I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

On a similar note, performance is sometimes better. As a direct comparison, the steam version of the Lenovos Legion S handheld is significantly more performant than the windows version. Like 20% better FPS and double the battery life. Literally the only difference between the two is the OS.

As an aside.. I went down a mini-rabbit hole learning about the LAN Party House, read your website and about Sandstorm[0] and how that ended up with you at Cloudflare leading Workers. That’s a really cool and honestly inspirational path. Would love to learn more if you’ve written elsewhere…!

[0] https://sandstorm.io/news/

I see not being able to install invasive kernel level anti-cheat as a positive. I uninstalled all Riot games before they rolled it out. I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules simply because I wasn’t reading tech news before the auto update.

It keeps surprising me how many people don't care about some of the most popular games today. I mean I don't care about Battlefield or League of Legends neither, but in earlier decades of PC gaming, almost everyone had some of the most popular games. Doom, Half-Life (1 + 2) and such.

The games market today seems more similar to music in its fragmentation.

"And wow is it nice not to have all the ads and crapware in our faces anymore."

I don't understand this - and I'm not being a Windows defender here, I use Linux when I can (and promote its use).

But my Windows 11 installation has zero ads and zero "crapware". And it's a Dell!

Everything that I didn't want on the machine was removed when I purchased it (two years ago). I see no ads. If I did, this can be fixed easily by even non-technical users with OOShutUp10 or similar - or just edited with a registry change.

I've been using Windows since 3.1 and there were some ugly years but that is not the current state-of-the-state. I'm just calling it like I see it at this point.

Did you ever get those local SSDs as copy-on-write overlays on Linux? I imagine it'd be easier with btrfs support for seeding device: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Seeding-device.html

Yep, I've been gaming exclusively on Ubuntu (mainly because I want my desktop to match my servers) for several years. If you aren't playing the latest AAA FPS, then everything pretty much works.

I recently heard that Star Citizen of all things, still in eternal development hell, runs really well on Linux.

Also, amazing house, my friend is enamored of the cat-transit. I used to live not too far from you :)

Hey Kenton & the others,

What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work

Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore.

If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...

Battlefield 4's anticheat runs fine on Linux, if you end up needing one. It definitely slakes my BF fix, in the same way Deadlock is filling the LoL-shaped hole in my contemptible subsistence.

league of legends is basically the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux for myself :/ really want to just swap over to linux fully. love your website + house!

That's an amazing website, I just spent 30 minutes reading all of its content. Thank you for sharing ! I haven't been to a lan party in probably 20 years and made me jealous !

That is literally the coolest house humanity has built this side of the Industrial Revolution, if not ever. Congrats on envisioning and executing such an amazing project!

I'm sorry if you hear this a lot, but your house is so cool, and I must admit I am more than a little jealous.

I've also said it here before but I will just give up on PC gaming wholesale before I go back to Windows. It's crazy how much gaming on Linux has improved in just the past couple years.

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

As I've said elsewhere, Battlefield 6 has got a far better user experience on Linux than Windows and I would recommend it to anyone.

Does this mean the GitHub repo linked with the scripts now include up to date linux versions? Last time I looked it was all windows specific, but I'd love to setup something similar with stations for (much lower power) versions.

The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).

> I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work

I consider this a feature, not a bug

Pretty sweet setup. Mine is a bit simpler, one laptop on a spinny taco table with HOMM3 from GoG

Hey man can I be your friend? That is a super sick setup and I love how you've done it!

Love your website + house :D

what stability and performance? yeah, i dont see bsds but bluetooth doesnt work and it doesnt wake up after sleep 85 percent of the time. kind of crap really

What distro?

Wow this is amazing!

keep it up!

prrsonally using bazzite desktop for my stuff.

> (I'm aware that Battlefield series and League of Legends won't work due to draconian anti-cheat -- but nobody in my group cares to play those I guess.)

If every PC gamer would finally just hop into Linux for a year, no Windows, don't buy games that don't work. Just hard boycott, we could actually do a drastic change for PC gaming as a result. As they say "vote with your wallet" well I've been using Linux as my main OS with all my Steam games for about 3 years now? I only use Windows on work computers, but I'm increasingly only going to apply to work at places that either let me use Linux or will give me a Mac to work. I'm voting with my wallet full force. Windows has been turning into a steaming pile of trash.

I've repeatedly said, if Microsoft would release "Windows for Gamers" without all the bloated BS on it, I would consider using it.

I spent 2 grand or more on a prebuilt gaming system and it came with Windows Home which didn't let me add new users, so I was stuck with a Microsoft account user. Jokes on Microsoft, that and their AntiVirus sending files to their servers without any audit log was the last straw for me. I'm not supporting Microsoft, I say this as someone who is a "fanboy" for Microsoft (.NET is the only good thing they have going, but they can't even stick to one GUI stack they have to reinvent it 1000 more times).

