Is Linux really worth it?

Hello Sup Forumsentlemen, Is Linux worth using as a daily driver? What I mean by that is: can it do general tasks without a problem (web browsing, general productivity, watching videos, etc), and can it game and do productivity such as office work, programming, photo and video editing, etc? If so, what distro is the best? I really wanna try out Linux but I am discouraged by the seeming lack of compatibility. Pic unrelated. P.S If you're gonna ask what type of games I play the most, I usually play retro games and roguelikes the most. That means tons of emulators, some more recent games such as Sonic Mania, Shovel Knight, etc. and The Binding of Isaac. In general, I prefer indie games over mainstream ones.

Other urls found in this thread:

reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_passthrough_or_how_to_play_any_game_at_near/
winehq.org/
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#I.2FO_MMU_virtualization_.28AMD-Vi_and_Intel_VT-d.29
ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/05/install-retroarch-ubuntu-1504-1404/
extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

If you use anything except windows pc/laptop or a faggy mac as your everyday device, you're a no life faggot who doesn't actually do anything productive.

Windows 7 is better

BOTNET
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>can it do general tasks without a problem (web browsing, general productivity, watching videos, etc)
Yes

>productivity such as office work, programming, photo and video editing
Yes

>what distro is the best
Arch for binary packages and Gentoo for source packages, Arch also has AUR which gives easy access to many packages not in the official repositories (it's not that difficult to compile something from source AUR is just more convenient)

>That means tons of emulators
Emulators work just fine on Linux

>some more recent games such as Sonic Mania, Shovel Knight, etc. and The Binding of Isaac
Don't play much games either but if they're on Steam you can check if there's official support for Linux, otherwise you'll have to use Wine (so do a search for Wine+game name to find out if it works or not). Also from what I heard you should use open source driver for AMD cards and proprietary driver for Nvidia cards because Nvidia's primary target group is gamers and they use Windows so Nvidia doesn't give a single shit about supporting open source which means the proprietary one works best

I am currently using Windows 7 on my main PC but because it's gonna lose support in the near future I wanna try out Linux. I do not wanna move to windows 10 because it's spyware in a nutshell and that leaves me with no choice but to use Linux, hence why I'm asking all this.

>in the near future
What? It's currently supported until October 2021. Mind you that WES7 is being sold till 2025, so 7's support may get extended by a lot.

I still want to get prepared once the support ends. As I previously said Windows 10 is horseshit and spyware worse than the previous versions of Windows, and I really don't wanna use it at all.

Debian/Ubuntu for binary packages. At 80,000+ packages it stands at over 4x the amount of packages available in Arch/AUR. If a package is available on the internet, it's almost guaranteed to be in .deb first, and maybe only.

basically I find that the more willing you are to put time into setting up gentoo or arch before using it for anything real, the less time you will spend constantly doing maintenance on it.

Your mileage may vary with something like Ubuntu or Fedora but in my experience, something randomly breaks every time I try to use a pre-configured distro and I can never fix it. Spent a week configuring gentoo before using it full time and it's never had any problems.

Luckily I don't mind spending extra time on configuring everything to work, so that's not a problem.

>Web Browsing
Yes
>General productivity
Would like some clarity but in general yes
>Watching videos
Yes
>Can it game
Mixed bag, but if you like indie games most likely yes, if its a AAA game mst likely no
>Office work
Yes, although not as good as Microsoft Office it's still pretty solid for this
>Programming
Fuck yes
>Photo and video editing
Gimp takes some getting used to but I heard some hollywood grade video editor came to Linux a couple months ago
>Emulators
Some Emulators work, others don't so mixed bag
>Best distro
For a beginner I suggest Ubuntu if you're not that into tech and Debian if you're well versed, I also suggest you run a vm and play with Linux for a bit before trying to install it on real hardwar
No one cares, this is a Linux thread

Does Photoshop work at all? Or can you do most of the stuff with GIMP?
>Some Emulators work, others don't so mixed bag
Which ones don't work though?
>Yes, although not as good as Microsoft Office it's still pretty solid for this
Can't Wine run MS Office?

I don't think you can run Photoshop with wine, nor MS Office
>Which ones [Emulators] don't work though?
Probably gonna have to look that one up Senpai, not really into emulators

I heard that Photoshop can run on Linux with PlayOnLinux and/or Wine. What about Sony Vegas Pro? Does it work at all?

I don't know to be honest, Photoshop didn't work for me and I don't do video editing, gonna have to test it in a VM user.

If all else fails I can always use it in a VM. Or I can find some great alternatives to these programs.

