Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen.
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.
But it’s linux, so one obscure setting in a config file or slightly different hardware can make all the difference. I say this as a linux user since WinXP.
It's like this since it became clear smartphones were going to become the bigger market, so around 2012 or so.
Investment into desktop everything went down: OSes, apps, games, etc.
Heck, you can see this even for Open Source desktop stuff. There was a flurry of releases of cross platform Open Source software around 2009 or so: KDE4, better support for GTK on Windows, etc. All of that has slowed down or frozen in time.
Mobile has sucked all the money and hype from desktop development.
This is my feeling over the past few years. No OS is in a great spot. But I have hopes for Linux being better supported with Valve using it on the Steam Deck. (Not the highest hopes, but more hope than I used to have)
I don't agree. KDE in particular feels more well rounded than ever before. I use it on FreeBSD but I use Linux on servers and I'm also very happy with that.
Windows 10 is stable for me too though I was hit with the eTPM stutter bug (I use my Windows box exclusively for gaming, in particular VR which I didn't feel like figuring out in proton). But the windows dark patterns are surely there and I hate them. But as it's only my gaming machine I can deal with it.
And Mac... Well I moved away from it because Apple is locking down too much and I've come to hate opinionated software. Still they seem to be doing nice things with M1..
> A lot of the best kernel, driver, and gui shell improvements have only really hit their stride in the past 24 months.
Could you elaborate on that?
I've been using desktop Linux almost exclusively for the past 24 years (ouch!), and recent years seem pretty average to me. Things work great, most of the time, like always.
Unless you're talking about gaming. I'm not a gamer (or i wouldn't be such a long time Linux user) but I hear there's enormous progress on that front.
Gaming was what held me back from switching for decades. Steam is doing a great job on that front, most recent (like in max 5 years old) games in my library work like a charm under Ubuntu. And that includes all AAA games. Old games are harder as those are, understandably, not on top of the priority list to convert to Linux. For those, and some rarely used other stuff I haven't bothered to figure out Linux alternatives for, I still use Windows.
If Linux based gaming continues on the current trajectory, I could imagine a world in which a great chunk of the consumer market switches from Windows to Linux.
Mainly that I like the concept of FreeBSD. It's just one OS, has excellent documentation. Some good tech like jails, zfs on root etc.
Apparently it's not great at WiFi but I don't use that on my main driver (NUC).
On Linux I use docker a lot, and while FreeBSD has its excellent jails, it doesn't have the whole ecosystem around them. So that's why I use Linux on the server side more.
I've used WindowMaker as a Window manager for decades. Only recently did I decide to switch to Mate because I wanted a taskbar at the bottom with useful things like applets to show and switch Wifi/network, volume control and often-used icons/launchers.
TBH, if I could get things like tint2 and yabar working with the mate applets, I'd probably switch back to WindowMaker in a heartbeat.
FWIW: most systray applets work with any of WindowMaker's dockapp systrays, and there are a few dockapps (wmappl, wmbutton) that allow you a slightly more compact often-used icons/launcher thing. Mate panel applets do need the Mate panel of course but you can generally find equivalents for just about anything.
I don't run Linux anymore (not natively, for everyday use, in any case) -- like most people in this thread I also think the desktop is a shitshow these days but it's a particularly bad shitshow in Linux, and I was using Linux in 2003 so I know what a shitshow looks like. But when I do still need to touch a Linux machine, WindowMaker is still my WM of choice. It's really good.
I dropped Windows for Linux with XP. I use Linux for all my computing needs, except a few video games that don't like Wine. For those, I do have a separate Windows machine that gets turned on to play those games (like a console), and turned off when I stop. Both machines are built desktops.
I never use the Windows box for anything else. No files, no coding, no internet browsing, no music, etc. No cameras, microphones, bluetooth adapters, etc. are installed. I turn that thing on every few weeks or so.
This has worked well, and is a compromise with which I can live. Try it, it's blissful!
I don't play videogames and I'm perfectly fine with my Ubuntu install, it does everything I need it to do. Only gamers put videogaming as a must for an operating system.
I use macOS + Windows + Pop!_OS (Ubuntu-based) on a daily basis and they're all better or worse depending on the task at hand. They're all useable but imperfect. For me, Windows is for gaming and some music production stuff, macOS is my work laptop and dev environment, and Ubuntu is for most other things like personal use, but also my desktop dev environment.
Testing Windows stuff on an M1 Mac with Parallels doesn't work very well today (I have hope that we'll get there soon). Windows VMs work a lot better on my Ubuntu desktop, but a lot of our dev tools have mostly macOS users, so getting them to work with Ubuntu takes a bit of massaging at times. macOS is hard / unsupported to virtualize, so I basically have to use macOS when developing macOS software.