Your house sounds like a great place to hold a fighting game local tournament (or something like the old Smash Summit series for Smash Bros Melee and Ultimate before Beyond The Summit shut down)

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The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks.

Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.

> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.

I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.

In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package.

The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.

I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.

EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.

I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.

I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.

I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already!

https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels

Hopefully vr headset support will get better

When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.

You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.

What might help is if AMD or Nvidia take the gamble and create decent drivers and advertise Linux compatibility, driving up sales, forcing their competitor to do the same.

I thought it was just my bubble, but I guess you're right, it does appear Linux is being talked about more in the mainstream.

My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.

>which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM.

Sadly, those exclusions are pretty big asks for the common folk. That's always what it comes down to. Some killer tool you need for whatever reason that either doesn't work on Linux, or is severely compromised.

I'm very comfortable with Linux, but my work still requires Unreal Engine. And good luck getting that going in Linux. So I'm stuck with dual booting at the bare minimum.

I have been working professionally on Linux for many years. But about once a year I have to reinstall the os because it craps out for various reasons. The same story goes for most of my team, but for some reason they seem ok with this. My issue with Linux is this: I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this. Yes you can do whatever you want, but I don’t want to do those things. I want to write code and play games, not maintain the intricacies of a running computer.

For a server there is no better choice than Linux, but for my desktop/laptop, I find other alternatives better. Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro», if so let me know, but until Linux is as low maintenance as windows or macos, it will be for those with an interest in doing that maintenance.

I realize I have a love-hate relationship with Linux. It is perfect, but flawed.

I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.

> Originally Wine, then Proton, now Bazzite make it super easy to game natively.

For many people, this is called "barely working at all." And as I get older I am becoming one of those people so quickly.

(cue nitpicking) Can Okular sign a damn pdf with a pfx certificate yet or do I still need a PhD to set that up? MS office has an online version now but it is arguably very ass and Libreoffice is not even worth a mention, using it feels like time travelling twenty years back.

Linux would be the desktop of choice years ago if anything from Adobe or Office actually worked on it, the two things that make the world go round. Valve has done their part to develop Proton, but there is no equal push for things people can't do work without.

Big fan of Linux. Use various distros daily.

That said, tech folk routinely underestimate how much they rely on their own technical skill. Try using Linux for a week without ever opening a terminal. Terminal is a "f this I'm going back to Windows" button for most people.

>but I just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows

Many games refuse to run in VM, even if that VM is windows one. I bet there is a trick to bypass, but then you are at risk of being banned or can't receive support when needed.

> Weirdly enough, MacOS in a VM is a huge pit

That isn't weird. It's by design. MacOS is only designed to run on Apple hardware, and a VM, even if the host is Apple hardware isn't really Apple hardware.

> just use a VM with PCIe passthrough to pass in a gpu and to load up a game for windows or use CAD, etc. Seriously, ez.

as pointed out by others and throughout the thread, anti-cheat is very restrictive inside a vm. even cloud streaming fails to support some popular titles from EA and R* due to this.

meanwhile, WSL exists, and now provides good gpu passthrough and has a higher success rate with the said permutation.

I used to believe, until 2005 thereabouts, then I got tired.

Plus I never been that FOSS religious, any system with some POSIX compatibility is good enough for me.

I remember when I first started reading HN how disappointed I was to see so many comments shitting on Linux and/or FOSS. I was kind of shocked because this is exactly the group that should be evangelizing this stuff. At the end of the day I realized I’m willing to put up with some inconvenience in exchange for freedom, but most people just aren’t.

The amount of hate spewed at FOSS is astounding really. People are literally giving you shit for free. Chill out.

Lol. Here have my upvote

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AFAIK this comes down a lot to NVIDIA not doing enough efforts for the Linux drivers. There is a pretty well documented and understood reason for the perf hit NVIDIA GPUs get on Linux.

Honestly, considering where we came from, a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider. Especially for all the people that don't want to touch Windows 11 with a 11-foot pole (which I am), it's a more than decent path. I can reboot into my unsupported Win10 install if I really need the frames.

Really, Linux benchmarks need to be split between AMD and NVIDIA. Both are useful, as the "just buy an amd card lol" crowd is ignoring the actually large NVIDIA install base, and it's not like I'm gonna swap out my RTX 3090 to go Linux.

Thanks for the comparison! Would you have an apples to apples, or rather an NVIDIA to NVIDIA comparison instead of "across the board"? I'd suspect the numbers are worse for the pure NVIDIA comparison, for what I mentioned above.

> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards

I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux on a GeForce GTX 1060 (which is almost 10 years old!) without a fan (I found later that it was broken) and I generally did not have issues (couple of times in the whole game slowed for couple of seconds, but nothing major).

This sounds nothing like my personal experience. I was able for play every single game I tried including

Asetto corsa competizione

Basically all total war games

Cyberpunk

Witcher 3

Dishonored

Mafia 1 and 2

AC origins/odyssey

Civilization 5

Detroit become human

Prey

Crusader kings 3

Stellaris

Metro exodus

And more games I don’t remember

I don’t enable ray tracing or resolution scaling so that might be making the difference on games that have it.

Chances are you can run it if something is at least gold on protondb

Also my gpu is amd.

As a side note, I played cyberpunk for more than 400 hours on max settings without any major issue so saying it doesn’t work because of rtx is very silly imho

> Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards

Not at all my experience which makes me question the rest. Also https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 most people seem quite happy with it so it's not a "me" problem.

Finally the "10-30% drop in average FPS across the board" might be correct, then so what? I understand a LOT of gamers want to have "the best" performance for what they paid good money for but pretty much NO game becomes less fun with even a 30% FPS drop, you just adjust the settings and go play. I think a lot of gamers do get confused and consider maximizing performances itself as a game. It might be fun, and that's 100% OK, but it's also NOT what playing an actual game is about.

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These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.

Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.

Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).

I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.

SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.

FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.

Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.

I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.

I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.

> And of course, as always, those for which it works will tell you you're doing-it-wrong™ .

This sounds like you are rejecting help because you have made up your mind in frustration already.

Because you are doing it wrong. If you want an OS that just works, you should use Ubuntu or Fedora. Why is SteamOS based on Arch then? Because Valve wants to tweak things in it and tinker with it themselves to get it how they like.

You don't.

So use an OS that requires less from you and that tries to just work out of the box, not one that is notorious for being something you break and tinker with constantly (Arch).

Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.

You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS

As an Arch (btw) user myself, yes, you're doing something wrong.

Arch won't hold your hands to ensure everything required is installed, because many dependencies are either optional (you have to read the pacman logs) or just hidden (because it's in the game itself). Valve actually does a great job providing a "works everywhere" runtime as their games are distributed in a flatpak-like fashion, but things can seep through the cracks.

The compositor can have an effect. The desktop settings. The GPU drivers. What's installed as far as e.g. fonts go. RAM setup, with or without swap.

As for steamOS, the real difference, is that despite being Arch-based, you're not installing Arch, but steamOS. A pre-packaged pre-configured Arch linux, with a set of opinionated software and its set of pre-made config files, for a small set of (1) devices. It's not really Arch you're installing, but a full-blow distro that happens to be arch-based.

That said, I understand your frustration as I've hit this many times on a laptop with dual graphics. Getting PRIME to run with the very first drivers that supported it was fun. Oh and I'm likely to hit the same walls as you since I just switched my gaming rig to Arch. GLHF!

I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.

You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.

Well, but many games just work. Actually, I try starting the games without any tweaks before heading over to protondb.com, and often they run just fine.

But it is also true that many games still require minor tweaks. For example, just last week, I found out that I had to enable hardware acceleration for the webview within Steam, just to be able to log in to Halo Infinite. It was just clicking a checkbox, but otherwise, the game would not have been playable.

But I am always surprised when you find out you have those kinds of issues with Windows as well.

Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.

Worms run just fine IF you force the proton version. There is a really old and unmaintained Linux version that doesn't work.

Never had any issues with among us, but granted it was a long time since I tried it now.

Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.

Yeah, if you read the actual ProtonDB comments, they're like "works great, after you do this hack, except this part is broken: thumbs up"

> Worms, Among Us, Parkitect

All three games works perfectly well on both Steam OS and on my kid's PC running CachyOS without any intervention.

As other have said, it's usually driver or configuration issue, which is why I prefer using the prebuilt, pre-installed steam deck.

The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.

There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?

Don't use Arch unless you don't mind spending time troubleshooting and configuring.

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> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.

Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.

I switched in 1999. I've never really had any problems in all that time.

Although it was to BSDi then, and then FreeBSD and then OpenBSD for 5 years or so. I can't remember why I switched to Debian but I've been there ever since.

I'm sat here now playing Oxygen Not Included.

But what about laptops? I don’t use desktop machines anymore (last time was in 2012). Apple laptops are top notch. I use ubuntu as vm (headless) for software development tho

> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.

Amazing that high dpi still doesn’t work. I tried to run linux on 4k in around 2016-2017 and the experience was so bad I gave up.

> On occasion you have to compile apps from source

That's fine for people on hn, but it instantly wipes out any chance of non technical users on Windows and Mac. It's a total deal breaker.

