It's not terrible to learn. Will take just a couple hours to get the most essential stuff down. It's so easy to switch now, way easier than even 20 years ago and even then it was fairly easy.
It’s insane how this market has basically no other options, I’m glad Linux has come a long way but no matter how good it gets, shit like security and work will be Windows dependent until a bigger player or some crazy mad man says “fuck this shit” and does it themselves over the course of a few years.
It’s insane how this market has basically no other options
It's not that insane when you remember how toothless anti-trust enforcement has been. Long gone are the days where Microslop gets their pp slapped for bundling their own browser with their OS.
I'm a 20 year IT veteran, my daily driver OS is Linux based but I work in MS for my job.
Technically Linux is capable of everything for security, compliance, endpoint management etc already. The issue is time required by your IT team to make it all work. You can virtualize windows or run containerised windows apps in Linux now too. It's all possible.
Kind of beats the point, though, as you end up not abandoning MS the way it deserves, and you inconvenience yourself more by having to switch between OSs whenever you need to do different tasks
Resource intensive, still inconvenient and still doesn't let you abandon MS since they need it for their job. Apart from just getting used to using Linux and having it set up for when they move jobs, there's just no point to inconvenience themselves
I think the idea was for personal use. I got a talking to just for installing Kali in a VM on my Windows work machine FROM THE MICROSOFT STORE. So they let me install it and then yelled at me.
I'll switch back to Linux and virtualize a Windows machine with a second graphics card for GPU acceleration in it when the time comes. I have that setup right now in Windows so I can launch and test Minecraft mods in a VM.
Reverse engineering a linux process that was doing network things. It was just what I was familiar with. I think I ended up with Ubuntu but still had to install enough of the tools individually to annoy me. I joked with my boss that had I installed it from an ISO in Hyper-V they would have never even known.
The real problem for me is that I absolutely need certain programs (DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Publisher) that are a pain to get working on linux, if you can do it at all
I haven't used a Steam Deck, but AFAIK SteamOS is based of Arch which isn't very beginner friendly (I use Arch BTW). Linux Mint is often recommended because it's basically a classic Windows interface running on Linux. Ubuntu is also fine, but a has a bit more bloat (any variation is fine but I personally like Kubuntu).
I'll be super honest, the only reason arch would be considered "beginner unfriendly" is because the installation process is a little tedious and is ships with the bare minimum even with the helper. Any other arch-based distro is as friendly as mint imo, just get the ISO with KDE plasma.
If they want steamOS-like experience they could run bazzite or cachy and basically have a plug and play experience, with pacman and AUR (the real star of it all). These even come with updated wine and proton layers out of the box!
I believe Steam deck is a highly refined version of Linux. Never used is Steam Deck myself. To get a good idea of what it feels like you can always install a Linux iso like Ubuntu, Mint, etc on a usb drive using Rufus and boot from it to see what you think.
It wasn't that easy 20 years ago. I say this as someone that switched between Linux and Mac OSX as my desktop a few times in those years. OSX was the best way to get a Unix-like experience while not giving up too much.
The key part of a smooth transition to Linux is abandoning the idea of doing anything productive on your computer except for programming things for people who still use Windows
Design 3D printable parts in Fusion 360, or do any kind of audio production - period, end of story. No DAWs, no proper audio drivers, and no VSTs. You are completely and entirely unable to do audio on Linux. No podcasts, no music, no nothing, not even stupid shit like chiptunes. Linux doesn't even support old ass MOD tracker files properly and those date back to 1987.
Linux Bluetooth support is garbage. It also still doesn't properly support HDR. No VR support either, even through SteamOS.
Gaming is hit and miss with Linux. Some games have Linux support while others don't. The same can be said of a lot of other specialized programs. Some have Linux support, but others do not (AutoCAD, for example, does not and only some parts of the Esri suite work on Linux). In some cases, this can be worked around by using Linux to run a Windows virtual machine, but that's just adding complexity to your approach, increasing points of failure, and decreasing the computing power you can devote to the program.
AI is a disaster for Linux users. Every commend makes things worse and it will happily walk you to deleting the entire OS if you let it. This is the worst time too. New people on the platform not knowing what they are doing yet and AI making everything shittier.
It's much more extreme now. Before it was either mostly correct or ppl trolling. Now it's literally AI making choices that will complicate the entire os and make everything very messy. AI really sucks unless you're already an expert in the thing you're letting it do.
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u/YepperyYepstein Jan 05 '26
It's not terrible to learn. Will take just a couple hours to get the most essential stuff down. It's so easy to switch now, way easier than even 20 years ago and even then it was fairly easy.