the ui is actually pretty good when you get used to it imo, it's just that it's very busy and intimidating for beginners
I think there should just be a simple builtin tutorial that beginners can access, that guides them through making a cylinder or something to assure them that freecad isn't as intimidating as it looks
FreeCAD's UI is good enough to work, but not to everyone's taste. Personally, I detest the clown car UI of Fusion and it's lack of customization for my work flow - custom pie menus rock. Something that FreeCAD allows the user to do. Not to mention the half-assed mix of local install/cloud that is Fusion360. It locks your projects in the cloud subject to AutoDesk's whims, but eats your local storage. At least OnShape and TinkerCAD is all cloud and honest about it. But it's all pay to play if you want access to the good stuff.
They are improving the FreeCAD UI slowly. The Ondsel version, (based on the 0.22 Dev release), gets high marks from a lot of users about the UI design. Not my personal cup 'o tea, but I do see the allure for many users. Besides, if you don't like how it works, you can easily customize things to your personal tastes.
They are really putting in the work to make FreeCAD not suck. I was a SolidWorks pro and still found FreeCAD quite unintuitive to use. Ondsel has fixed a lot of those issues... looking at you dimensioning tool. It also "just works" on Linux which is really nice (a friend tried on windows and not so much lol)
They're both really good (considerably better at what they do than FreeCAD is, to be honest), but they don't do what FreeCAD does. Blender is for art, so that's a different thing entirely. OpenSCAD does mechanical part design, but it only does mechanical part design. FreeCAD can do architectural CAD, BIM (Building Information Modeling), civil engineering stuff (e.g. working with survey data/site elevation), FEA (Finite Element Analysis), 2D drafting, stuff with NURBS and point clouds, texturing/lighting/rendering, CAM and CNC (i.e. toolpaths for a mill or 3D printer), etc.
Yes. For me, creating car body shells, FreeCAD doesn't come close. It seems most FOSS programmers don't need complex shape surfacing to scratch an itch, so that is a long way off.
For now.
First person to come up with a time machine, can you make your first trip back to the early 80s and buy 86-DOS and open source it before Bill gets his grubby hands on it?
Plot twist, you have to partner with Richard Stallman for the first open source licensing to get off the ground and end up with GNU plus BSD and its all powershell commands.
Out of curiosity what do you dual boot for? I used to dual boot for gaming but I've lately found that proton works very well with my games and there is no need to run Windows for anything
Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won't run on VM.
Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can't eject because it's in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that's super comforting.
Alright, as much as I want to give Microsoft the double birds and leave, way too many modding programs are .exe based.
And I just cannot yet be fucked to learn how to do per-app emulation. It scares me, things just sort of work here, and I can give them one and a half birds by removing almost all their telemetry garbage.
That being said I do really like the idea of Linux, I just want a little bit more idiot friendliness out of it
I have a Windows VM specifically for that purpose. Game directories are mounted as network drives. The only issue is that I can't use hardlink deployment in Vortex, but Nexus is making a new app to replace it that might have a Linux-native release.
Yeah, modding you mostly have to do manually, but it's pretty easy. Most modern games that's just moving a bunch of folders into a folder the game has. Nexus is working on a Linux version though so hopefully that'll be ready soon, which should cover the majority of games.
As for running the games (not emulation, WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator), you don't really have to do anything. They almost all just work. You just click play through Steam (or whatever you're using to play, Lutris is a good option outside of Steam) and they launch, just like in Windows. You can choose to tweak things, but there's no real need unless you want to do something weird.
It's more idiot friendly than you'd expect. You just have to enter it knowing it isn't Windows, so some thing will work differently than Windows. If you expect identical behavior to Windows then it can be annoying. You had to learn Windows at one point too, and you'll have to learn how your Linux environment behaves too.
I would recommend something with KDE (a desktop environment), because it's easy to use coming from a Windows user. Maybe Fedora. Just try it with a live USB and see how it feels. You don't even have to install it immediately.