Did you start using Linux on the Mac hardware or on PC hardware? I have a late era Intel Macbook and was considering switching it to Ubuntu or Debian since it is getting kinda slow.

Curious: do enterprises using Windows suffer through all the system-level ads and nagware? Or do they get a version that lets their employees actually focus on work instead of learning the many reasons they should consider switching back to Edge?

I have Interstellar on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray that features HDR on the cover, Sony 4K Blu-ray player (UBP-X700) and a LG G4 OLED television. I also have an AVR (Denon AVR-S760H 7.2 Ch) connecting both the Blu-ray and a PC running Linux with a RTX 3060 12GB graphic card to the television. I've been meaning to compare HDR on Linux with the Blu-ray. I guess now better than never. I'll reply back to my post after I am done.

I find that running HDR games in standalone steam gamescope works great for my OLED tv. Not perfect, but great.

I don't think this is true. I can go into my display settings in kde plasma and enable HDR and configure the brightness. I have a nvidia blackwell card.

nvidia

Yup. I fully understand that X11 is a shitshow under the hood, but it works and Wayland frequently does not work. Screen recording, window positions, various multi-monitor and calibration issues, ...

On my laptop I use to write blog posts, that never ever gets plugged into a second screen? Sure, Wayland's great. On a computer that I expect normal people to be able to use without dumb problems? Hell no!

I think Wayland is good for more technical users. Going from i3 to sway or bspwm to river feels like essentially nothing has changed. On the other hand, Gnome X11 to Wayland might be a bigger shock.

Unfortunately, Wayland inherently can't be like Pipewire, which instantly solved basically 90% of audio issues on Linux through its compatibility with Pulseaudio, while having (in my experience) zero drawbacks. If someone could make the equivalent of Pipewire for X11, that'd be nice. Probably far-fetched though.

"window positions not restoring at application start"

Well you see, you are actually just silly for wanting this or asking for this, because it's actually just a security flaw...or something. I will not elaborate further.

Which desktop environment do your friends use?

This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.

I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.

Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.

> Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.

It's Critic's Disease: When a band moves to a major label, they "suddenly" put out their critically acclaimed masterpiece, when before nobody would review a thing they did and mocked their fanatic fans.

"Now, they've matured."

Let them have it, though. People need to rationalize their past hostility to the right thing in some way in order to progress. If you want people to say that they were ever wrong, you'll die waiting. The situation became completely intolerable where they were insisting on staying no matter what because they weren't stuck-up nerds who care about stupid stuff that no one cares about. They were finally humiliated enough to move.

They'll end up moving to weird semi-commercial distributions that market specifically to them, too, and ridicule people who criticize those distributions for being stuck-up nerds who care about stupid stuff no one cares about. As long as it doesn't break Debian, I'm cool.

I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.

In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.

This is the key. It’s not that 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but rather 2026 is very much not the year of the Windows desktop.

Bazzite is rough in the way that all distributions are, but I imagine Windows 11 is rougher.

I think we've reached a point where Windows is about as rough as Linux. But the problem is still that people are familiar with Windows and have learned how to deal with the roughness; not so on Linux. And so long as Windows owns the business and education sectors, it will always have the benefit of that familiarity.

Same! I made a comment earlier that it's now very easy to navigate bash with guidance from ChatGPT.

Debian (stable) is great but I wouldn't use it for a gaming PC on modern hardware. The drivers included are just too old. Bazzite or Arch (DIY option) seem better options.

I'd say it's both... In particular 6.16 seems to be a defining point in terms of stability and performance at least for me. My RX 9070XT is finally running with no issues since 6.16 that I've noticed in any of the admittedly few games I play.

Mesa, the kernel drivers and Proton have all seen a lot of growth this past year combined with a bunch of garbage decisions MS has doubled down on... not to mention, enough Linux users in tech combined with Valve/Steam's efforts have made it visible enough that even normies are considering giving Linux a try.

A large part of it is that for most people, the vast majority of their computer use is in a web browser. Even "standalone" programs are often just an Electron app so they don't even have to use their computer differently than they are used to. Yes Windows has gotten bad, and Linux no longer has some of the major issues people would frequently run into (e.g. hardware compability is largely a non-issue, audio just works, etc.), but I think it is mostly that things are just way more platform agnostic today.

There are plenty. I run only Linux at home but CAD software for hobbies (Fusion 360), most games that want kernel level anti cheat, some embedded DRM-enabled media, all sort of just fail. Other things, like GPU tuning or messing with your displays/drivers are harder than they should be. My Bluetooth earbuds just don't work with my Linux machines.

FUSE will provide Dropbox in a more integrated way than Windows (eg. terminal) and a cursory Google revealed some projects for Dropbox that do the JIT download you are after - they are old, but I wager still work just fine (an inactive project can just mean that it's complete).

