this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Honestly I think windows is so fucked in terms of market share and it seems like they are kind of just pre-emptively ceding the battle to linux intentionally or not.
Yeah people have been waiting for years for linux to eat windows for lunch and it hasn’t happened yet but I am convinced that linux becoming massively more practical and easy to use for gaming (Steam deck being a good catalyst) in the last couple of years has pushed things past a tipping point. Gaming might not make up the outsized chunk of desktop usage, but gaming is where people experiment, try new things, learn software inside and out and it is where people are most inspired to contribute and build and polish out the annoying little details of complex systems.
Yeah Microsoft will have its walled moats around entire sectors of business indefinitely into the future, and that probably is where most of the consistent money is, but I think Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 so hard is creating the rosiest forecast for the future of Linux desktops I have ever seen in my life.
These twin factors converging has got me bullish af on Linux in the near to mid term.
Let’s fuckinnn gooooooo
The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.
Until then I'm using a pirated version of Win11Pro and wondering how this AI will work with pirated copies.
I mean Wine and steamOS’s Proton are that though? Sure compatibility isn’t perfect but the vast majority of games I have tried worked all the way from current AAA games to games like Steel Panthers WinspWW2, a DOS game from the 90s that barely functions on a modern windows computer but yet runs perfect on my Deck. Because the deck is using a virtual environment to emulate a windows OS it actually arguably creates a more stable platform to run windows software than windows itself running the program normally.
Pretty much the only obstacle left is stupid super invasive anticheat/spyware software that doesn’t bother to cover Linux in competitive multiplayer games.
Kernel-level anticheat and DRM are killer features, like it or not. People don't care how invasive they are, they want to play League of Duty. If Linux can't do that then it's not good enough yet as far as they are concerned.
Meanwhile the only thing keeping me from switching to Garuda on my desktop is that the GPU is wonky and misbehaves even worse under Linux than it does under Windows. Screw competitive online games.
Then Linux may win over Windows for gaming, but games might lose to tinkering for me. Cause no way in hell I'm installing a kernel-mode trojan consciously.
Linux can do that, see The Finals, Halo Infinite, Apex Legends or any number of other games. It’s just the anticheat companies are sketchy and often uninterested in doing even a little bit of work to add Linux support.
True, but getting someone to switch to Linux is a hard sell already. Any compatibility issues are seen as the OS's fault, not as the game company being lazy.
Getting someone to switch anything major in the workflow/toolset of their lives is nearly impossible most of the time, it is process highly likely to cause headaches and only provide counterbalancing benefits down the road once the painful learning curve of acclimation is overcome.
However, in the same token there are plenty of Linux distributions that have perfectly understandable desktop UIs that many Mac or Windows users wouldn’t event notice wasn’t windows. Especially with Windows changing shit every 5 seconds and stuffing useless crap into menus everywhere, I think it isn’t a stretch to say the UI of many Linux distributions is more user friendly than Windows and in many cases Mac.
The real problem is the moment someone has to fuck around with headaches with drivers for basic computer functionality like Bluetooth or other hardware. If that stuff is generally covered pretty well then most people aren’t going to give a shit.
At this point Linux is like making coffee with a French press, people who aren’t coffee nerds think using a French press is way more complicated than using some stupid keurig machine with completely unclear buttons and a camera inside just to check you are using brand name keurig cups that you have to fool by slipping in an old k-cup lid from keurig over the top of the off-brand one….
…peoplenwho do know coffee well on the other hand shake their heads confused when people jump through 1000 hoops to use other coffee brewing methods when a French press conceptually and mechanically is only one step away from just literally dumping your coffee grounds in hot water and then drinking it.
Lol, not even Windoof is compatible with all video games.