I personally wouldn't recommend KDE unless you like customization and modding. It has lots of configuration options that can prove overwhelming. It also often prioritizes new features over completing existing ones.
What the fuck is all this anti-Windows 11 talk? I have never had a problem with it. Is it because of functionality or something else? Because, functionality wise, it’s been fine for me. 🤷🏼♂️
Oh shit I didn’t realize this was in Linux. Welp o7 I go down with my ship lmao
I'm just guessing, I'm still using Windows (though I would have made the swap literally decades ago if the games I like in particular ran on Linux just as fine): it's not about functionality; Windows was designed to be a great tool to do your business.
It's everything else that you pay in return, the price being the least of the problems. Forced ads, forced software, insane amount of "telemetry" (half of which is just data collection for their own gains), to name a few. Year by year it's getting harder, more complicated and more tedious (and less and less doable) to remove all the forced ads, reverse all the forced program defaults and automatic bloat. If you have to look it up on the Internet how you need to edit the registry to be able to stop certain processes/services that annoy you, then it means they don't want you to stop the annoyance. A few patches later you can't even do it. Dishonest stuff like that.
If you're fine with everything that Win11 means, including stuff that drives others up the wall, then Win11 is for you and there's nothing wrong with that.
As much as others here love to shit on certain games (like League of Legends or Valorant), I still find them fun to play and I wouldn't want to say goodbye to them just because otherwise I'd prefer Linux. There's a reason they aren't supported on various OS's at the same time (developing anti cheat on multiple systems is just super labour intensive, and opens up way too many loopholes/exploits/bugs for cheat developers), and it pretty much applies to ANY multiplayer game. If I only played single player games I would switch in an instant.
I really dislike the locking of the taskbar to the bottom, having to click twice to see all my right click options, having to dig through multiple layers of menus to find a setting, not a fan of copilot being pushed in the OS (though I did totally use cortana back in the day, had some somewhat nice assistant features like traffic monitoring to recommend when I left for work), generally not a fan of for lack of better term "streamlining", it's mostly minor annoyances and the like but they add up.
I do really like Auto HDR, winget being there ootb (I think? Was amazing when I migrated work computers), windows terminal is straight up fantastic. It's still definitely useable, it's just only on my work machines (no choice, but I live in the terminal, text editors and browser for almost everything so OS doesn't really matter much to me) and my desktop, run linux on everything else.
I used Win10 mostly without issue and when I transitioned to Win11 that went without issue as well and it's been pretty much smooth sailing the whole time. The few annoyances I had with it, I was able to find something that fixed the issue, it just works. The only thing I really didn't like was that the only reason I transitioned to Win11 as early as I did was because of an update they sent out that made it sound at the time like I had to switch over, something about the wording made it seem like I had no choice, I remember it being a bit confusingly worded. I had wanted to hold out as long as possible on Win10, but because of that went ahead with the switch. It's been fine since then, but I would've preferred not having to switch because of that.
Some desktop environments (plasma 6 at least) support it when running in Wayland - my daily driver for months has been an HDR setup (with a nvidia gpu, even) and it’s been great. It’s not quite ready for non-technical users, but imo it’s not far off and I can’t wait for it to be more common.
Multiplayer (competitive?) gaming in general is pretty poorly supported on Linux. It's not necessarily Linux's fault: it's enough to deal with one OS's loopholes as an anti cheat developer, let alone two or more; but if you happen to actually enjoy playing games like Valorant, League of Legends, PUBG, Counter Strike or basically most of the big names, then, unfortunately, you don't really have a choice.
I've been waiting for the (nearly?) full compatibility of multiplayer games for 20 years. I would love to solely use Linux, but I'm afraid it's not just HDR or music production.
I switched to Linux on a laptop of mine because an update to windows caused it to not boot.
Now I get to deal with my keyboard backlight not working, sometimes the keyboard freezing on resume, my Bluetooth not connecting on the first try, and my wifi sometimes not working, but it boots fine every time.