I just switched to Linux. It's a great gig, and I'm actively encouraging everyone I know still infected with the malware known as Windows 11 to switch.

But some of the drawbacks really aren't edge cases. Apparently there is still no way for me to have access to most creative apps (e.g. Adobe, Affinity) with GPU acceleration. It's irritating that so few Linux install processes are turnkey the way they are for Windows/Mac, with errors and caveats that cost less-than-expert users hours of experimenting and mucking with documentation.

I could go on, but it really feels like a bad time to be a casual PC user these days, because Windows is an inhospitable swamp, and Linux still has some sharp edges.

I agree, I'd cut off dual booting and go full Linux when the hardware and software I use supports it. One of which being a PCIe Elgato capture card, another being an audio mixer with no driver support and the alternatives are very hacky and too complicated for me.

I permanently switched from Windows to Linux about five years ago. I had the same issue as you with Dropbox, so I switched to using the Maestral client for Dropbox instead which has support for selective sync. Works like a charm for me.

When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.

Examples:

- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format

- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects

- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat

The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.

It’s bad for society for the desktop OS market to be a proprietary monopoly. It basically allows Microsoft to extract rent from the public defender.

I do understand the evangelism being obnoxious. I don’t advocate for people to switch if they have key use cases that ONLY windows or OS X can meet. Certainly not good to be pushy. But otherwise, people are really getting a better experience by switching to Linux.

Because there are people who care about Free software from a philosophical standpoint on how societies should function and interact.

The community aspect of free software both pushes for more people to participate (and often for other groups to be excluded as "wrong" or "evil").

But that community only offers secondary benefits to those who are authors or painters or photographers rather than software developers - economic factors, risk aversion, functionality, and so on. The FLOSS communities are almost invariably driven toward hobbyists and developers rather than authors, artists, gamers, and the like - people whose interest lies outside of tinkering with and/or improving software.

The BSDs were never really a movement in that sense, and macOS is still just a product even if there are enthusiastic users of them both.

Similarly on the Linux side: Android, Steam Deck, and countless IoT devices are examples of successful products where the Linux aspect of them is not really even advertised.

Because we want the best for other people.

> Why are we so needy for ALL users and use-cases to be Linux-based and Linux-centric once we make that choice ourselves? What is it about Linux?

Software freedom is A Good Thing.

And if you want my help, don't ask me to support the garbage that $OSCORP is foisting on you.

> why is it that the Linux people seem to be so needy for everyone to make the same choices they make?

This is the sort of question an apolitical person would ask a liberal (I am aware liberalism had been tainted in the recent times), like why is it you people are so needy and constantly preaching about democracy?

These seem annoying, but I'd argue that these problems are in some ways less significant on Linux than on Windows. If some function of Windows is broken or unsatisfactory, there is not necessarily a way to fix it.

But you can adjust your own system. It'd be unhelpful of me to suggest to an unhappy Windows user that they should switch to another operating system, as that demands a drastic change of environment. On the other hand, you're already familiar with Linux, so the switching cost to a different Linux distribution is significantly lower. Thus I can fairly say that "Ubuntu getting worse" is less of a problem than "Windows getting worse." You have many convenient options. A Windows user has fewer.

The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!

I moved from ubu to mint about five years ago due to snap and am quite happy.

What are you talking about? Firefox hasn't been single process since more than 10 years ago. At most, it uses 7% for the main process and I have thousands of tabs open. I can't talk about the other two, but I've had processes use 60% of the system memory without problem (everything else is slow due swapping, but that's expected).

Try Pop OS 24.04

Adoption has really picked up since 1900.

Thanks for the counterbalancing post. Linux isn't quite there yet.

Right, because Windows has no technical gibberish: \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ C$\WinSxS>ps1 DWORD etc.

Outdated view—most people don’t do these things, and just use the app store and menu.

Yeah, because getting ads and pushed to use more Microsoft products all day long isn't an annoyance when they just want to get on with using the computer.

They remain consumers at their peril.

It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.

Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1prm8rl/archanno...

I've had mixed experiences with AMD. Back in the day - a bit after Linus told Nvidia to fuck off - I tried to get my Radeon 5850HD (i think?) working on Ubuntu. It was one of those things I spent the whole weekend (OS reinstalls really add up) trying to make work, to no avail. Relative to that nonsense, the equivalent proprietary Nvidia driver just worked after being installed.

A couple of months ago I bought a second hand RX 7800 XT, and prepared myself for a painful experience, but I think it just worked. Like I got frustrated trying to find out how to download and install the driver, when I think it just came with Linux Mint already.

I've been using a full amd build with arch on it for years now. never had graphics related issues after an update. my biggest gripe is with the hdmi organization and how we can't have proper support with open source drivers.

