Dating apps are crap. You literally have a higher success rate walking up to a random person at a bar than with a first message on Tinder. They could be a good tool, but we live in capitalism so they are made to extract as much profit as possible, even if that means promoting toxic, mental-health-crushing behaviours.

You forgot cache distance. That would also critically hinder performance

One thing I hate about the Linux desktop is the sheer lack of interest for supporting new hardware until it’s too late.

Before you jump at me: I know it’s not really anybody’s fault. The contributors didn’t switch to new hardware yet, and someone has to do the work.

But that does not excuse the passive aggressiveness. GNOME’s stance on fractional scaling was, for years, “never happening - fractional pixels don’t exist, so we do integer scaling only”. A few years later, hidpi displays are becoming the standard and all premium laptops ship with them. Very few of them work fine at 200% scaling. One thing the Framework Laptop 13 reviews mention when testing it on Linux is that there is no optimal screen scaling available, just too small or too big - and that you can enable experimental support for fractional scaling, but it’s a buggy mess and it’s an option not exposed to the user for very good reason. Only now that it’s too late and Linux is already buggy and annoying to use on modern laptops because of this we are beginning to see some interest in actually resolving the problem, including GNOME rushing to work on implementing support for it in GTK and Mutter, after years of bikeshedding. Somehow, things that are impossible and never happening suddenly become possible and happening when the writing that had been on the wall became true, and the hardware that a minority of users had been calling attention to for years is now common place and oups! That gives the Linux desktop some very bad exposure and first impressions.

Touch screens were another problem area. Initially the common stance was that nobody really uses these, convertible laptops suck anyway, etc. fast forward to now, more and more premium laptops offer touch screens, and stuff like 360 degrees hinges and convertibles that are actually decent are starting to surface. And, of course, everyone on Linux desktop wakes up and starts admitting that touch screen support is actually in a problematic state when it’s already too late, and (prospective) owners of these devices have to pick between a very buggy experience that feels like Alpha state on Linux, and just using Windows.

It goes on. HDR support? Color correction support? FreeSync support being spotty and completely missing in GNOME Wayland?

I’m a heavy Linux user. I will nuke my dual boot when my next laptop ships so I’m going all-in after all these years. But I also own a 4k FreeSync monitor, a MX Master 3 mouse ane my next laptop (Framework Laptop 16") will require fractional scaling and VRR support to use comfortably. Having tried all these things side by side on my dual boot, I am somewhat jealous of how well Windows seems to handle these things compared to Linux. All this “nice stuff” has either taken a lot of time since my purchase to work nicely, or still doesn’t work nicely at all. Ignoring contribution / manpower issues, this constant critical attitude towards new hardware and the unwillingness to try and properly support it is actively keeping us in the “Eternal 90% there” stage. We will not get out of it, because customer tech will keep evolving, and we will keep accepting new trends only when it’s too late, and we’re 7 years behind Microsoft in implementing support. It’s not a secret that where Windows still obliterates Linux is niche use cases like HDR and colour accurate work, and support for new customer hardware, that usually lags 5-7 years behind on Linux.

Yup hard agree on this. Switched to gnome a little more than a year ago and not planning to switch back because the polish and stability is too good - but this is a major issue.

Have you tried GNOME Wayland? Your System76 laptop should support Fedora Workstation. As long as the hardware in your System76 laptop is capable, it can so pinch to zoom and 2-3 fingers scrolling for workspace switching, revealing the overview, etc. 1:1 gestures like a MacBook, too.

I know the switch from KDE is daunting. I’ve done it too. But GNOME Wayland is simply above everything else right now

I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don’t have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn’t done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn’t anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn’t support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn’t seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I’m going to buy a game and hope it’s going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it’s Steam from me.

As in tradition - mindset. Getting on Linux requires a certain mindset, and this gets more and more true the weirder and more involved whatever it is that you are planning to do gets.

+1 for everything you mentioned - I’ll add Stardew Valley. Flawless mod support with SMAPI on Linux. I do love my mods.

Stardew Valley and Minecraft modder reporting in with no issues. In general, anything Steam is moddable without issues.

I agree. I’m tired of always blaming the end users for everything

Yeah :( I love my 2017-2018 phone to death (it’s a Pixel 2 XL, and in the ~€400 phone market they are still trying to beat its camera quality 6 years later - and since it’s a Pixel it’s still more fluid than several phones I try in store, like €400-500 Samsungs, that display evident stutters that mine does not), but it has started with the random crashes and “dying” (boot loops followed by not turning on anymore) for a few minutes / hours before coming back to its senses occasionally

(edit: as a preamble - I recommend against using Mint as a new user, since it leverages outdated technologies. Fedora uses newer tech that has a lot of rough edges from the past already smoothed out. But the following comment still applies.)

I’m a heavy Linux user who has dropped Windows but I agree. It’s fundamentally based on luck: a combination between your hardware configuration, the games you play and the software you use. Linux gaming is gaining popularity because for a lot of people it mostly just works, minus a couple papercuts that are tolerable, especially when you factor them against all the jank you left behind from Windows.

But if you get unlucky enough… as another person said, it’s death by a thousand papercuts. Or, like The Linux Experiment put it, a permanent state of 99% there. Things working, almost fine, but never quite perfect, and enough things being rough around the edges that it does put you off. I am going to be completely honest: the fact that Microsoft has been seemingly self-sabotaging the user experience they offer and murdering the UX with their bare hands with Windows 11 is helping bridge the gap a lot.

