With Linux, I can change just about everything. If I want a real-time kernel, I can switch. If I want a different desktop environment, change. If I want more control from my keyboard, Linux has my back.
As much as I agree with the sentiment of the article, this is a terrible reason and more likely to scare people away from Linux rather than get them to install it.
If you know what a “real-time kernel” is, you’re probably already using Linux and you are a highly technically literate user. Any “normal person” user is going to look at that and think “Oh, I guess I need to understand technobabble in order to use Linux”. Normal users care about easy, preset defaults, not customization.
Once again, Linux adoption is kneecapped by its own users, who forget what normal people really care about.
Real-time Kernel?
Like my popcorn?
Desktop environment
Jimmy I work in an office. What are you talking about?
- Your average Windows user… Probably.
Security: Linux doesn’t need antivirus, just don’t install infected software. Riiiight? Sorry, but this is silly.
Centrally managed repositories help a lot, here. Linux users tend not to download random software off of sketchy websites; it’s all installed and kept up to date via the package manager.
Yes, Linux malware and viruses exist, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The usual reason for installing Linux virus scanners is because you’re hosting a file/email server, and you want to keep infected files away from Windows users, tho.
Even package managers are vulnerable to many security problems - can they guarantee that apps are not infected either directly or indirectly (through a library)? There is also flathub. Windows have also an option to verify apps through certificates which isn’t the case with Linux AFAIK. If you want to stay safe on Windows to some degree you can, but the real problem IMO is that Windows is hugely more used and run by less technical persons. 🤷♂️
This isn’t true
Linux package managers typically use GPG which is a much better solution. It is simpler and doesn’t have the unnecessary complexity of certificates.
What security problems do you think package managers are vulnerable to? If the upstream repo is compromised all bets are off regardless of the system.
You are right, GPG signing is good as well. But in both cases you still have unsigned apps.
What security problems do you think package managers are vulnerable to? If the upstream repo is compromised all bets are off regardless of the system.
Yep. And in such case an antivirus software might come handy.
Antivirus software would be totally useless since the problem is your own system.
There is also the issue of trust in the antivirus. This programs are typically high privilege and mostly snake oil.
Linux users tend not to download random software off of sketchy websites; it’s all installed and kept up to date via the package manager.
No experienced/power users do that. Those are who just so happen to install Linux.
If you want Linux for everyone then you will get the users who will install anything, and you need a way to keep them reasonably safe.
Until you have random people install manjaro, enable aur in their package manager and install any package that’s effectively a random github repo
Yes, this is user error, but it amazes me how many people claim the AUR is better than sliced bread
Linux does have some issues with social engineering since any file with the executable bit will run when clicked
Outside of that, you are right
Antivirus software is a joke
MAC (SElinux) is a much better solution
SELinux doesn’t help much when it comes to desktop apps. AFAIK it’s more geared towards server apps and its configuration is complicated. At least that’s my impression.
It’s easier than you think to try out on dual boot. You can also run your windows apps through a virtual machine!
Or just run a live disc.
It is so easy for everyone to just answer this question for themselves rather than read articles about it. And it takes about the same amount of time and effort.
Disc?
yep. short for USB-diskette ;]
The first paragraph alone filled me with so much emotion because my very first computer was a Pentium 75 too! If I hadn’t switched over to Linux earlier this year I would do it again in a heartbeat 💓 best decision I’ve ever taken!
I’ve said this many times here, but I was a Windows fanboy for close to 30 years. I hate that Windows got so bad, but I’m happy that I switched. Linux is great.
I just wish games worked fine on Linux.
What games? Because a lot of games do work fine, maybe even most of them. The problem is that the outliers are often games that a lot of people are playing (see https://areweanticheatyet.com/). Those games are usually not my cup of tea anyways.
The two I tried recently that were problematic were wow and last epoch.
Allegedly they both work fine. They don’t though.
I’m usually playing steam games, and I often will find a solution to make it work on protondb if I have issues. Most of my games I can just install and run though. But I understand it being frustrating if your favourite games don’t work or require lots of tinkering. I have played a few older games outside steam as well. I usually use Bottles for that, as it creates a wine prefix for me that’s set up with DXVK, etc out of the box.
Last epoch is a steam game. And on protondb it’s platinum apparently.
Never had a good experience with it on Linux though. Buggy as hell.
They do
I’ve read people saying this here on lemmy often.
But it really hasn’t been my experience at all with very few exceptions.
1 reason:
Microsoft
The only thing holding me back at this point is a thin thread called my favorite game only supports and requires anti-cheat on Windows. :(
And money but hopefully that’ll solve itself soon.
Money is stopping you from using Linux? What does that mean?
You see Linux is free so what will you spend your money on?
time
It means that I need more storage space to do what I want to do
Which game is it?
Likely apex or fortnite.
Any Tipps on how to do that in a business environment? Preferably from people who are actually using Linux in a professional environment? I’m using Linux at home for more than a decade now, and I don’t miss Windows at all, but transforming a smallish company to use Linux in a way that is remotely as comfortable as the Windows stuff seems impossible for now. I need to find solutions that don’t make it harder for our staff to get their work done, because they are busy enough with actual work.
