Yeah Linux's biggest problem now is "oups, your application / driver isn't available"
Not user friendlyness.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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What drivers are you missing?
AMD drivers are so smooth on Linux!
The GPU is actually NVIDIA! But planning an upgrade to an AMD card soon.
AoE2DE never worked online for me. It always resulted in a desync error a few minutes in. I read between the lines that that's been fixed?
Is this a known bug? I never had that problem to be honest.
I play with some friends on the other side of the world once a week. I'm on Bazzite (previously on Mint), one of them is on Mac, the other two are on Windows.
I mean, if you have Windows like DE’s it’s really not THAT hard for a Windows user to use Linux. The issue is when you have Gnome and others installed.
But yes I agree with you. I definitely think we’ve come a long way from having to use the terminal for everything.
Linux Mint Cinnamon has been a blessing to me tbh
How so? If I'm not reading some blanket / feel good /empty statement like this about it, it's bitching left and right about specific issues and actual experiences. There's no karma system here, so why make karma farming posts?
I suggested a friend to try out Bazzite (KDE desktop). He told me it felt like he was playing on a console because everything works from the get go. He didn't have to tweak or install anything.
That was exactly my experience with that same distro + flavor. One of my happiest moments of the past year has been buying a new prebuilt gaming PC with Windows preinstalled and immediately wiping Windows in favor of Bazzite.
(Because I know someone will wonder: I bought prebuilt because, for a brief time, a store near me still had pre-RAMpocalypse prebuilts for their original price. They had already increased the build-to-order and individual part price to account for higher RAM cost, so for that brief time I was able to get a reasonably-priced, decently-spec'd prebuilt gaming PC for cheaper than building my own. It had Windows preinstalled, and having them remove it for me would've saved me like $10 on the license, but made the machine into a build-to-order, which would've ballooned the RAM price by like $300. Plus, holding Windows' head under the water until the bubbles stopped was unexpectedly awesome.)
My partner is the same way roughly. Biggest issue she's had was her drawing tablet pen not working. Turned out she was using the wrong pen for that tablet, the correct pen worked flawlessly. An hour of my life troubleshooting I can't get back haha.
There have been a few games that have had issues, and the updates aren't the most intuitive on Kubuntu, but she did manage the last update just fine on her own without me even being home, so that's good.
drawing tablet pen
Soapbox: EMR is amazing. No need for charging, effectively infinite pressure gradient, no lag, open standard (which solves your issue because any stylus works on any tablet). The fact that Apple didn't use it for the pencil is infuriating, and the fact that some other companies are moving away from EMR too is driving me up a wall.
As anti-competitive as Wacom can be, they cooked with that technology, and I'm so happy with my e-ink EMR tablet.
Try installing opentabletdriver, it made mine work out of the box.
I have friends who says "I still run Windows because I don't want to do any tinkering," but don't realize they'd do less tinkering if they switched haha. It's not 2015 anymore.
never have to tinker more in my life than on windows. its even worse with the batshit things Claude will do. On Linux shit just works
N00b or liar?
claude on Linux? it works.
Too bad Linux users don't.
Absolutely this. I was spending 2-3 hours a week making my Win11 box stable.
Once a month I had to redo all the sound drivers, as with each reboot sound would get quieter and quieter until I was running a lottery of which program wouldn't be affected any given day and suddenly have it's volume loud enough to shake the house.
I upgraded CPU/MB after the MB failed, MS cancelled my Win11 licence. I realized I still was spending stupid amounts of time keeping things working, and I am very against all the AI being shoved into every Windows book and cranny.
The first week of ditching Win11, I was tinkering everything because New Shiny, but now things were working I'm not even sure I've spent 3 hours in the last two months tinkering.
"Windows doesn't require any tinkering, just run this to make a local account, decline 100 requests to use OneDrive and Office 365, get these debloaters, uninstall all these things, and make sure you always tell Windows to not restart your computer while you're using it every time it updates. And when it does update, you'll need to run the debloaters again."