Use linux as general OS, then VM with seamless mode for windows software, then dual boot windows 7 for your games. If you don't want to dual boot you can do gpu passthrough

What are the requirements to do gpu passthrough? I haven't tried it before, how does it fully work?

You gotta get 2 identical gpus and do a SLI, that way one GPU is responsible for the VM and another for the host os. Of course, you have to configure some things first but that's pretty much it. reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2z0evz/gpu_passthrough_or_how_to_play_any_game_at_near/ sorry for reddito link only decent one i could find

Look at winehq.org/ for Wine compatability. Watch out for out-of-date entries.

I've run both PS and Office on Wine in the past. But this was a 3 or 4 years ago, and it's possible Ad*be and Micr*soft have upped their botnet game since then which would make it harder to run (DRM is often the bit in non-free software that Wine doesn't like). So if you're fine running older versions then great, if not then do your research.

GPU passthrough is really hard to get working. If you don't know Linux well then you will probably struggle. But what said with VirtualBox seamless mode is good for non-3d programs.

> You gotta get 2 identical gpus
???
No you don't. You can use your good GPU for the VM and your bad/integrated one for the host.

Linux is (more-or-less) on par with
> Web browsing > General productivity > Watching videos

It blows Windows (and MacOS) away with
> Programming

It lacks on
> Gaming > Photo and video editing

Dunno about emulators.

Ubuntu is a good distro to start with. I don't understand people who say you will “graduate” to Debian/Arch or whatever. Nothing about Ubuntu will hold you back, unless you want a minimal set-up.

This

Many indie games has support for linux, at least shovel knight and binding of isaac:rebirth

>No you don't. You can use your good GPU for the VM and your bad/integrated one for the host.
that's a relief. is there a good tutorial somewhere i can follow?

Don't worry about it Senpai. I'll read up on it and see for myself, thought unfortunately I don't have a budget for 2 GPUs so it might not work for me.

The Arch wiki is a has a very detailed tutorial wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
You can follow it no matter your distro, just be sure to translate Arch-specific stuff into your distro (mostly package manager commands)

>No you don't. You can use your good GPU for the VM and your bad/integrated one for the host.
How badly does that affect the performance on the host machine?

Well obviously while you're not using your VM, you're limited to the power of your puny GPU while your beefy one sits there not doing anything. But if you don't do anything more demanding than video on your host then it won't be a problem.

You can leave your VM on and idling with no significant drain on your host's performance, assuming enough memory.

Browsing / watching videos: kind of. Flash works but the first-time setup can be a hassle, and some websites, most infuriatingly Kindle and Netflix, require certain proprietary extensions to be installed client-side, and will block access to content if they aren't there. Everything else works fine -- i.e. when you're not trying to view flash content or access web services run by fucking assholes.

Office work, photo and video editing: yes. You can't install MS Office or Photoshop, but you won't need them; you've got lowriter and gimp, which are available free of charge, and compatible with and just as good as their proprietary counterparts.

Programming: best OS for it out there hands down. Also provides much more support than other OSes for using shell scripts to automate menial tasks.

Games: yes. Plenty of emulators. For other stuff, hope you have Steam. Good support from indie devs especially, actually, as well as from Valve, but most other triple-A companies don't give enough of a shit. That's starting to change, though, with the release of Steam's own gaming-oriented proprietary Linux distribution, Steam OS: companies are starting to see the potential of supporting it, and since it runs on Linux, games which support it almost always support other more recognizable distributions as well, such as Arch.

Also Linux can run Windows software without a VM through a program called wine, which just translates all the syscalls into Linux-speak and maintains a minimal Windows userspace installation over that abstraction layer. Wine suffers chronically from poor compatibility but it works for some stuff.

Can it be interchangeable? What I mean is if I am not using my VM can the beefy GPU take control over the host machine?

>Wine suffers chronically from poor compatibility but it works for some stuff.
I heard about that another compatibility layer which is paid, but has more compatibility over Wine. How much better is it compared to Wine?

>can it do general tasks without a problem
yes
>web browsing
firefox, just werks
>general productivity
yes
>watching videos
yes obviously
>office work
libre office, it just werks seamlessy, even with proprietary ofiice products
>programming
duh
>photo
gimp (raster), inkscape (vector), krita (digital painting)
>video editing
blender's video sequence editor, or kdenlive if you're a pleb
>which distro
for these stuff any distro would work, but you can go with mint or ubuntu (xfce is the sexiest) if you want it to just werk seamlessly since they include propriteray stuff so you're less likely to have driver issues.
>games
there is always a way around, and there is WINE if you need a windows only game.