Have you tried different distros? Some hardware is supported better by different forks. I myself have an odd situation with an old laptop that got weird Bluetooth audio issues on stock Ubuntu, but having swapped it over to mint (which is supposedly just Ubuntu under the hood!) it works flawlessly.
Now I get to deal with my keyboard backlight not working
Could I get that problem please? Pretty much any keyboard anymore comes with a backlight which I can't even imagine being useful to anyone who can type. If they provide a way to turn it off, it's via Windows-only software.
It is pretty solid unless you are going way off the rails. There are a lot of reasons not to like it but stability is not one of them (unless you are talking about non changing)
(I'm not saying dual booting is bad, I'm just saying it doesn't count as not using Windows, which is what most Windows users are opposed to, not to dual-booting with Linux.)
I had to work with a win 11 system today. I needed to fast move through a lot of pictures with the m$ image viewer, every time I delete a picture it does a fucking slow animation which just steals my time.
Okay, I went to the win-settings and removed animations. Photo-app still does animations...
Also I have a laptop I use from time to time running mint, few games installed. The games itself work okayish but the amount of times I need to "fix" some bullshit is annoying. Last things I remember were the touchpad being wonky and games having extreme tearing on HDMI, no matter if vsync was on or off.
I might try pop os some time but honestly my windows machine runs mostly without fault for years now (just cannot use any gpu drivers after march 24, but that's on nvidia) and at the end of the day I just want to consoome without fiddling in settings every time.
Tryp BazziteOS next instead of Pop. It's a Linux OS that's designed for gaming and comes with all drivers, emulators, proton, etc out of the box. Also based on Fedora, which in my experience does better in the gaming department.
I don't use it (haven't used Windows in decades), but I kept a small partition with Windows 11 on it which I boot from time to time as I enjoy watching what it's becoming.
It's like watching a slow motion industrial accident. Horrifying fascination.
I get cheap hardware. A hardware intensive OS seems stupid to me. I want my computer running the programs that I want, not wasting memory and CPU usage on the OS instead.
Plus I've gotten a notification on every laptop I own from Windows telling me to upgrade followed by something saying that they are below specs for the upgrade
Have you ever tried installing 50 pc's with windows 11 vs win10? A night and day difference. To clarify, win 10 is outrageously faster then win 11 where ms wants to have the system updated before you finish the initial setup. Whoever thought that this was a good idea should be fired.
Win11 didn't even know what to do with my Intel (of all brands) WiFi chip.
Win10, Kubuntu, and mint all detected it without needing to download and transfer the driver with my phone in order to start the updates after install.
One of our controllers (Logitech G710) works OOB on Win10 and Linux but not on Win11, a GitHub guide is needed. Also don't ask me how Win11 uses 10GiB RAM on fresh boot.
Nvidia just released a new driver for Linux, which fixes a lot of the issues with wayland.
There are still a few issues left, but it's very much useable now!
Some people these days are actually looking to give up Adobe. You know it has to be bad for them to want to make massive changes to there workflow. I think it has to do with Adobe using your data for AI.
Fusion360 is the only software I use that I cannot get running on Linux. So my wife's last macbook now lives to play Tidal in our garage and run NoMachine so I can remote into it for Fusion.
But all of these things, except AutoHDR (coming soon tm) already exist on linux though... Scaling and Freesync, especially haven't been an issue on linux for a while if you use the right desktop (KDE Plasma or GNOME on wayland)
I haven't left because W11 IoT LTSC exists. No AI, no store, options to disable all the telemetry, no bloat. It's what a Windows system should be and is pleasant to use. Also Tidal music doesn't have a viable Linux option 😢. Oh and Quest 2 PCVR streaming.
I also have a Bazzite install I hop on pretty frequently, and it's getting rather close to me switching which one is my daily driver OS. And leaving a Windows Install for Battlefield. Valorant, and VR.
Edit: Also, it would be a huge shame for someone to waste their time looking for the IoT LTSC .iso on a website massgravedotdev.
oooooooohohohohohoho you really got me with that last one.
