codekoan (parody)

The top critical replies to Coder Girl here were "4 hours fixing audio drivers nobody asked about", "Installing Linux is a mess", and "sure if you don't like to game". I have been a Linux user since SlackWare in the mid 90s. I would have agreed with all three of those up until around a year ago. Here is the reality I have been experiencing now: 1) My livingroom gaming machine is now permanently Bazzite. I installed the default Bazzite distribution from a USB key with no modifications. It can run Steam in deck mode, so I can use it with my (Microsoft!) XBox controller, and I play almost exclusively Windows games on it, which run (shockingly) flawlessly in Proton. I have yet to encounter a single compatibility problem, although I am sure I would if I played competitive shooters since their anticheat kernel drivers are designed to prevent using it anywhere but on unaltered Windows distributions. Anticheat is really the only thing holding Linux back from being an immediate substitute for a Windows gaming machine. 2) My audio workstation is now also Bazzite, since I figured it was easier than maintaining two distros. Default install just worked, no drivers necessary, despite the equivalent Windows install needing both Yamaha and Behringer drivers to be installed manually to function properly. It "just worked" out of the box for audio as compared to the Windows equivalent, and has been rock solid - no drop outs, no crashes. I did not have to touch a single audio configuration option. I just installed Reaper and PianoTeq, and everything worked. 3) The only machine I've found so far that has trouble working out-of-the-box with Linux is a Microsoft Surface tablet. But I still got it to work, it just required me to manually install a kernel patch because support for things like the Surface touchscreen aren't built into Linux distros currently. Once I did install the patch manually, it works perfectly, and even has a touchscreen keyboard just like Windows does. So even Microsoft's own hardware can run Linux just fine, and it would even be turnkey if your Linux distro of choice decided to mainline the Surface driver repo. The bottom line is that people who think Linux is worse than Windows either haven't used it lately, or are not being honest about how bad Windows has become. Windows is circling the drain. Every update, it gets worse. The number of problems I regularly have to solve on our remaining Windows machines dwarf anything I have to do for Linux system maintenance. Windows had a good run, but Microsoft has obviously focused its resources on SaaS and cloud computing. They don't care about Windows anymore, and neither should you. The next decade is about transitioning to Linux everywhere.