Simply replacing MS Office with LibreOffice and Nextcloud for example does not cut it. The tight integration of MS Teams, Office and Cloud functionality is seen as a huge benefit there and I can’t just take that away from them unless I find a combination of tools that work in a similar fashion. Using Google products instead is obviously not a viable alternative. Every cloud based solution I have found so far is underwhelming at best and lacks a good integration.
Serious answers appreciated.
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As it stands Linux isn’t really viable in a business environment. You can make it work but it will involve lots of pain and suffering along with toms of custom scripts and configurations.
It is great for servers but Linux desktops are hard to manage and are unfamiliar to most folks.
With that being said, supposedly fleetdm can manage Linux devices
Nextcloud has Nextcloud Talk, and you could add the Collabora or OnlyOffice plugins. There you have it all.
Nextcloud is such a pain in the ass. I would never deploy it in production due to its monolithic design
Been using it for years without trouble.
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For me, these are 5 reasons to stay on Linux. :-)
Zorin OS is much more straight forward than Windows 11.
5 reasons you should not ditch Windows:
-
Your hardware is incompatible or you do not want to fiddle with settings or command lines
-
Your applications/games only work well on native Windows (and not wine)
-
You need serious group policy support or other device/software lockdown methods
-
Your company policy requires it
-
Makes helping Windows users harder if you cannot walk them through the same things they are doing
Of course if any of these apply you can always dual-boot or use a VM. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use Linux at all.
To me, my activity on my own computer being monitored by Microsoft is the only reason i need to not use it.
And I do actually think you may be slightly mad to be OK with that. Maybe because you feel you get a “free” operating system. I think thats the mentality of a slave.
you do not want to fiddle with settings or command lines
Kinda the reverse for me
I need to fiddle with Massgrave and various debloat scripts to run win
Your applications/games only work well on native Windows
Windows for docker, winboat, etc
serious group policy support or other device/software lockdown methods
I would argue sudo and normal file permissions do the same
Makes helping Windows users harder
???
Your hardware is incompatible
I think you’ll have an extremely hard time finding any hardware that supports Windows but can’t run linux. With Win11 requirements it’s much more likely to be the other way around.
Your applications/games only work well on native Windows
Personally, every game I care to run works perfectly fine on my Steam Deck. I refuse to play any games that require kernel-level anti-cheat. It’s officially distributed malware if you ask me.
It’s crazy how many people are just OK with running completely proprietary code that monitors everything that happens on the machine and phones home all the time, all with the promise to “catch cheaters”.
Fortunately every game I’ve seen so far with such malware is just a generic competitive multiplayer dopamine farm that targets the Streamer crowd.
“But all my friends are playing it!” - Is it really worth it to run omnipresent malware on your machine just to play the currently trending game for a few weeks until you move on to the next?
I think you’ll have an extremely hard time finding any hardware that supports Windows but can’t run linux
My previous laptop couldn’t boot linux for like 2 years until kernel patches came out. It still to this day doesn’t support bluetooth in linux due to an unfixed/wontfix kernel bug. And the wifi only uploads at 1mbps under linux.
By incompatible I don’t mean “won’t boot at all” (even though I’ve had that multiple times, including with my Surface tablet), but it’s all the little stuff that often doesn’t have a 100% working driver (either yet or at all). Maybe you don’t experience this but there’s still lots of people that do.
Personally, every game I care to run works perfectly fine on my Steam Deck
Almost none of my TeknoParrot games work under linux, no matter what version/patch/fork of wine/lutris/proton/etc. I try. Plus there’s tons of people that still want to play those newer games with kernel-level anti-cheat, even if you don’t.
Your company policy requires it
The only legitimate thing on this list. Also the most obvious and pointless.
I don’t think anybody is saying to format Linux over the company computer against their Windows policy.
What’s with all the downvotes? Anyone care to explain?
This is community, where major portion of users only criticize Windows and praise Linux.
And rightly so! 😇
-
How is the support for linux on M-based Macs these days?
Is it viable ?
Asahi has made some good strides. Might be worth checking out.
Maybe on M1,but after some heavy dispute, Asahi Lina, main dev of the graphics driver, stopped working on it and does not feel safe coming back. Also, it was in rust
I’ve heard it is getting better. It would be worth downloading and trying a live-usb out and see where it is presently at.
I need something that I can use for work though
It is still considered unstable and unfinished
Wouldn’t use it for work
To me, that’s the same as “Five reasons not to invite a renowned scammer and con artist into your home”. Unfortunately, my work colleagues think its normal and what else can they do but shrug.
Stupid insta360 software >:(
Oh boy my time to shine. Took me a while but I finally got Insta360 Studio working smoothly in Bottles on Linux with GPU acceleration. All credit goes to this github repo https://github.com/SveSop/nvidia-libs.
