this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Yeah, it's a fricken nightmare... Windows is ok in a well managed corporate setup where all the crap is uninstalled
I bought a laptop recently which came with Windows. I was going to setup dual boot because I need Office365 for work... but in the end I just gave up, deleted windows and installed Ubuntu.
I hear lots of people used to using Windows saying "I tried Linux and couldn't get anything to work"... it's not that I don't believe them, but I really struggle to understand it. Windows is so much worse!
I tend to get the kind of Linux issues nobody believes.
Currently my installation "works" but none of the text mode boot up stuff displays at all so I have to dig out a spare screen if it gets stuck there.
Another screen I could never get the display scaling to work no matter what I did - I tried swapping cables, editing the resolution manually, different drivers, different distros, everything I could think of but it would always output 640x480 native pixels unscaled as a tiny square in the middle of the screen.
Windows gives me issues but it usually just works with every screen+gpu combination.
What graphics card do you use, and also what kind of cable? Sometimes when using dvi in hdmi compat mode it cannot read the displays information and defaults to rendering with basic vesa drivers, or just defaulting to the smallest size to at least make sure that you have a picture
No text mode is HDMI with a 3070, the monitor does have HDMI compatibility in the options but it's off.
The no scaling was displayport, but AMD RX 5700 to a GSync display so that might have been the issue because it did actually work fine with NVIDIA cards.
The no text mode could very well be a nvidia issue, I gave up on using their cards some time ago when Wayland came out and nvidia was slow as hell on the uptake. Nvidia cards in general have more wacky bugs outside of the normal gui environments they were designed for. I had a 1050ti that would only display text mode in 320x240 mode with the proprietary drivers, and then would only display on one screen with the open sauce ones. Overall after switching to AMD I havent had any driver bugs besides the ones related to ryzen APUs locking up when switching power states, and that's been resolved for a little over a month. But I do understand why NVIDIA is the preferred choice for a lot, the performance difference is very real
It's a completely different set of problems with both systems. Problems with Linux are usually related to missing drivers, or the whole mess with having 40 kinds of software stores (and it's 2023 and you still can't update stuff like discord without running a command on the terminal).
Problems with windows are usually things like "if I join a call my phones stop playing stereo music", or "there's 50 different programs launching on system startup and it takes 5 minutes to even display my wallpaper".
Folks get used to one of them eventually but when switching to the other all they think of is "I didn't have to deal with this sort of thing there"
Is that a thing still? The last 3 companies I’ve worked for didn’t even remove the Xbox apps from windows. The most I’ve seen is disabling the windows store so installing Microsoft terminal and WSL becomes more difficult.
Problem is that without the appropriate GPOs being setup, Microsoft will keep reinstalling the Xbox shit. And they keep changing how it happens so the GPOs need fixed every 6 months or so. It’s quite annoying, easier to just set one of my AV suites to attack and quarantine any games as malware and alert my team so we can have a talk with someone’s manager when they try to download destiny2.
Laypeople can and do have problems on Linux, sometimes due to defects or deficiencies, other times of their own making. For people beyond layfolk however, Linux is infinitely easier to troubleshoot and manage. I just came off such a troubleshooting spree I finished on my new corp Ubuntu workstation that would randomly go black screen and wouldn't recover without a reset. Without information on the web, I was able to track down the culprit and come up with a workaround. If that happened to me on Windows:
Why, were you too stupid to configure dual boot? I don't imagine you're having a better time with Linux. This is not hard stuff.