Yes they are less shit for most people. I'm on PopOS and had both a 6650xt and a 6900xt. Almost all games works to the point Linux compatibility as become an afterthought for me now. The main tinkering is selecting a version of Proton or ProtonGE.I feel I have to do this less and less.

It's seems to be what most of AMD card experience, but i didn't dig on numbers.

Still less than the number of people bashing windows.

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NixOS is really a profound experience, once you embrace it. I used Arch for ~3 years and ended up reinstalling it maybe 15 times on my desktop alone. Switched to NixOS and I've used the same installation for 3 years, synced with my laptop and server, switching from x11 to Wayland to KDE to GNOME then back again with no problem.

It doesn't feel real sometimes. My dotfiles are modularized, backed up in Github and versioned with UEFI rollback when I update. I might be using this for the rest of my life, now.

I wouldn't recommend Xubuntu for the average user. What you feel is about Xubuntu, not Linux. Normies are doing well adapting to Linux Mint. It's easy for Windows users to get used to within a few days and it has sane defaults that match what users expect. It just works.

Outdated view. Regular people ask for help at the genius bar or IT poindexter all the time. And pretty icons are plentiful.

Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)

If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle

Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.

Just use Debian. If you have technical skills, run Debian Testing. If not, run Debian Stable, or someone else who repackages Debian Testing such as Mint or (as you mentioned) Ubuntu LTS.

Debian Testing will sometimes break, so technical skills are necessary if you want to always be sure you can be up and running. Otherwise, something may not work for a few days to a week, like CUPS (printing). 99.9% of the time, it won't be your networking or something super-important, but it could be. When you update, read the list of changes and absolutely make sure that you know what the things are that are being uninstalled, and whether you can do without them for a few days. Check the internet for when packages are removed from testing (and why) or will be moved into testing from unstable. Don't forget that you can use LLMs now when you have a problem.

Once you've been able to handle Debian Testing for a while, especially through a couple of breakages, you'll probably be confident enough and knowledgeable enough to know if you want to go to another distro. I personally don't need anything other than testing for my desktops, and stable for my servers.

edit: Debian Testing gets software that has worked smoothly on Debian Unstable for a two-week period. Sometimes things get missed during those two weeks, and sometimes Debian decides to reorganize packages radically in a way that takes more than one update. One thing to remember is that urgent bugfixes to Debian Stable might bypass testing altogether, and might actually arrive later to testing than everywhere else. You'll probably hear about those on the news or on HN, and you might want to manually install those fixes before they actually hit testing.

As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.

Don't go for Ubuntu LTS. There are many choices that would work equally well for you. I'd go for Fedora KDE edition (but could easily be EndeavorOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Absolutely don’t use Ubuntu LTS when you’re new (or old) to Linux.

Ubuntu is optimised for corporations, as this is the main source of income for Canonical. Try Debian _testing_.

Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.

I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.

Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.

I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.

Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.

Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.

Proton for games had changed things dramatically. Gamers can legit switch to Linux with barely a second thought, without being technical.

Linux/x86 still is poor for battery life compared to Apple.

I'm glad that I am not the only one saying this. I made the switch 20+ years ago for my day to day use, and I have rarely experienced any problems with it.

But now it is good and also has working networking, audio and you can watch videos and scroll webpages without screen tearing.

Unless you're a power user, you should check out Photopea[1]. It runs well as a PWA.

[1] https://www.photopea.com/

I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years, and I've been using it on the desktop since 1999, so I lived through the infamous "Year of the Linux Desktop" era.

I've not seen anything like the current level of momentum, ever, nor this level of mainstream exposure. Gaming has changed the equation, and 2026 will be wild.

I don't think the prevalence of these articles this time of year is because the authors go on holiday, but instead is because the new year is the perfect time to ponder: "Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?"

I guess everyone’s in a “fuck it I’m ready to try some new stuff” mood too so this content is perfectly suited for new years. Would never have noticed this without your comment.

Perhaps it could have been written, but it would have been far less accurate.

2026, the year of linux

What an abysmally cynical take. More good stuff is good. Be happy about it.

Except every year you didn't have people like Pewdiepie and DHH pushing Linux. As as channels like GamersNexus doing Linux benchmarks. At the same time Windows and Mac making very dumb mistakes. So this time it does feel different, even if it might not be in the end.

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For me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux Note that it's coming up on 10 years.

I think I am hard-pressed to think of a more recent example...

WSL. Android app support (for the little while it lasted). Recall.

> Biggest hardware challenge I've faced is my Logitech mouse

In case it helps:

https://github.com/libratbag/piper

The only real obnoxious slow-down daemons I'm familiar with are the "system indexing" things (GNOME Tracker, KDE Baloo) -- highly recommend disabling them.

