Same here, i’ve got plenty of devices running linux, and i might give it a chance again for my daily driver, but i know it will be a complete pain in the ass, and waste a lot of my time…

No it isn’t, Windows has got a ton of developers making sure non technical users don’t get stuck easily, and it mostly just works. The linux desktop is just of inferior quality, and fragmented like hell. “Linux” doesn’t even exist when you talk about the desktop, which of the hundreds of distros are you talking about? each with their own undocumented annoyances and problems regular users will just get stuck on. A nightmarish landscape of package managers, or just installing packages. For all the correct annoyances about apple/windows walled gardens, they got one thing right: if it says it runs on windows/mac, it’s extremely likely to just work for you. If it says it runs on linux, is it on the package manager your distro uses? who knows. If you can just download the package, will it work? who knows. You know what i don’t have to worry about if i find a windows app? If it will run on windows. Maybe with truly ancient apps it can be an issue, but even there the backwards compatibility they offer is pretty insane.

You can live in your imaginary world where “Linux is awesome”. But i see myself, and colleagues who’ve grown up with computers (millenials, so the generation that actually had to use them), that give linux a try, and it’s just a freaking nightmare. From endless distro choices that boil down to “pick your poison”, as there will always be something bad about them, and things you really want that don’t work, to all kinds of silly & annoying issues. (a colleague that’s really technical now had the privilege of encountering an issue with fedora based distros that for some reason fails to properly install grub. So you run through the entire installer, and at the end you have a pc that doesn’t boot. It’s a known issue on certain configurations, they haven’t fixed it yet. You know what doesn’t happen with Windows/Mac? such things)

I assume this is AI generated? The windows on some buildings in the background don’t seem to make any sense, and looking it up, i only find this image, i would’ve thought i’d find an artictle from six years ago?

Sadly enough, the same is applicable for regular programs…

If it were only this hard for bad stuff, you might have a point, but this also being an issue for good stuff is why linux is such a PITA to use…

I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.

My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).

If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.

So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).

I think you’ve gotten some good replies here.

My comment isn’t meant to scare away people, but to keep our feet on the ground. Linux gaming has made amazing progress. If you play recent, mainstream games, it’ll be very well documented, and most things will work, unless they’re explicitly made to not work (such as certain anti cheat systems).

If you play lesser known indie games, really old games, or more specific things (not sure how good VR support is?), you’ll quickly encounter issues that may or may not be well documented. Also, in another reply thread to my post, someone commented a game not working because he has multiple monitors on linux. Stuff like that is also still happening.

So it can be really decent, but know that you might encounter issues. Give it a try and see if it works for the games that are the most important for you :).

It’s just my experience when playing around with bazzite on my legion go.

But look at the other replies, there are people mentioning issues they encounter (like one guy replying a game not working because he’s using multiple monitors. If that’s breaking games on linux… that’s a far better description of the current state than the title of this thread).

And some of the other replies here are “launch steam, press play”…

1. why are we all running to steam when we’re using linux to have freedom of software? I’d expect more GOG love in a thread like this.
2. steam is indeed nice, but we also have lutris, and heroic, and i’m probably missing some other launchers here.

And i’ll give you a quick example of what i encountered: i thought of giving visual pinball a go on my legion go. It’s a free project, not on steam. Checked lutris, it was on there, but an ancient version, not kept up to date. But since the latest version, they have an actual linux build, gave that one a go, and had to manually tinker with it expecting a symlink for a certain dll to exist, but bazzite is fedora based, and uses a different convention for that dll than other distros, so had to manually make a symlink so the game could find it.

I’m a programmer, the above is an hour of frustration until i have solved it, i can manage. But that’s an example of what i encounter. I’ve got some older games in my steam library that have warnings that there are controller issues with them, …

And that is just the linux experience. Wrong distro? it might not work. Multiple screens? It might not work. The latest hardware? You’ll never guess it, but it might not work. It’s tuesday? It might not work… I’m amazed with proton etc… how much progress linux gaming has made, but we have to keep our feet on the ground, and be honest with ourselves. If we act as if we’re already there, while we’re not. How will we actually get where we need to get if everyone acts as if it’s good enough already?

As if that’s an acceptable explanation.

Why the fuck is that breaking games… Reminds me of when i was playing around with linux 15 years ago, and i saw how poor multimonitor support was compared to windows back then. And they’re still managing to have stupid issues like this in 2025…

This is why the linux desktop keeps failing “i want to play a game but it doesn’t work because i have 2 monitors”… Who wants to use that as an OS??

I know, i’ve got steam, and lutris, and heroic. And some games work in some of these things. For some free games i only find ancient versions in these launchers, …

All i’m saying is that it’s still far away from “just working”. It’s made incredible leaps, but if someone reading this will think “this’ll be easy”, and they try to play an older or less known game, they’ll quickly be disillusioned…

If you only play new popular games, and buy them on steam (and not GOG which is a platform that’s far more aligned with the linux way of thinking), sure. But i’ve got plenty of old steam games that have issues, or require me to muck around with custom control stuff, have warnings that they might not be fully supported, …

I love that we’re all moving to linux to be free, and then be using steam iso GOG XD.

And how many run on linux via a well documented way?

I’ve been playing around with bazzite a bit, and for sure, i can run a lot of games on it, but you often end up googling which launcher to use, which settings to use, … And then even if you find something, it doesn’t always work.

Linux is making good progress in this regard, but this title feels a bit over optimistic (or at least, users who take it at face value will quickly be disappointed when they can’t get 90% of their games to work).

Which would be most people?

I don’t even want to try to comprehend what these kind of people are thinking/are up to.

but doesn’t mean we should tell lies about them either. Was just correcting a small mistake i saw. It’s not because they’re lying everytime they open their mount that we can’t just be truthful :).

he didn’t call the attacker a patriot. He called anyone who would bail the attacker a patriot (and apparently to have a talk with the attacker and then uncover some conspiracy or something?)

meh, it’s not as if there’s anything better on TV

I’m not supposed to tell you this, but this is not random. you’re basically in the truman show, and you’re the central character. They noticed you thinking about it, so made sure it became relevant again!

I don’t think it has much to do with how “complex or not” it is, but rather how common it is.

It can completely fail on very simple things that are just a bit obscure, so it has too little training data.

And it can do very complex things if there’s enough training data on those things.

Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…

The point i guess with the main OS’s like windows/macOS, is that microsoft/apple put in the time to support most edge cases, and most things you can try either work, or aren’t that hard to make work (assuming you don’t go against things they try to force. But that’s not something that most users we’re talking about here do). So for windows, want to install that app for windows XP from 20 years ago? no problem. As mentioned in the article here: want to install that up to date program made for another distro? good luck…

And that’s in the end what it boils down to… It’s a fragmented ecosystem, and many slightly advanced things require that you understand how your computer & OS work. Things that a slightly advanced user can handle in Windows via some UI, will most likely be far harder on linux…

I’d love to use a linux desktop more, but sadly my time is also precious, and i just don’t have the motivation to use it fighting with the linux desktop >_<…

I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.

It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.

In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.

But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?

Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …

It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”