Though at least I’m only addicted to R6: Siege and not CoD or Valorant like a fucking pleb
Edit: a MASSIVE /s
I do unironically love Siege and it is actually what’s keeping Windows installed on my PC, but I admit it’s in no way a good reason to keep malware on my machine
The problem is I'm addicted to Fusion's generative design topology optimization. I haven't seen anything else like it on the market, much less open source. It's shapes are so cool and material efficient for 3d printing.
Not sure, they changed license server types recently for newest NX. But new server should support backwards. They have NX12 linux GUI version supported , latest NX release only runs Linux batch NX---for who know why
I miss NX. My company uses SolidWorks, and it's...okay, I guess? But I'm aggravated on a weekly basis because it doesn't do something that NX could. But cost is the issue. I think you can get like 5 SW licenses for the cost of a single NX one.
Siemens has a 3 to 1 model license option now. Up to 3 users of Solid Edge, but if they check theirs all in, you can pull 1 NX license. A nice compromise for when you need more power
Because the time to learn a new operating system is more than I have to spare. I'm approaching middle aged, windows is familiar and I just want to kick back and enjoy my games.
Linux hasn't reached drop-in replacement on the desktop yet. The steam deck is fantastic and I have no problems running it stock, but desktop Linux? Nah. Why would I dual boot when I can stick to one OS that does what I want and need.
(Side note: I run Linux on my server and am quite happy with it).
Windows changed shit up on me too many times, I kept having to relearn where the dick they hid the control panel, for instance. At a certain point I realized if I'm having to put in the time to relearn shit on windows every new version, why not just learn linux? At least I'm learning because I'm getting into something new and exciting by choice instead of being pissed I have to relearn it because some dickhead moved it around on me!
That was actually my experience. My Win 7 laptop died, I needed a new computer, bought one that came with Windows 8.1, and everything was different for no reason, down to whether you left click or right click on the system tray icons to get menus or control panel windows to appear. Switching from Windows 7 to Linux Mint felt like less of a jump, and the changes between versions of MInt aren't that drastic; they don't reshuffle the UI on a whim.
There are only a few mouse models that fulfill my requirements and software support for them is bad even on windows. I'm currently on Razer and Roccat, the software is slow, heavy and convoluted, but it's the only way to use the devices to their full potential. There's no way to get the drivers for Linux and that's a deal breaker for me.
Windows 11? I have Windows 10 in dual but using Linux only, I just don't want to remove everything even if Windows is shit... I'm only disappointed there's no Affinity Designer on linux :( I know it's full of alternatives but I like the UI and I'm used to it
i was held back a while because no Roblox on Linux but I've resorted to using my phone if i really want to(ps: little mad at Roblox for killing off vinegar and the rest).
finnaly I don't have to deal with using experimental Wayland to be unable to play Roblox because of internet issues, and a system update basically deleting waydroid.
My experience with Win10 for what I use my computer for has been far less janky than any Linux distro I've tried, and I'm past the stage of my life where I could spend hours and hours troubleshooting and enjoying it.
As for Win11... I may very well made the dreaded switch to Linux when Win10 officially loses updates. I just wish Linux had viable alternatives to a lot of Windows software that wouldn't result in my workflow being significantly altered in a way that will require watching countless god awful tutorial videos and going through forum nonsense.
Like for sure Windows has its problems but we shouldn't pretend Linux and the community don't do a lot of things that massively turn off new users.
Want regular ass people to switch from Windows to something new? Check out how/why Mac OS is so popular among those who've switched from Windows, and perhaps there's some things of value there that the Linux community can learn from.
The Linux community is packed with toxicity and a stubborn insistence that it's nothing but helpful and if a user has a problem, it's always their fault and never the distro's fault.
Laptop shows your unlocked screen briefly when you open it before unlocking? Never had that issue with Windows, Macs, but on Linux this happens with Ubuntu when installed on several Thinkpad models.