I've been using Kubuntu for years with good results. I prefer KDE to Gnome, which Kubuntu takes care of, and I normally add in the flatpak repositories so I don't need snap. That has generally worked well for me in the last 5 years.

For certain timeperiods I have needed to switch to Fedora, or the Fedora KDE spin, to get access to more recent software if I'm using newer hardware. That has generally also been pretty stable but the constant stream of updates and short OS life are not really what I'm looking for in a desktop experience.

There are three issues that linux still has, which are across the board:

- Lack of commercial mechanical engineering software support (CAD & CAE software)

- Inability to reliably suspend or sleep for laptops

- Worse battery life on laptops

If you are using a desktop and don't care about CAD or CAE software I think it's probably a better experience overall than windows. Laptops are still more for advanced users imho but if you go with something that has good linux support from the factory (Dell XPS 13, Framework, etc.) it will be mostly frictionless. It just sucks on that one day where you install an update, close the laptop lid, put it in your backpack, and find it absolutely cooking and near 0% when you take it out.

I also have never found something that gave me the battery life I wanted with linux. I used two XPS 13's and they were the closest but still were only like 75% of what I would like. My current Framework 16 is like 50% of what I would like. That is with always going for a 1080p display but using a VPN which doesn't help battery life.

We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.

My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5

> Does this line up with others’ experience? If yes, what actually works long-term? Minimal bases, immutable distros, avoiding certain package systems, strict service hygiene, specific hardware?

No, not really. A Linux desktop with a DE will always be slower and more brittle than an headless machine due to the sheer number of packages/components, but something like Arch + Plasma Shell (without the whole KDE ecosystem) should be very stable and snappy. The headaches caused by immutable distros and flatpaks are not worth it IMO, but YMMV.

With debian and KDE (both personal preference), but no snap or flatpak, it works wonderfully. Power/sleep-management has become better than a default windows install. All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, just works.

Not at all.

I've run Void Linux + Xmonad for many years without any such issues. I also recently installed CachyOS for my kid to game on (KDE Plasma) and it works super well.

> Does this line up with others’ experience?

Not really, no. What did you install that slowed things down?

> If yes, what actually works long-term?

Plain ordinary Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, running on an ancient Thinkpad T430 with a whopping 8GB of RAM and an SSD (which is failing, but that's not Linux's fault, it's been on its way out for about a year and I should probably stop compiling Haiku nightlies on it).

Can you give an example of which desktop apps are "dragging in daemons"?

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It's not like Windows comes with built in support for running linux with gpu support.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...

I just got a laptop for Christmas (first thing I've bought for myself in a good while) with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a video card inside of it, AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, AMD Radeon 6550M. 144hz screen.

Not the best, but works for me.

I put CachyOS on it, using Steam just run the game's installer adding it as a game to your library -- you just select which proton you want (cachyos-proton) as a dropdown in the Properties in the Steam library. that's it.

it's lightweight, arch (I ditched manjaro), runs KDE and games perfectly, cursor IDE runs great, VMS run great.

first thing I did when I got it from fedex was remove Windows and put Linux on it. I thought 'maybe I'll just bite the bullet and sign up a Microsoft cloud account to be able to access ..my desktop' and 1/4 through its install I held the power button and popped a flash drive in. just say no to windows and you'll all be happy, trust me.

the only effort it required was for me to say f this on using Lutris and just use Steam as the wrapper.

2026 is definitely the year for linux. every year is. valve heavily invested in Arch, proton, and is using Linux on their devices and honestly: Windows is spyware, and after their vibe coded jank 25H2 update that broke a ton of things and Windows 10 being EOL, I hope more people get to enjoy throwing Ventoy on a USB stick with a bunch of linux isos copied over to it and boot and play with what they love.

so I disagree, 2026 is the year for Linux, and Linux is love.

> Can I get a laptop to sleep after closing the lid yet?

> on windows all of this just works

Disagree on the sleep one - my work laptop doesn’t go to sleep properly. The only laptop I’ve ever used that behaves as expected with sleep is a macbook.

Still no big CAD names that I'm aware of (annoyingly), Libre Calc works fine for me as an Excel alternative, I have used Matlab on it but not recently, not sure on the others.

Laptop sleep and suspend can still be finicky unfortunately.

I will say my experience using CAD or other CAE software on windows has gotten progressively worse over the years to the point that FEA is more stable on linux than on windows.

We do really need a Solidworks, Creo or NX on linux though. My hope has been that eventually something like Wine, Proton, or other efforts to bring windows games to linux will result in us getting the ability to run them. They are one of the last things holding me back from fully moving away from windows.

