I was getting the same on Windows.
For what it’s worth, the “i7” branding isn’t a family, but a tier representation.
So basically it goes like:
i3 = basic
i5 = midrange
i7 = high end
i9 = top end
The first i7s released way back in 2010, so some older i7 chips are not supported by Windows 11 while newer ones (2018 and onwards) are.
But yeah, use Linux :)
I honestly hated W11 so much that I jumped onto Linux whether I’d be gaming on it or not.
It runs great, but even if it didn’t I wouldn’t go back.
I’d love to roll back to Linux but my GPU and the drivers don’t get along very well.
I have a 3080 and run Mint without any real issues, what sort of problems have you found come up?
I have a 3080 with two HDR capable high refresh rate monitors and a year ago when I switched I tried Pop and Fedora both of which just launched all games to a black screen. Installed arch which finally let me run most proton games but every couple of sessions I get FPS spikes and jittering and have to restart the games. Going to get a 9070XT and bazzite soon
I can’t say i’ve tried either of those distro’s but I chose mint because I heard it had good support for NVIDIA cards etc and wanted something easier to get into.
There was one game I have ran which I do have an issue with freezing in but I know this particular game had the same issue for some people on windows as well (though not me previously) so I don’t think it’s specifically a linux problem.
I’ve only had issues with audio on mint due to a mistake in one of the config files which didn’t allow it to recognise my sound board correctly but was fixed with a few minutes of googling thankfully.
I’ve heard bazzite is good for gaming so I hope it works well for you.
Which GPU do you have? There are plenty of distros that work just fine with Nvidia.
GTX 1080.
Might be an issue with my setup. I run HDMI + DVI. My BIOS refuses to work with DVI for some reason.
Might detect it as two monitors, hence why it runs at full boost clock constantly. Didn’t find a fix for it so just gave up and went back to Windows where it works just fine.
Also doesn’t seem to detect DVI without the HDMI connected. Might be my GPU is faulty.
/shrug
Buy AMD, I suppose
Amd doesn’t necessarily work better than nVidia. It can completely break your system if you’re unlucky.
Care to elaborate?
There’s a well known bug in amdgpu that will freeze your display or your whole system. Just search “amdgpu freeze linux”, apart from the usual shills it’s not a secret.
I don’t get any indication from the search that there’s a single unfixable issue, seems like various crash/freezing issues being reported over the months. I’ve only seen an issue where I needed to restart my system once in the year or so I’ve been on Linux, and that seemed to just be linked to one game (that I’ve since played without issue).
This is also the second time I’ve seen someone with a vague reference to an amd issue that is described in a way that sounds both profound (breaks for system) and mundane (by making it freeze once in a blue moon). And instructions to do a search that will give results but the implication is that they are about some massive single issue when the search term is going to give lots of unrelated results. Smells like disinformation to me, or rather trying to make nornal issues appear like massive ones.
Replace “amdgpu” with “nvidia” or “linux” with “windows” and there’s still tons of results.
It seems to me that things like
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues?label_name[]=9000+dGPU+series
Are a fairly good example of the problems that many people are having. Note they’re not very random but tend to follow a distinct motif. The driver freezes the display or the system at random times. And if it’s such a rare occurrence, I must be so very lucky.
I’m not saying that one brand is better than the other. Just that the endless shills saying that AMD is the Linux messiah are both tiresome and wrong. There can be, and are, many problems with AMS din Linux, just like there are with nVidia.
Gaming distros should have that sorted out of the box.
Are NVIDIA drivers still an absolute bitch to get working correctly? Is there still no way to run games off Gamepass?
Ok cool, so it’s NOT just easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy to switch.
I gotta say… As bad as Nvidia’s drivers are (obligatory fuck you Nvidia with a Linux middle finger), I’ve never really had a lot of trouble installing the drivers. It’s always been fairly straightforward with some shitty installer program, but it almost always worked.
Nvidia just works unless you have a some weird obscure hardware combo. It’s been like this for over a decade. Nvidia’s reputation is because their code is shit, their processes are shit, and they lack feature parity from windows that their competitors have shown isn’t an environment limitation (like changing the amount shared dram used as vram).
Tips: Your distro maintaindr already did the hard part, get the driver from them instead of nvidia (unless you’re on Debian, then you’re on your own).
If you are on debian (or any of the other rare distros that don’t package the nvidia driver for you) and using xorg, back up your xorg.conf because the nvidia installer will modify it and the new one may not work. If you’re not comfortable using the terminal, make sure you take note of the location of your xorg.conf to minimize time spent there, you will need it though.
If you’re on a normal distro, it’s usually just
sudo <PackageManager> <install flag> nvidiaorsudo <PackageManager> <install flag> nvidia-openI know nothing about Gamepass, but Mint runs Steam games on my 2080 just fine. It worked out of the box. I was a little surprised. To keep Steam from forcing me to update FO4, I bought it off GOG and installed it through heroic, with zero issues. It just worked.
But, no, it’s not easy-peasy to switch, you do need to be motivated to make the effort. Of course, there is a learning curve. Feel free to stay on Windows, that was always allowed.
No, on popular distros they are preinstalled, or only require you to check a checkbox in system settings.
Has anyone had any luck with Diablo 2 Resurrected?
Use Faugus launcher flatpak. So much easier than heroic or bottles.
Last I tried during 2025, it worked well when you installed the blizzard app as an external app on steam
I played d2r a lot using my Linux box last year. I even able to do double boxing to play my alt while I was at it. Bnet app works really well with wine out of the box. Just install bnet then log in and install d2r
