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If you could run all of your apps & games on Linux…
Would you switch to a Linux desktop?
Why? Or Why not?
I’ll go first.
Yes. I would switch. I already switched back in 2019 & I’ve been happy.
I couldn’t even run everything I wanted to run (a couple of games and Atmel Studio (embedded IDE which is a variant of VStudio, only runs on windows)
Why?
Updates are amazing on Linux (rarely do they cause any down time — no sitting & staring at update screen like Windows)
I like development on Linux. I like hobbyist “family” of Linux where it is “us against them”. 
I also do Android programming and Android Studio runs better on Linux.
Linux typically uses a lot less RAM than Windows which is nice.
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What's primarily keeping me back is my own lack of familiarity.
I've messed around with a lot of Linux distros, and even though it happens rarely, there have been occasions where I've somehow managed to completely make a mess of things, and the simplest solution has always been to repave. I can't afford that luxury.
I'm much more familiar with Windows, so when I do screw something up, it's extremely rare (aka "never") I can't recover without doing something so drastic.
It's a catch-22. Because I won't dive in head-first, Linux is relegated to run in VMs and until that changes, the rest of my systems keep chugging away on Windows. Which is a crying shame 'cuz over the years, I've come to realize that Linux runs damned well. At times it sure feels like Microsoft these days is trying very hard to push me in that direction, as most of their "improvements" over what already exists sure don't feel like such.
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dandy72 wrote: What's primarily keeping me back is my own lack of familiarity.
Preach brother. The only reason I know it is because I had a buddy into it 20 years ago and have been following BSD and Linux since. We used to geek out about it.
You can see if there's a Linux User Group (LUG) in your area. I used to go to those as a kid. Peeps were great. I can guarantee you if you wanna learn it, someone there will show you the ropes.
dandy72 wrote: I've messed around with a lot of Linux distros, and even though it happens rarely, there have been occasions where I've somehow managed to completely make a mess of things, and the simplest solution has always been to repave. I can't afford that luxury.
There are beginner friendly distros.
These two are closer to what you're used to with Windows:
Kubuntu
Linux Mint
Kubuntu will use Wayland (newer display crap). Linux Mint still doesn't. But both are beginner friendly.
There's also Ubuntu. It's a great, beginner friendly distro too. Its desktop experience is nothing like Windows though. It's more like Windows 8 meets iPhone. It's pretty nifty, but IMO it's worth installing an extension to give you a normal taskbar with it.
Anywho, start with a beginner friendly distro man. Unless you enjoy pain. 
dandy72 wrote: It's a catch-22. Because I won't dive in head-first, Linux is relegated to run in VMs and until that changes,
Yeah, immersion is the best way to really learn something. Having it tucked away in a VM makes it easy to not use it.
IMO, if there's an interest, find some peeps at a user group. The right friends really do make all the difference.
Jeremy Falcon
modified 9-Aug-24 19:12pm.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: Yeah, immersion is the best way to really learn something. Having it tucked away in a VM makes it easy to not use it.
That is a very good point. I had “tried” Linux a number of times before & it never stuck.
Then I became really annoyed with windows in 2019 & entirely erased it from my machine and installed Ubuntu (user friendly distro as you said) and jumping in and forcing myself to figure out every problem I encountered got me there.
However, I also understand that is an extreme viewpoint & not everyone wants to go all-in.
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: There are beginner friendly distros.
I have an uncanny ability to mess up even the beginner-friendly ones, including (especially?) Ubuntu and a few of its derivatives, like Mint. If it's not a video or network driver, it's the file system, or grub, or...
I currently have 862GB worth of ISOs (going back a decade or more) spread across 34 different folders (a different distro per folder), so I don't really need an introduction around which as best at what. It's more of a matter of making a commitment to using one daily, and finding out how to get things back up and running when (say) an update gets botched (it happens) and the system no longer boots...