Are dell motherboards supported? I don't see any on the wikipedia list...

>Gimp takes some getting used to but I heard some hollywood grade video editor came to Linux a couple months ago
Are you talking about Resolve or something else?

>web, watching videos
sure
>general productivity
?
>game
you can play dota
>office work
you can run a windows vm if libreoffice isn't good enough
>photo and video editing
yes
>best distro
try kubuntu

Resolve sounds right, but to be honest I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about

kek
Damn I wish Adobe would move their ass to Linux but I'm not sure there's any reason for them to do that.

Okay, turns out they are. As long as the option for virtualization appears in the BIOS it is, right? Or am I being a retard?

Sort of. There is a bunch of set-up to basically disable your passthrough GPU so that your host doesn't claim it and prevent the VM using it, but I don't see why the steps requires can't be automated into a bash script so that your “swap” becomes a case of just running a script to switch it on or off. This will require some UNIX/shell scripting knowledge though. And a restart, as GPU assignment happens during boot.

>I do not wanna move to windows 10 because it's spyware in a nutshell
True, but more importantly, updates have become a game of Russian roulette, with no way of fixing things if they go awry. I've gone through two Windows 10 installs since release that have been destroyed by simply taking the updates as they are released. I can't believe these fuckers can consider this shit acceptable. I've migrated to LTSB and it seems to perform better, but I still sweat bullets every time I take an update.

The magic feature you absolutely need is:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#I.2FO_MMU_virtualization_.28AMD-Vi_and_Intel_VT-d.29
Either VT-d for an Intel mobo or AMD-vi for AMD.

if it requires a restart, why not just dual boot then?

Perhaps you mean Lightworks?

This. LTSB is actually the best shot at Windows 10, but some might consider it a deal breaker because of the lack of features. When it comes to LTSB updates, I think you get to control the updates and all of them are just security updates and hotfixes, nothing to worry about.
In other words Windows 10 is actual complete shit except for LTSB which is manageable.

>LTSB
It's still trash and has all Winblows10's bugs

>Flash works but the first-time setup can be a hassle
>installing Flash on GNU/Linux
You guys totally miss the point.

Now that I think about it you're right, it probably has even more bugs due to the fact it's an even more stripped down version of Windows 10, and I'd figure that it will have even more bugs.

better at being shit, yes, but this thread wasnt about eating horse shit

>either with their actual names ("VT-d" or "AMD-Vi") or in more ambiguous terms such as "Virtualization technology", which may or may not be explained in the manual.
Yep, virtualization technology is right there. Guess i'm good.

Use Ubuntu or some shit like Linux Mint. I have used Linux for a decade but I still use Linux Mint because it's very little hassle

It's not as secure as ubuntu.

>Ubuntu
>Secure
As far as I know Ubuntu has spyware/it's a botnet.

Godspeed Anonski

Linux is shit.

Can you point me to where the spyware/botnet is?

Windowsfag btfo

yes it is... just as secure as ubuntu. at least

As far as spyware goes the amazon integration is all you'll find, and not only can it be disabled but it was disabled by default in the recent versions of ubuntu. Correct me if i'm wrong.

>outdated packages

I have heard about Ubuntu having some spyware that will be removed/already is removed. However it is relatively easy to remove.

any security updates are quick to get there, but you are right... it's old packages which is a pain in the ass, but so is debian. (of course no reason why linux mint (which is trying to be a desktop OS and not a server OS) should be on the ubuntu LTS version instead of just the newest

For a few versions of Ubuntu text you typed into the dash (universal application/file search thing you got by pressing the Wind*ws button) would be sent to Canonical and Amaz*n listings supposedly relevant to that query were returned.
Searches were apparently anonymised before they got to Amaz*n but Canonical still got them straight from you and there was no way to know they weren't saving these searches and associating them with your install.
You could disable the Amaz*n integration or disable online searches within the dash entirely but it was on by default.
A few versions ago this was turned off by default. There is still a shortcut to Amazon on the dock by default but it's harmless and an of course be removed.

Linux should only be implemented by experienced virgins as a back end utility that sane people never see.

For end users it is a nightmare of different forks developed by a community that refuses to cooperate with each other. Ubuntu is as close as Linux will ever get to be a normal friendly OS. The Linux user share will never rise above 3.5% or so. Linux is a toothless cuck forever.

This gets posted around /jee/ whenever Mint comes up. I can't verify everything is true but it does sound quite damning.

