I’ll be doing my part soon, lmao. First PCs for 2 kids are going to run Linux. I’m taking this too seriously. The only reason for that though is that I’m a cheapskate (budget PC builds, will make them Windows 11 compatible, but I want to see if they’re going to work with Linux first, because it’d be easier for me to manage them in a pinch - and no need to buy a Windows license).
I don’t know why wait that long, the Pi 4 8gb is my main PC already (writing from it) and has been for the past ~half a year.
Maybe it’s just my bias, but I’ve seen Windows misbehave a lot more times than Linux. Given, the number of Windows to Linux users where I worked was around 5:1, yet the Linux users never complained about Linux itself, only about their IDEs not functioning as they were supposed. Linux users were all programmers, but none of them were Linux gurus, like at all. They could use a terminal a bit, but all would prefer WinSCP on Windows (we had a few programmers using Windows) and MC on Linux. If faced with a tty, they would likely pause and not know what to do.
Actually, wait, there was one user who had issues with Ubuntu, not sure what was going on, probably some broken binaries or something, but the shell was always freezing. Both Unity 7 and GNOME Shell (both wayland and xorg). Moved her to Fedora and she never had an issue anymore.
As for Windows users, my lord. How many broken audios after Windows updates. And I’m talking, just normal windows updates, not feature releases. Only on windows 10 (between versions 1909 and 20h2). Again, it may be my bias, but my experience was always that Windows itself does stupid stuff to break something that could have been avoidable, more often than Linux does.
Again, working as a sysadmin and doing some Windows and Linux helpdesk on the side may not be a normal representation of users. But the fact still remains that Windows had issues, either with simple stuff like installing a non-functional audio or wifi driver which required uninstalling and reinstalling the official one (Dell Update Center really saved our asses big time, because it made it really easy), or really strange stuff like plugging in a monitor or projector and not detecting it (which was because windows had “uptime” of more than 30 days, but that’s only because Windows refuses to do clean reboots if you don’t do them manually from time to time). Or there were times when Windows had 100% CPU utilization for no reason, with all updates done. At other times, indexing started misbehaving and was trashing m.2 SSDs at 100% utilization in task manager. Personally I’m sick of Windows shenanigans, which is one reason why I don’t want to be the one to have to repair it and why I try to push Linux on the users I have to manage.
You know when Windows works best? On older laptops and PCs that don’t receive any driver updates anymore, with maybe the exception of GPU driver updates. But that is also where Linux shines too, even more so because it’s lighter on resources. But nowadays any post-Sandy Bridge PC or laptop can run Windows just fine if it has 8 GB of RAM and an SSD (which is not always the case). But not for long (thanks MS for W11).
Well, speaking of W11, to be honest, if what they say is true and there won’t be anymore BSODs happening on 8th+ gen Intel iCore, and 2nd+ gen AMD Ryzen, I’d be actually happy, because less people will have issues, meaning less things for me to solve in the future (unless I decide to be a d**k and refuse to repair Windows PCs, lul).
I don’t know, changing default audio devices was always easy in KDE (Manjaro and Fedora) and on Ubuntu (Unity) for me. Not sure how GNOME Shell does it these days, as I moved to the terminal before I had a chance to try it for real (heil pulsemixer).
TBH, I still have my doubts about gaming on Linux. I’ve yet to build a new PC and start playing games on Proton and Lutris, and only used Wine and PoL like idk, 4h total in 10 years. I will do the gaming on Linux challenge, but as a Linux guy.
TBH, I think this gives the best of both worlds. But I always recommended having 2 PCs and maybe a single monitor with multiple inputs. That way, when you want to play games, you switch on your Windows machine and do your thing, and after you finish, you turn that off and just switch display input. That’s what console people are doing and you don’t hear them complaining that they can’t play their PS5 games on their PCs. I’d say to treat a Windows box like one would treat a console, and your Linux box as one would treat their main PC. GPU passthrough centralizes stuff, but I feel it’s kinda inefficient and TBH, kinda janky. LookingGlass appears to remove the jank and make for a more seamless experience, but still, I recommend 2 PCs. The Linux one doesn’t need to be super wow or something, an 2nd - 3rd gen NUC would work just fine.
Again, people shouldn’t convince people to switch, just help them if they desire to switch.
Edit: am I developing dyslexia or something? AAAGH, SO MANY EDITS!