Games

The year of Linux has been basically every year since 2003. Virtually every server runs on some form of Linux and with containerization, even the Windows servers are secretly running a bunch of Linux machines though a hypervisor.

The year of the Linux desktop is the one that's a bit of a meme. X11 has been dragged kicking and screaming into to 21st century, but the general consensus now seems to be it's time to take it out back and shoot it. Wayland is quickly becoming the new standard.

It will legitimately become easier to develop desktop applications on Linux once this all becomes standardized. The reason so many companies target Windows is because Microsoft has a ton of proprietary but managed apis for building desktop apps. Ones that are not compatible with X11.

2020 or thereabouts was the year of the linux desktop. steamos came out which meant there was a lot of labor put into getting a proper compatibility layer for gaming. DEs were good enough by that point that your grandparents could use them. plus i heard they finally got the graphical installer mostly working, i think. meanwhile microsoft has been over-enshittifying their product with the assumption they have the same captive audience they had in 2008. i just don't think that's true anymore

sorry if this just restates the article i didn't read it

Installing Linux is like 10 clicks nowadays. I remember even 10 years ago it was a lot more involved. The gaming focused distros even include GUI apps for common game related workarounds and 90% of the time anything else can be fixed with a couple copy pastes of terminal commands

Even installing Windows is really scary for a lot of people, if it's not the OS that comes on it from the factory it's unlikely most people will use it.

"but muh gaaammess"

"if you want to feel like you actually own your PC" is pretty hilarious though.

How is it at all inaccurate? It's been clear for years that various software corporations would prefer you not actually own your hardware (in the sense that you can modify it as you wish and run whatever you want on it). Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all been trying to achieve this (through various secure boot and attestation measures) to better extract profit from either their walled gardens or their SaaS offerings. To them, the ideal computer is one you pay for, but they control. That's not ownership.

Been running dual-boot Linux and Windows for a few years now for the reasons you mentioned. I have the boot menu set to a 1s timeout and to default to Linux so it's easy if I want to boot to windows on start-up with very minimal impact on my boot time, although I rarely boot to Windows at all these days.

I play a lot of indie games and so some of them have stability issues with Linux, especially if it's a recent release, because they have small dev teams but generally my experience has been that Linux gaming is really good, better than I expected, even despite my experience being a bit of an outlier on the worse end of the scale. Most of the time performance is noticeably better too.

In terms of "owning your PC" it does sound hyperbolic but every time I boot into windows I get forced to deal with updates on windows' schedule (wanna boot to windows to run some utility for a quick 5 minute job? Hah, too bad! You get to have forced updates and you will reboot when we tell you to and now you have booted back into windows you have to get more updates and reboot again for some reason) and all the user account control measures and shit. I can't just run certain programs on start-up without the UAC prompts and I literally have to open submenus just to say "yes, I want to run this program and no, I am not concerned about the risks" or I can disable all the security controls and get ridiculous notifications that I have threats detected with my PC and, when I try to scan for threats it will tell me that none are found and it's only hidden within submenus that the "threat" is that my UAC settings are lower than recommended. Bruh, I set them lower because I don't want to have to deal with constant pop-ups making me confirm that I want to run the program that I just started. That's not a threat and I chose that so I don't need to be told to attend to the security center to figure out the threat that the security center doesn't inform me about only to discover that windows doesn't approve of my user-defined settings.

You get used to Windows being this way and always having mostly useless training wheels on it which dictate how and when you will use your OS but it's genuinely frustrating to go back to it when you've been free from it for a while.

Not gonna lie - my experience with Linux is occasionally that I want to do something but I don't know how to do it whereas my experience with Windows I that I want to do something and either it won't let me or it routinely puts up a series of roadblocks to actively discourage me from doing something even when I specifically chose to do that thing. So it's a choice between two different frustrations but overall my Linux experience has been trading a constant stream of Microsoft-induced frustrations for skill issue frustrations on Linux and the occasional "Why the fuck would in have to set up a hotkey binding for bringing up the system monitor when there should be one pre set upon installation?" type of frustration.

I've had it with Windows and ascended to the sunlit uplands of Linux, where the trees heave with open-source fruits and men with large beards grep things with their minds.

Same but with virtual instruments. Almost no native compatibility and emulation is made basically impossible by the fact that you open them through another piece of software

How about Winboat? Its just a Windows VM with less hassle. I use it for all the office apps.

I know this sounds silly but have you tried running it through steam for proton? Not saying it will work or anything but it might? Might also need to install stuff in wine through proton tricks to get it to work (it’s not that bad, you just pick what thing to download from a searchable list. Just have to know what it needs.)