by jchw | 2025-08-23 09:40:23+00:00
I absolutely love the direction KDE Plasma Wayland session is headed; I think it looks great, it definitely runs great, and it really is just packed with features. I do have some personal KDE gripes I'd like to work on, mainly just improving the KIO fuse integration more, but wow have things progressed fast.

Still, I caution people to not just jump to Linux. The actual very first problem is not software. It's hardware. Firstly, running cutting edge motherboards and GPUs requires a more bleeding edge setup than typical LTS distros give you; you'll be missing audio codec drivers and the GPU drivers will be missing important updates, if things even boot. Secondly, NVIDIA GPUs are currently in a weird place, leaving users with trade-offs no matter what choices they make, making it hard to recommend Linux to the vast majority of users with NVIDIA GPUs. Thirdly, and this one is extremely important, nobody, Nobody, should EVER recommend people run Linux on random Windows laptops. This is cruel and unusual punishment, and it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if Arch wiki says it works pretty good. It's a bad idea even if a similar SKU works well, or hell, even if a similar SKU ships with Linux out of the box. It's just a bad idea. The only two big vendors that even really do a good job here are System76 and Framework, and they still have to use a bunch of components from vendors that DGAF about desktop Linux. It is impressive that you can more or less run whatever desktop hardware and things usually work OK, but this logic doesn't apply to laptops. This point can't be stressed enough. I have extensive experience with people trying to switch from Windows to Linux and it's genuinely a challenge to explain to people how this doesn't work, they don't have the frame of reference to understand just how bad of an idea it is and learning the hard way will make them hate Linux for no reason.

Still, even with good hardware, there's plenty of software woes. You'll be missing VSTs. You might have to switch to Davinci Resolve to edit video, Krita to do digital painting, and Blender to do... Well, a lot of stuff. All good software, but a very non-trivial switch.

I'm really glad to see a lot more people interested in running Linux and I hope they have a good experience, but it's worse if they have inflated expectations of what they can do and still have a good experience with. Being misleading about how well Linux or WINE will work for a given task has never really helped the cause, and probably hurt it a lot.

I won't argue about Proton/Steam, though, that shit's miraculous. But honestly, a lot of people like playing competitive multiplayer games, and those anti-cheat vendors don't give a damn about your Linux, they're thrilled to start integrating Secure Boot with TPM attestation as it lets them try to milk more time out of the "maybe we can just secure the client" mindset. (I personally think it's going to die soon, in a world where ML has advanced to the point where we can probably do realtime aimbots that require absolutely no tampering with the client or the computer it runs on, but we'll see I guess.) But for me who doesn't care, yep, it's pretty good stuff. Whenever there's a hot new thing out chances are it already works on Proton; been playing a lot of Peak which was somewhat popular in the last couple months.