If we could run macOS as a VM, I'd choose Ubuntu / Pop!_OS for most things.
OS X virtualization is well supported by Parallels if you're on a Mac and are willing to pay for software (it's a just a few clicks via the GUI to set up and they offer a trial). I haven't tried it under windows, but it's still eminently possible.
You can run macOS under VMWare Workstation Player on Linux using an unlocker. If you combine it with a serial from an actual mac you own, but no longer use, you can get iMessage working also.
Projects like Proton and Lutris are making it so that most of the configuration work is encapsulated in installation scripts that make most of that grinding go away.
Unless you care about gaming MacOS has been rock solid for at least a decade. For what it is worth I am no mac fanboy, I am typing this to you on a windows 10 computer in my shop(that I use for gaming, among other things).
I've got a Mac at work and I hate it with passion. I now use my own linux Laptop instead. There is no del key, no home, ctrl and alt are swapped in some aplications and not the others. Login screeen does not remember the language and animations come back after every update even when I explicitly disable them. Muscle memory from other 99% computers I use doesn't work and most of the games don't. I feel like mac os is in contempt of me and I really hate it when I have to use it for mandatory tasks. Mac doesnt fit for me at all, I use Linux for Production and Windows for games
Ctrl+a. Also: Ctrl+e for end-of-line. Like in emacs. Also Ctrl+fbpn.
Works best with CapsLock->Control, which is a native GUI option, not something you have to install/CLI for (linux) or something you have to registry hack (windows). I really miss these on Windows and Linux, though not enough to fight the native layout. It's a rougher fight than you might imagine, though.
> Login screeen does not remember the language
It does for me, but more importantly: it shows it. Windows likes to swap the keyboard layout out from under me and doesn't show it. Mix with a 3-strikes-you're-locked-out policy at work, and it turns into pain.
> animations come back after every update
Yeah, that's fair.
> Muscle memory
That's not.
> I feel like mac os is in contempt of me
I feel like windows is actively malicious towards me and linux desktop doesn't care enough about me to do even minimum viable bugfixing. It's definitely a "pick your poison" situation.
The last time I had to use MacOS regularly, the thing that killed it for me was the lack of a tiling window manager.
I use xmonad in Ubuntu and I haven't dragged a window on my personal laptop in years. Not only was that option missing on MacOS, the underlying OS abstractions actually made it impractical to build the last time I checked; windows were owned by the application, there was no language to move another application's windows except asking the application to move its own, and doing that required the application to be frontmost. So tiling was a context-switch morass and a bad UX.
However, it appears the Accessibility Manager may since have grown enough feature hooks to support what I want, and https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst may do the job. I'll have to test it the next time I have my hands on a MacBook of some flavor.
Delete forward is Fn + delete, Home is Fn + up. It's not a specific key, obviously, but all those keys don't fit on a laptop. However, if you plug in your own keyboard I'm sure they'll be recognized.
My experience is that the only apps that use actual Ctrl on macOS are GTK apps, like Inkscape, and terminal apps (because Ctrl-C should be quite different from activating the menu item corresponding to the Cmd-C shortcut). Unfortunately, if you use non-native apps, you're going to get a non-native experience.
Yeah, this. Macos is my daily driver and it does a good job of staying out of my way.
I recently got a windows pc just for gaming, and god DAMN it's annoying. Even worse than Vista. Nothing is consistent anymore and everything is always trying to grab my attention for irrelevant shit. What the hell happened :/
In my experience, messing with Windows in this manner (especially with an unmaintained script as this one is) results in a broken installation after enough updates. I just let my Windows partition do whatever the hell it wants, and keep my use of it to absolutely minimal levels.
Yeah, it does take some getting used to. It's nice having a real shell though, and not have to worry about Windows Subsystem for Linux to get work done.
As someone who grew up with MS-DOS, Windows used to be really good until Microsoft started getting desperate and started shoving crapware down your throat... ads for Office, preinstalled Teams that starts up by itself, Skype, stupid Defender scans, nonstop UAC warnings, won't let you use a password instead of a PIN... all these dumb, user-hostile decisions. Zero respect for their users.
Apple has a bit of that now (iCloud logins, OS level notifications, bundled apps) but not quite as bad.
If Linux had Adobe Suite and MS Office I'd probably switch in a heartbeat. Need those to collaborate with other non-devs in the office.
It's all games, both proton and native, on a specific computer. The issue didn't occur for a long time when I first installed, so I'm pretty sure its a software/config problem which a reinstall would fix. I just haven't gotten around to it. Probably a nvidia driver problem tbh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2lhwb_OckQ)
Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.