I've been using Linux for 3 years, Mint then LMDE and the not tinkering is bullshit
On my laptop the boot drive is forever filling up with Linux Kernel updates and i need to delete them. i have a 1GB partition, there's no simple way to. do that, there's a bunch of commands i need to use in Terminal, it's bullshit that I even need to do it
On my desktop just installing Signal was a drama (no official flatpak) the command line given on the Signal site is not just copy paste and it's Debian.
then lets not even talk of Davinci Resolve.
i have zero intention of going back to Windows and my needs are quite simple but there is a fair bit of tinkering even then.
Out of three issues, two are just "app isn't made to be easily installed on Linux", which isn't on Linux itself, but the ones making the app. still, valid issues.
The boot drive filling up is REALLY annoying because on modern systems there's no need for it to even BE a dedicated partition.
Even with encryption and BTRFS, boot can live in your root partiotion just fine. Only EFI needs a partition and that never fills up.
Distros need to change this default!
And if some obscure error code shows up, the first five points in the knowledge base are powershell commands.
I mean, you don't really have to do these stuff. I doubt the comment's author's friend cares about debloating and privacy.
Yes, in the same way that you don't typically need to tinker with Linux
In the end they're not so different, except Windows intentionally does anti-consumer things that make people want to tinker.
No joke my linux laptop hardest part was the initial install. Steam made gaming seemless. No ms account login, no asking for ai, no drivers. Just install and boom im playing my games. Its so nice.
Literally, my Linux Mint came with the drivers for the wifi, meanwhile Windows always needed me to put them there...
I put Windows on my laptop last year-ish, same exact one with Linux on it now. Took around 2.5x slower to start it up. Win 11 at the time. Fresh off a new image.
Linux takes less than 10 sec. And thats without any optimization and a "heavy" distro like PopOS.
Mint is a good option too :)
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There's what Die4Ever said, but there's also Windows 11 incompatibility with games that otherwise just work with Proton. Around when I got my Steam Deck, I also had a Windows PC that was, to my initial surprise, more of a hassle for games, so I pretty quickly switched to Linux Mint, and later Fedora.
I used Ubuntu way back when on secondary PCs mostly for fun, but Linux has only outpaced Windows imo in the past five years.
Even in 2015 I was doing more setup on Windows than Linux… honestly even in 2005 too.
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I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She's got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it's exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and "needs" it installed so I didn't continue down that road but I'm pretty sure it'd blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it'd be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
I got my mom (about the same age as your mom) setup on Linux for her new laptop about a year ago. She's been using it fine, and was even excited to tell me how she figures stuff out without me.
Honestly, I've had to do less work on her machines since I switched her over. Package management makes it easy for my mom to add or remove apps.
The "doesn't come preinstalled" part is still huge, combined with the "doesn't have first-party device manufacturer support".
If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn't only mean that you don't have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don't put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn't have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.
And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn't a hardware lottery under Windows.
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Nice it's always great to hear the work millions of people put into the Linux ecosystem is paying off.
This is the kind of story we should forward to Linus Torvalds, the Linux mailing sublists and other volunteers so they see how their work gets recognized ^^
Compared to when I started with Linux 21 years ago, we are absolutely spoiled with games that work well today.
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I'm old and thus my relationship is old enough to drink. As we met they were using an utterly virus riddled Windows XP install. I suggested alternative and that Debian install has survived a couple decades. Sure, I'll do anything major like hardware changes but mostly it has just been easy living. For most people working browser, some sort of office package and an image editor is plenty. Linux has been ready for that for a long time.
Excellent. That means it’s working as intended.
The best user interface is one that you don’t even notice. The seamless layer between you and your tool (or game in this instance).
Man do I feel that PS, I think the worst part of gaming on Linux (which is massive credit to how well it works) is not knowing whether a bug is just... the game, or is somehow Linux/Proton/Drivers. I hate not knowing if it's worth stopping to look into a fix or not.
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