- download
nvidia-libs-0.8.1.tar.xzfrom https://github.com/SveSop/nvidia-libs - unzip it
- the zip includes a
bottles_setup.shscript, you can try it and see if it works, but it didn’t work for me so I had to use the manual method detailed as follows
- the zip includes a
- copy the extracted
nvidia-libs-0.8.1folder to$HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/- this is just copying it to a location inside the Bottles flatpak sandbox, so we can access it inside the Flatpak command shell that we use later
- go to Bottles > Preferences > Runners
- install
kron4ek-wine...runner (not the proton one) - create a new Bottle:
- Name: Insta360
- Environment: Gaming
- Runner: soda
- after creation, go to Insta360 bottle > Settings:
- DXVK: Disabled
- VKD3D: Disabled
- Discrete Graphics: Enabled
- (optional) at this point feel free to close Bottles and disable internet for Bottles if you are really paranoid about privacy and don’t want the Insta360 Studio sending telemetry. You can disable internet for Bottles entirely using Flatseal, or use the experimental option inside Bottles to disable internet specifically for the Insta360 bottle
- then in terminal, enter a shell inside the Bottles flatpak sandbox:
flatpak run --command=bash com.usebottles.bottles - enter the folder you copied from step 3:
cd $XDG_DATA_HOME/bottles/nvidia-libs-0.8.1 - set variable pointing to the folder corresponding to your Insta360 bottle:
export WINEPREFIX=$(realpath ../bottles/Insta360) - set variable pointing to the soda runner:
export PATH=$(realpath ../runners/soda-9.0-1/bin):$PATH- exact folder name depends on the version of soda you used in step 6
- run the installer script
./setup_nvlibs.sh install - back in the Bottles flatpak, go to the Insta360 bottle settings and switch to
kron4ek-wine...runner- as for why I didn’t start with the
kron4ek-wine...runner from the start, it’s because I had trouble running thesetup_nvlibs.shscript in step 13 when I tried to point to thekron4ek-wine...path in step 12, so I started with the soda runner instead
- as for why I didn’t start with the
- run the Insta360 Studio installer inside the Insta360 bottle
- open Insta360 Studio inside the Insta360 bottle, go to Preferences, and if hardware acceleration is enabled by default then everything should be working!
Note: You’ll want to put all 360 files in the Bottles Flatpak sandbox at
$HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/Insta360/. This way Insta360 Studio will be able to see them. Exported files will end up in the sandbox as well.I actually did this all in a VM with GPU passthrough, and then made a backup of the entire VM. This way I’ll always have a working copy of Insta360 Studio, even if newer versions of Linux or Bottles stop supporting it.
Tested on:
- Fedora Bluefin 42
- Bottles runner: kron4ek-wine-10.8-amd64
- nvidia rtx gpu
- Insta360 Studio version: 5.6.1
References:
Hey thanks so much for this! Is the nvidia stuff needed if I don’t have an nvidia GPU? I have integrated (Radeon 700M) and I see the Insta360 startup splash, but after that the bottle stops. :(
Aw shucks I don’t know anything about AMD, sorry. I doubt any of the nvidia-libs related stuff would do anything on AMD. I did learn a bunch of troubleshooting tips while trying to get it working though, hopefully they can help:
- as always, check system logs. You can use
journalctlin the terminal (look online for more tips, like how to filter for a specific time range), or your distro might come with a GUI (Gnome and KDE both have one, though the Gnome one is much easier to use imho) - Insta360 Studio has log files, you can find them in the bottle sandboxed filesystem, pretty sure it was under AppData, so the path on the host would look something like
$HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/Insta360/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/... - in the Bottles flatpak, after installing Insta360 Studio in the bottle, next to the Insta360 Studio shortcut there should be a triple-dot menu with some options, try clicking “Launch with Terminal” so you can see the terminal logs as the application is launching
- though for some reason I noticed that on Bluefin this option doesn’t work…in that case maybe try running the entire Bottles flatpak from the terminal:
flatpak run com.usebottles.bottles, though I haven’t tried this specifically
- though for some reason I noticed that on Bluefin this option doesn’t work…in that case maybe try running the entire Bottles flatpak from the terminal:
- try running tools like GPU_Caps_Viewer and GPU-Z inside the same Bottle to see if they detect the GPU, and what capabilities they report (for the Nvidia GPU you need the CUDA capability, not sure what might be needed for AMD)
- search for Insta360 Studio under https://appdb.winehq.org/, see if anybody else reported getting it working on AMD, and how they did it
- in Bottles, try different runners, like the proton runner or the caffe runner
- ask an AI like ChatGPT or Gemini, the ones with web search access are pretty good at solving Linux issues from what I’ve heard
Unfortunately this is just as tedious as it sounds. I hate trying to get Windows software running in Linux (aside from games, those generally work and you can just check protondb for support). Luckily Insta360 Studio was the last remaining software that I still needed a Windows VM, so once I finally figured it out I could retire Windows for good.
Thank you! I gotta figure out how acceleration but otherwise it’s working :) just had to find a runner that worked with it
- as always, check system logs. You can use
JFC, 16 steps!
Hey, at least they got it to work! Progress has to start somewhere.
- download