Personally I have gotten quite lucky. I don’t use any NVidia hardware - and this alone already wipes away 60-70% of the common issues that people complain about. There is a lot of weirdness that doesn’t even look like it depends on the GPU (like buggy standby behaviour) that depends on the GPU and that is not reproducible - NVidia setups are a toss up that could go anywhere from “just fine” to “a total disaster”. Not only that, but Linux support means that if any of the dozens of components on your computer doesn’t quite support Linux, there is so much seemingly unrelated stuff that breaks that you wouldn’t believe. I had a friend who was incredibly unlucky on Linux and had mysterious sudden system crashes and some very exotic errors that I had given up debugging. We finally got down to, literally, trying to unplug device after device for an extended window of time out of desperation - and we found out the culprit was a small USB audio card that he used for headphones. A small USB audio card that was misbehaving and had a poor quality Linux driver caused a lot of issues that never would I have traced back to an audio card. I have also used a laptop that had a lot of mysterious issues like erratic sleep/wake behaviour and system hangs / freezes that were caused by the Wi-Fi card. Would you ever think that your Wi-Fi card is causing your computer to randomly crash seemingly out of nowhere? Exactly. This is why I think the “luck” factor is huge for your success on Linux. Sadly, hardware manufacturers mostly target Windows. Linux works well with simple setups with hand-picked components from a handful of brands that are known to work as intended. But the more complicated your gaming setup is, the worse it gets. Hell, multi monitor setups with different resolutions and refresh rates can already be a challenge, whereas Windows has a good handling of them now. If you mix GPUs and have a GeForce and a Radeon in your system, just forget about it. You will get a lot of erratic behaviour unless you exclusively run AMD.

The Steam Deck is an example of how well a properly supported Linux system could work. It’s custom hardware with parts picked with Linux support as the utmost priority. The Steam Deck experience is, in fact, much smoother than the average Linux desktop experience, with a hell of a lot less rough edges that show up.

I still encourage you to run Linux, but also understand that it’s still growing, and this means that hardware and commercial software vendors are yet to support it properly still. It’s going to be a d20 throw between “perfect”, “horribly broken” and “mostly working well but with some rough patches you can work around”.

I still can’t understand what’s wrong with this. I believe we have normalized being constantly reachable and available way too much, and “through mandatory text replies” is already way too much. Calls take this one step further: “I am demanding to have your undivided attention, right now, for as long as it takes, I don’t care what you’re doing”. I just think that’s rude.

Actually, even with my partner we have a “Scheduling calls is vastly preferable to random calls” and I am 100% okay with this. If I am doing something else and it’s not urgent, I’ll get to you later. Let me get my work done and wait until my next break, or let me actually enjoy my friends’ company IRL for a few hours, then I get back to you to chat. Why do I have to be available, at your disposal, immediately and giving you my undivided attention anytime? I’m not a chatbot, I’m a human being with a full and interesting life.

I believe not doing this is only doable if you have few friends. If you have plenty of friends + a full social life, you really have to manage your conversations and find various time windows throughout your day to keep up with multiple texting threads and that is time consuming as it is - before I established my own boundaries, it would seep in all areas of my life and I would get absolutely nothing done at days because it was too dispersive.

I have plenty of friends, so that is the only way to keep it sustainable, yes.

Of course, everybody can unschedule call for an emergency or a time-sensitive thing, like “Hey we have decided last minute that we’re hanging at at place X in like 10 minutes, wanna come?” - in those cases, I actually prefer to be called because I don’t want to miss it.

My family and my girlfriend are basically the only people allowed to do this. Everyone else - if you’re calling me directly I will assume it’s an emergency and will get annoyed if it’s not.

Calls are fine. Unscheduled calls are not. Text me to set up a time to call that works for both. I am okay with giving you my undivided attention - just not necessarily right now.

Text to call. I also really like calls, but scheduled. Calling randomly to chat means you’re taking my undivided attention for however long you want whenever you want and that’s super disrespectful of my time

It’s time to dust off Terraria and go on a nice run again.

Edit: I will, of course, be first in line to buy any new games they release. They donated $100k to a FOSS project I use and love, thus to me as well indirectly, I can give some of my disposable income back to then.

It was at 7/10 because the iPhone 14 introduced a repair-friendly design that made it, in theory, easier to repair than most competing high-end smartphones. However, the fact that there is a software DRM on the parts you install makes this repairable design completely useless for the end user, it just makes repairs cheaper for Apple themselves, thus adding insult to injury.

That about wraps it up

Unity was “cancelled” the very second they introduced this fee. Nobody wants or will ever want to publish their game in Unity anymore. Studios planning to develop a game in Unity have already decided on moving to Unreal as we speak.

Unity is now irrelevant, and a product to recommend against. Unity is legacy software to abandon. If this doesn’t mean it’s cancelled I don’t know what does.

It’s pretty heart warming when you see some organization you didn’t suspect already adopts FOSS alternatives of things. I think there’s value is explicitly popularizing when this happens: they will get more popular through emulation, as humans are social beings. If one piece of software is considered to be some edgy stuff that nobody uses and works poorly then few people will use it. Otherwise, the “if relevant organization / person I follow XYZ used this solution then I should give it a go” thought pattern takes place. Worked with Krita.