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Comment by nout | Hacker News Reader

This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.

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I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all.

Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)

Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.

My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.

I just did my yearly attempt at this again, and unfortunately I ran into multiple issues - aside from issues I had during dual boot setup which is still WAY too user unfriendly, the driver recommended for my video card breaks the standard resolution on my main monitor, downgrading the version fixed it but it took me an hour of hacking with console commands to work this out, and reading forum posts where I watched people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue. Sleep is still half broken, the login appears on the wrong monitor and only console commands I had to modify to copy some obscure config file would fix it. And cyberpunk crashes for me randomly every 10-30 minutes and runs 30% slower. And I can’t install it on my macbook… but I don’t blame linux for that last one.

Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.

SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.

> And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.

Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.

Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.

You saying pebcak only reinforces my point.

Pebcak it is then.

And that reinforces it further. See what I mean?

Yeah, sure thing. Your ‘reinforces my point’ reinforces the pebcak. Which reinforces your point, which reinforces the pebcak. Infinite loop.

Throughout using Linux here and there for like two decades or so, my only issues were Ubuntu forcing some very Microsoft-ish decisions on me, which I did not like. Plus, this very very stable very stable Debian breaking upon version upgrades (I have no idea why, I keep running mostly default Debian since forever). These days I mostly use Arch and Fedora (on those shared computers I don’t bother to config to my liking), and they were mostly flawless for like years. I have some things I don’t like, but they aren’t too many and minuscule. I used a MacBook Pro for like over a decade, but left macOS earlier than this LiquidAss fiasco, so I cannot relate really. But still reading all these complaints about Windows and macOS, it looks like your guys only issue with Linux is ‘I did not make any effort to understand the system, I’d use my weird pervert Windows baggage and expect it would just work the same way.’ Hey, it wouldn’t. Take a weekend to research, take a month to play with Linux on some non-critical hardware (buy a used ThinkPad or ThinkCentre). I’d say Linux is quite ready for most things these days. Yes, not all hardware may work well, but once you understand the reasons for that, you won’t blame the community, but rather those who intentionally do nothing to make their own hardware work. I’m looking at you Nvidia. And even them, it looks like, started doing something. Switching my desktops from almost a decade on macOS, I mostly feel like an upgrade. Even on a MacBook! I wish some software to be better, but it’s getting there slowly, even without my help.

Thanks for reinforcing my point

Annnd here they all come to prove my point! I said in my comment “watch people be insulted by the community just because they ran into an issue.” And here they are, insulting me just because I ran into issues… to prove my point wrong?

You just can’t make this shit up, it’s too hilarious.

I installed CachyOS recently for my 8 year old kid.

Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box (gaming, wifi, etc).

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