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Oh btw, Linux isn't without its problems... especially with some drivers. Anyone saying otherwise is just lying. But, crap runs faster on it I'm convinced. And well, nobody's forcing peeps to give them all their data. So, ya know... there's that.
Jeremy Falcon
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Yeah I have an NVidia GPU & I have had issues.
I had one bad problem I didn’t understand & i ended up doing a complete re-install of Ubuntu (which I later discovered was not necessary).
I have hit the pain points using Linux but I had a backup windows laptop if I got into trouble and that kept me going. The switch will not be without pain.
I also had all of my data backed up so I didnn’t lose anything on re-install.
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I've been running NVIDIA on Linux Mint for about 8 years give or take. People way NVIDIA is a problem, but other than one instance where an upgraded package left me without X-Windows (which was fixed by removing the package manually and installing it again), I've never had an issue.
Other than that issue, and some hardware problems where the machine locked up when running GPU intensive workloads (because the heatsink and fan fell of the video card) Linux has been rock solid and never skipped a beat.
Complaints:
I was not able to get the Samsung mobile phone backup software to work under Linux a few years back - so I had to use Windows for that once when I changed phones.
Discord wants a package re-install about once per week. You start it up, it tells links you to an updated .deb file, and you download and install it either by double clicking on it from the Gui, or manually according to your preference. That might be because Firefox is my default browser and it doesn't run remote code. Chrome is available and also works.
Otherwise, everything pretty much works. Not only do I not miss Windows at all - I feel sad when I have to use it for work . . .
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: But, crap runs faster on it I'm convinced.
I sitll remember some years ago in burning a CD with Nero in Windows XP around 15 to 20 minutes and that's going fast.
Linux burned the same CD in less than 2.5 minutes
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: I sitll remember some years ago in burning a CD with Nero in Windows XP around 15 to 20 minutes and that's going fast.
Linux burned the same CD in less than 2.5 minutes
Well. To be fair, let's compare apples with apples; burning a CD isn't exactly a task that will overwhelm an OS, even during the XP days. Undoubtedly there's a burn rate selection that was not chosen. Or the burner itself, hooked up to XP, didn't support the higher speed - I remember the introduction of faster drives was a very gradual thing.
OTOH, I've burned CDs at (say) 52x. No buffer underrun, no problem reported whatsoever, only for me to realize weeks/months later the disc was rather unreliable. I stick with burning at 4x, no matter what the OS. And better yet, these days I burn as few discs as I can...
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: nobody's forcing peeps to give them all their data
This is big part of why I only have Win11 on one VM or two. Otherwise I'd probably have migrated to it within a few days of its original release.
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On my Win11 box (23H2) I bypassed the account creation, but... now they're literally nagging me to create one with every thing I do in it. You change a setting... nag. You use the start menu... nag. It doesn't take a genius to figure out if they care that much, then there's a reason.
Jeremy Falcon
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Real men use QNX... on a Raspberry Pi... underwater.
Jeremy Falcon
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I haven't tried it underwater yet, but Linux does run nicely on the Pi.
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No. Why? In one word (or maybe two) - VisualStudio. There is nothing in Linux world that comes close to it; not by a mile; not by many miles. I've tried over the years a few times and all the substitutes were so poor, specially on the debugging side, that I was relieved when I got back to Windows.
Another gripe I have with Linux world, this time as a user, not a developer, is the endless list of options where there isn't one that is obviously better. You could use GNOME or KDE or Xface or Cinnamon or (any other of 30+ desktop environments out there). Makes you want to go back to the command line but there are tens of distros, each one with it's own idiosyncrasies and slight incompatibilities.
All that makes me use Linux only for small gizmos like the many RPis and BeagleBones I use for work and around the house. General rule is: find a working configuration and don't touch it unless you're forced to.
Mircea
modified 9-Aug-24 18:29pm.
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: ou could use GNOME or KDE or Xface or Cinnamon or (any other of 30+ desktop environments out there).