>general tasks (browsing, videos, office work)
Yes. Firefox/Chrome, MPV/VLC, LibreOffice/WPS
>video editing
Yes. Shotcut/DaVinci Resolve
>photo editing
If you're not too cucked by Adobe, but I generally find GIMP easier to use for image manipulation. So, yes.
>gaming
Very GPU dependent. You will need to manually install nVidia drivers, or have a newer AMD card if you want performance similar to windows. If you use iGPU then it won't matter and the only difference will be how the game is optimized.

If you are a retro gamer you might have luck and be able to play in wine or in a virtual machine.

Other than that Linux is fine for the usual stuff like streaming video, torrenting, browsing, mail etc.
Ubuntu or Mint are usually considered to be the best distros for beginners. .

Of course, for the average normie Linux is unusable. I'd consider myself tech savvy and the only real reason why I didn't switch to Linux is because I feared for the seeming lack of compatibility and general support.
In conclusion I'll be trying out a (few?) Linux distro(s) once I get the opportunity and hardware to work on and then I'll decide if I can actually use it on a daily basis.

Does Linux have a wide variety of emulators though? Or am I stuck to using Wine for most emulators?

I'm a 7fag, but you might be able to use Retroarch with loonix. Or ubuntu anyway.

ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2015/05/install-retroarch-ubuntu-1504-1404/

The only reason to use Windows is when there is some vital, irreplaceable program or hardware that has no substitute on another OS. There is no other sane reason anyone would use it.

...

If you mean console emulators, then yes, there's a ton of them. Wine is the only Windows "emulator" (it's technically not an emulator) that I'm aware of, though. If you go the Wine route, I suggest Wine Staging, instead of the regular Wine package. I find everything just workswith the Staging package.

And yet most of us do. You're the minority here. Half of us are using Windows 7. Some retards are using Windows 10.

Your pet OS is and will remain trash that caters to a specific portion of individualist neckbeards like yourself. A lot of us don't have time to make sense of Linux. But then, a lot of us don't live with our mothers either.

Does linux's emulators have the same performance as window's?

I meant console emulators, and I'm happy to hear that I can play most, if not all retro games on Linux.

This is the technology board not the normalfag board.

Not the other guy but at least linux tried to appeal to normies with Ubuntu. That's got to count for something, right?

My computer runs pretty much everything at their full frame rate.

I think PCSX2 performs better on linux than windows nowadays.

>daily driver

stop that

Vanish up your own ass, neckbro.
That's as far as they've gone. If the Linux community really wanted their OS to be anything but a sekrit club, they could have dominated by now. But they all want it their own way and they all want to keep it a little bit complicated. Linux devs maintain their own casual filter with every distro. And then they act indignant about people not using it.

>Main OS
does that sound better fellow user?

yes buzz words are poison

>most used kernel in the world
>secret club

Don't split hairs. Linux isn't an OS for the real world.

>A lot of us don't have time to make sense of Linux.
Oh, come on, you really don't need to know shit to get by comfortably in Linux. Just learn the absolute basic terminal commands and keep your system up to date. If you're too retarded to remember the commands you use, just type: history in a terminal to refresh your memory.

>used on a shitload of critical servers all over the world
>not for the real world

name just fucking one

>The United Space Alliance, which manages the computers aboard the International Space Station in association with NASA, has announced that the Windows XP computers aboard the ISS have been switched to Linux. “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”
extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability

>Install a distro
>have to figure out how to automatically connect to the internet upon reboot
>have to figure out how to enable a touchpad/touchscreen
>have to figure out how to switch graphics cards
>have to figure out how to keep settings like screen brightness set on boot
The average user would not put up with this, they don't have the patience.

space is not critical we have no reason to be doing anything in space

I don't have to remember commands to use my OS. I never have, and I'll never prefer an OS that requires me to use commands.

It might be nothing to you, but life is complicated enough for a lot of us without having to fuck with command line autism.

>best kernel
>more efficient than windows
>ISNT FOR REEL WERLD XD

I dunno try it ffs shits free I don't even know why I'm filling a capcha for this

>not realizing how many technological innovations NASA was responsible for
Is this really the best rebuttal you have? Well here's your (you) friend.

Yes, there is a bunch of them for C-64
computers, obsolete gaming-consoles, Amiga computer and whatever else

No ones using it but you and the back end guys. Also, your meming aside, it's not a real world OS. If we all had to use Linux tomorrow, grids would go down and people would starve to death. That is how user unfriendly linux is.

You list issues which only plague some laptops. Linux on desktops is really easy.

>implying regedit is a knowledge you are just born with.

You just can't use computers, the software is fine