Linux really has come a long way

Yes, if you don't have a computer that literally came out this year, don't have 2 separate graphics cards and don't need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.

In my experience the VAST majority of people that say things are hard on Linux have never actually tried it ...

Same with people that complain cats are not LoYAl lIkE DOgS... They have never had cats

I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.

The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn't work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.

you shouldn't need to disable tpm

We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.

You've given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won't hibernate & restore.

Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn't have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn't have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That's when I was truly impressed by Linux.

I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.

TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!

No surprise it feels a lot snappier. You only run the shit you have purposefully installed, and not endless layers of telemetry, candy crush silent installs, game bars that somehow make the performance worse, and mandatory online service accounts

Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.

Yes it literally has come a long way, all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
I know that's not quite what you meant, it was just a thought I came to think of reading the headline.

But apart from that, it's also become quite good, but IMO it has been for more than a decade now.

When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they're supposed to do?

HP laptops--at least business-grade ones--are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.

Hibernate works

Yah, I'm not buying that.

It really has come a long way since the old times.

EndeavourOS has been a wonderful experience for me, can't recommend it enough.

This has been my experience since 2009 :) I've been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I've only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That's it.)

The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that's almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.

I'm happy you're having a good time :)

Installing Linux is really easy these days.

Secure boot is still problematic, but it has also become much easier thanks to sbctl; in the best case you only have to delete the keys in the bios and run 3 or 4 generic commands.

Did you get your audio volume fixed? My ThinkPad is so quiet on Linux (Silverblue) that it's hard to use it for anything with media.

Funny enough, I also flashed my (probably much older) HP Spectre X360 to endevourOS last week, works good, feels more responsive then PopOS was on it.

I then tried Bazzite on my desktop and the experience went much worse, seemingly because of Nvidia driver support still being pretty bad on linux. Oh well.

I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went.

I don't get your surprise. With a decent laptop like the one you have everything will work properly. You can even load something more stable like Debian into that and it will work just fine on the first attempt. No changes required.

The issue with stuff "not working out of the box" is usually related to people using unbranded potatoes or very old hardware with modern distros.

Maybe I upped the game too much when I decided to run Kinoite on Pi...

I'm glad it's going easy for you. Unfortunately after 3 hours of trying I still haven't gotten mint cinnamon installed yet. Bitlocker has been a pain to disable. I'm determined to get it working though, I'm really tired of microsoft

EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.

• Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
• pacman, pacdiff, yay, eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.

Yep, at this point Linux just does what I need it to.

which DE?

Linux works for roughly 80% of what I do. The BIG missing piece is audio production. The software is mostly okay, it's the actual audio system that's the problem. Audio on Linux sucks big floppy donkey dicks. Yes, I know all about JACK (complicated and never works the way you think it should), RT kernels, Pipewire, etc. It's all terrible.

Sound check (although a little quiet).

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad 3 and this was an issue on every Linux install I've had (Endeavour, Arch, and now Debian). I know it isn't a hardware issue because when I first installed Endeavour, I was dual booting with Win11 and it was, no joke, capable of easily twice the volume as Endeavour, and that was even after maxing everything out in Alsamixer. Really not sure what's going on there. I've been incredibly lucky with audio on Linux the entire time I've used it, this is the one black spot on my record.

Maaan, you turned off secureboot and tpm though. Does EndeavorOS not support that?

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That's more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that's fixed now). I've had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It's really been a lot of "it just works" all around.

iirc with OpenSuse or Fedora, Secureboot works quite easily too

Linux started in 1991 but initially it was just one student's project. It was only considered mature in 1994, by the time there were over 100 people working on it, lots of software was ported to it, the first distributions came out, and it officially hit version 1.0.

I agree, and I love it. Sure there are some iffy aspects of it that may give trouble, but for the most part a lot of those problems I've experienced can easily be solved by a quick search or are "would be nice but i'm sure it will work soon" features, and I can't even think of any recent examples with the latter. So I'm left with a great learning experience to how my computer works, another win.

Linux has also taught me to make good references. You get a very different experience to your computer than with a regular windows machine that 'works'.

I like to point out how I can update installed apps with a simple command (e.g., sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade).

No bloat, no ads, open source and the communities are just amazing and helpful.

What's there not to like?

I don't think I could ever use windows again, and it makes me proud.

As long as your pc is a little bit behind its gonna be ok (unless you have a certain wifi chip)

Just came back to linux myself, installed and configured nixos on a brand new low power n95 processor with quick sync ect.

Walk in the park for declarative config with very easy rollback. Its done 24hrs later, its working well, i dont have anything else to tweak and I am new to nixos as well as having been away from linux for a long time..

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I mean if you dont have secureboot or TPM support some people would say crucial security features are broken.

TPM is only used for "prevent local tampering with device" but could be used for way more.