I love Linux, but IMO you hit the nail on the head. With so many peeps contributing to it, you got endless options. Which, you'd think would be a good thing. But, mix that in with the immature flame wars about "omg, dis da best n00b" kinda fun and well, it's annoying when you just want crap to work and go on about life.
There are some beginner friendly distros that don't go through that. If you find one you like and a Desktop Experience (DE) you like, then screw what the kiddies think. 
Side note, JetBrains makes cross platform IDEs... even one for .NET (it's not free tho). And there's VS Code. But, you totally have a good point that if you do C#, may as well install the grand daddy of IDEs for it.
Jeremy Falcon
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: VisualStudio. There is nothing in Linux world that comes close to it
Have you never used emacs? 
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that's still around? I may have to spin up a Unix VM to see how it plays.
Emacs was wonderful, because it provided syntax coloring for code. Is it VS? No, and that may or may not be a good thing.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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My favourite editor when I was working on AIX, Solaris, Linux and Windows, all those years ago.
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You're kidding right! Emacs has a steep learning curve and most users can't handle it.
I come from Bell Labs Unix where I used both emacs and vi a lot. Windows in my opinion and experience lacks the power of the command line that is available in nix, however powershell comes close but relies too much on .net.
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I guess you missed the joke emoji.
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: No. Why? In one word (or maybe two) - VisualStudio. There is nothing in Linux world that comes close to it; not by a mile; not by many miles. I've tried over the years a few times and all the substitutes were so poor, specially on the debugging sid
Yep VStudio was an issue for me too, but with .NET Core (if you’re there) and Visual Studio Code you can debug all code.
So, as the world moves to .NET Core this will be even less of a thing.
I dev all greenfield on .NET Core / Linux / Visual Studio Code & it works great.
However, at work we are still on VStudio 2013 — but I remote to those windows boxes & do that work anyways. I also run VStudio in a window VM if I need to.
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> Mircea Neacsu wrote:
>
> In one word (or maybe two) - VisualStudio.
Close but no cigar. Ditched that clunker the very second I found JetBrains Rider (but our relationship had already been toxic for a decade or so). Now I start Visual Studio only once or twice a year, to build/publish some legacy stuff - after having done all the development in Rider.
What keeps me firmly rooted on Windows boxen is LINQPad. There's nothing even remotely comparable in the Linux world, and there probably won't be since JPad unfortunately seems to have died in its infancy.
My LINQPad script tree currently comprises 3464 files in 709 directories; it is basically a knowledge dump where each piece of knowledge is packaged as a LINQPad script, opened with a single click and then executed with a single keystroke. This goes from how to call a certain API (one line, or a handful) up to POC implementations with many hundreds of lines and maybe dozens of includes and referenced assemblies or NuGet packages. Basically, I don't start coding tricky stuff in a C# project until I have it working perfectly in LINQPad. Also, I often write LINQPad scripts (read 'C# programs') where I formerly would have done battle with batch files or Power$hell scripts, because it is so much more convenient and so much more powerful. Plus, I get to use a language with palatable/sane syntax (C#), as opposed to all the shell languages that I've ever seen.
Also, having programmed the Windows API since Windows 2.18 and the Win32 API since NT 3.51 I tend take certain amenities - e.g. threads, reliable file locking, interprocess synchronisation primitives, clipboard - for granted. That's why my mind really boggles when I find that Linux does not have interprocess mutexes, for example, and that people recommend farting around with disk files instead. That's not really a desktop/UI issue but it keeps me away from Linux and Mac for everyday work, because I cannot make them jump like a can even the newest, sh*ttiest iteration of Windows yet. And there's always the WSL if need arises ...
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Mircea Neacsu wrote: Makes you want to go back to the command line
Bourne? Bash? ksh? zsh?
(your point is well made) 
Mircea Neacsu wrote: but there are tens of distros
"Tens"? If only. DistroWatch maintains a top 100 list, and there's many more.
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