Vivado has a native linux build. Windows is the port not the other way around. The whole EDA suites from Cadence and Synopsys is native linux.

EDA tools are all historically UNIX tools and still to this day

These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.

I hear you, and also value Excel and a few other products, but I hit my perosnal limit with Windows enshittificatoion early last year and changed my daily driver at home to Linux.

I added a couple VMs running windows, linux, and whatever else I need in proxmox w/ xrdp/rdp and remina, and it's really the best of both worlds. I travel a good deal and being able to remotely connect and pick up where I left off while also not dealing with windows nagware has been great.

Adobe works

From what I've heard most of that 3% is steam decks, so the growth isn't exactly people switching their daily OS driver.

Thank you for being honest. This is exactly my experience as well.

My main joy of Linux is to have tilling manager and to have same machine on which I can both play games and work. Which since Windows I couldn't make happen.

Interesting, do you think game devs in future will just target windows/proton and not bother with native Linux ports?

VMs, second machine with firewall etc. I recommend moving everything you can to trustworthy tech. Doesn’t have to be all at once but a gradual process.

An ex lease Thinkpad T Series with Intel graphics is a good choice for value and compatibility. eg a T490 or T14 era machine.

Using hardware at least 6-12 months old is a good way to get better compatibility.

Generally Linux drivers only start development after the hardware is available and in the hands of devs, while Windows drivers usually get a head start before release. Brand new hardware on a LTS (long term support) distro with an older kernel is usually the worst compatibility combo.

Some N100 based mini PC.

Grab one of the old Windows 10 machines which are showing up from corporations upgrading to Windows 11.

Steam Deck. It has been my main computing device for 2 years.

Article mentioned Bazzite. For normal computing Mint or Fedora.

> without it I cannot function in a work environment.

This is more about what you choose as your operating environment, not what your work imposes as your working environment.

Most places of work, mine included, run Microsoft services that lock them into the ecosystem incredibly tightly.

As per the article title, "if you want to feel like you actually own your PC", this is about your PC, not the one provided to you by your workplace (since it's likely owned by them).

One thing I'm worried about in my work environment is Microsoft enforcing the web versions of Office and deprecating the stand alone desktop applications. The web versions are a massive step down in terms of functionality and ease of use. Your mention of OWA makes me feel as if that is what Outlook will be sacrificed for at some point in the future anyway.

I had a similar issue, but I ended up installing Debian and running Windows 10 as a virtual machine with VirtualBox. The webcam can be accessed as if were installed on the guest OS and haven't had a problem with Zoom or Teams. Just sharing in case it helps.

Same here, since 1997 though, running the tax software in a virtual machine with Linux as host.

Yes. The reason the year of the Linux desktop has yet to arrive is because most people don't understand this joke. Linux is powerful because it is made for power users (although certain distros are changing this)

> I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again

And this is a problem with Linux ?

Photoshop (for example) largely works in Wine, although it's not stable enough for production usage. The problem is the CC itself and the installer, which is unimaginably bloated and glued to the Internet Exp... I mean Edge Web View and many other Windows-only things.

Your entire comment could be written 20 years ago and it would just about fit perfectly.

> as a non-gamer.

As a non-gamer, you might not fully grasp how entrenched Windows is for game development, distribution, content creation and modding. This is significant and reporting on it is good stuff, even if it's outside of your niche.

This is not an argument in good faith. Nintendo is a company that primarily makes hardware to sell its own games. The Wii is not a general computing device and we never expected it to do that.

Linux claims to be a general computing operating system, but had historically not prioritized gaming (or UI…). This has changed and the article notes as much. Windows OS is used for a benchmark because it is still the gold standard, and the OS that most games are intended to be executed with.

> When do we ever say Nintendo is good now because it plays Sony titles?

If it did, we would.

> Why are you holding computing to the same standard?

What?

> The article seems to be entirely about Windows gaming.

It is. It'd be weird if it wasn't.

Today I'd recommend CachyOS. While I haven't connected a scanner, everything else I've tried just seems to work.

You're going to get everyone's opinion here. Try a bunch of the major ones and see what works best. I did this and landed on Fedora but ymmv

Yes, Mint for most people.

I am using Fedora on machines with new hardware and liking it as well. It has small pluses/minuses vs Mint.

Omarchy is pretty streamlined for developers and you can play games as well as they work well.

cachyos is a good os that is also performant. arch though so there are quirks around the rolling update model but you always have the newestish packages and if you update regularly there seems to be less headache.

the Universal Blue project has got a great suite of distributions:

https://universal-blue.org/

Simple, Debian with i3-wm

Sounds ultra-specific to your experience. VMs, package management and networking are all things that macOS and Windows stumble with for regular usage. I've used all three OSes professionally, and Linux requires the least configuration to get work done.