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Comment on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA

RedPandaRaider@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

I will mainly switch to Linux whenever I feel ready for the headache of setting it up for the first time. Already got another M.2 SSD to run it alongside my existing Win 10 for anything that doesn’t run on Linux.

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MiDaBa@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
It really depends on your hardware. I have a Dell XPS with an 11th gen Intel i5 that I’m running Fedora (Gnome desktop environment) on and it was rock solid from minute one. Things to check:

Make sure your network card is supported. Intel network cards are some of the better choices for open source compatibility. On most laptops this can be swapped out if necessary.

Camera

Touchpad

Fingerprint sensor

Sound driver

Any niche functions or modules. Think things like a secondary display on the keyboard, speciality ports etc.

Support is much better now than in the past and remember you don’t need everything to work to have a good time. My fingerprint sensor doesn’t work but it didn’t work well under windows so no big loss for me.

You can always use a live bootable USB drive to test your hardware without having to commit to anything. This will tell you a lot about the experience you might have after installation. Heck, if you’re board you can try this right now and it won’t touch your current hard drive or operating system.
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brennesel@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
It’s so much easier than I had anticipated. Funnily enough, the most complicated thing was organizing a 16Gb USB stick to boot because I only had 20 year old ones with 4Gb. On a newly purchased bare AMD PC, I was able to set everything up after work and play games with my buddies the same evening.

I opted for Bazzite and everything ran right out of the box without any additional hardware drivers: gaming mouse, wifi, wireless PS4 controller, printer, NAS, Android phone. The game libraries from Steam, Epic, gog etc. can all be easily connected via Lutris and so far all the games I’ve tried have run. For programs that are only offered for other distributions, I have installed BoxBuddy, where you can create Distroboxes. For most Windows native programs Wine just works.

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- RedPandaRaider@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  In theory it’s always easy, but in reality there will always be some major issue. I’ve tried switching to Ubuntu twice many years ago and there was always something that didn’t work. One time it even bricked my Windows install.
  
  Currently before actually installing it, I’ve installed Pop OS in a virtual machine. I wish I had the screenshot, but entering 4 different commands to try and install VLC player and getting an error that the command is unknown each time is degrading. A lot of the first results for installing software on Linux has commands or repositories that don’t work and you have to keep looking. It was the command on the official VLC website that didn’t work for me…
  
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  - brennesel@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I had the same experience with Ubuntu many years ago. And I can’t speak for Pop!_OS since I never used it. Most developers only provide commands for Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora on their websites. So they don’t work all the time in derived distros.
    
    At least in Bazzite there is an “App Store” called Bazaar, containing many popular apps as flatpaks --> 1 click install. I generally like using the command line, but it was not necessary at all so far.
    
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    RedPandaRaider@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Yeah I know of those app stores. Sadly they don’t automatically include anything also found on GitHub. So not everything is on there.
    
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