And nearly every response to this problem on Linux forums is "you must be doing something wrong" or casually telling a new user 'just switch to DingOS 3.14 bro, it's what I use and I've never had an issue" like that's NOT a major pain in the ass for the average user.
I've just spent the last 6 hours troubleshooting steam input on 3rd party flatpaks, also alacarte has a bug that doesn't let you save property changes, also I can't use vim as root anymore for some reason I don't care to look into, also symlinking some of my media was a pain. Band-aid solutions have been found for the first 3 and the last was me being an idiot and not having a GUI solution to symlinks because Nautilus is arse compared to ms file explorer.
I fucking hate pop-os and flatpaks, cosmic launcher is a pile of junk, and my 4k monitor has created an infinite amount of scaling issues to work through.
Windows was a slow burn of minor inconvenience, Linux is a series of kicks in the nuts.
Auto HDR... I have one HDR monitor and one SDR monitor and w11 plays nicely, Nvidia app still won't work with more than one monitor for their version of auto HDR
Windows 11 may be the first major version of Windows that I never use on my own personal rig. I’ve used 98, XP, 7, 8/8.1, and 10 throughout my life. But I’ve got no reason to touch 11 when Arch (or fill in with your distro of choice) with KDE exists. It’s just a much better experience.
Shoot, even my daughters share a computer with endeavorOS+KDE installed and they have no problems using it. Windows 11 would refuse to even install on that same machine.
It's definitely different if you're getting paid for it. I plan to get into I.T. within the next year or two if I can, so I'm sure I'll have to get familiar with Windows 11.
I mean, technically I do use Windows 11 daily at work. Gotta be able to order stuff, send emails, and manage my time card. All that is done on a Windows 11 PC. But nobody is paying me to put it on my home PC, so I'm not going to.
I'm playing Wuthering Waves that is a more fair genshin impact and the dev is actively blocking Linux so far, so I'm not switching.
Strangely enough mihoyo themselves are letting linux players alone nowadays, both Genshin and ZZZ work without needing a VM, but they were also hostile against them in the beginning with genshin.
Thankfully I managed to purge gacha games from my life despite all the sunk cost feeling. God I miss the times when entertainment was innocent and not trying to rob me
I have a reverb g2 and the only linux projects that support it don't work with the controllers
Microsoft is going to kill WMR in the next couple years so I'll probably switch then, luckily it seems like people are working on controller support already so hopefully that's stable by november 2026
This needs an extra top panel with the dude just chilling with no makeup, maybe reading a “clown makeup for dummies” book. The caption is “my last Windows machines are barely working but they know what happens if I have to ‘fix’ anything.”
That’s where I’m living right now. The PC I use all day is already Linux.
I only continue to use Windows 11 because dual booting Linux breaks my Windows installation for whatever reason. I've been told that putting each OS on its own separate SSD works fine, but it's hard to do when you're using a laptop that you're not sure whether or not it has an extra NVMe slot or even a SATA slot.
I generally only use Linux for programming just because how convenient and straightforward it is, but beyond that I have no incentive to move.
I like KDE but the ui is jank af right now, after logging in, it takes a solid 1-2 min for the taskbar to actually popup, and opening file manager including any file dialogs takes about 5-10 secs which is pretty insane since I'm running on a pretty powerful PC with a Samsung 990 pro M.2.
For context I am using Endeavour distro with nothing else modified.
Yea no shit I have to figure out why it's having issues, but my point is that I still have to jump through hoops just to figure out what's wrong, I have a life to deal with besides being on my pc for hours on end
Yeah, that's strange. I'm not running endeavor like you two but I'm running fedoraKDE, it's lightning fast for me from boot to up and running, I don't think it's KDE I think your set up is off somehow.
I kind of like having Linux on a VM in Windows. I only use Linux for things like web browsing or writing papers which a VM can do. For gaming, I prefer Windows to avoid any problems I might encounter (like anticheats).
This gives me a near-ideal set up with access to both Linux and Windows. I just wish my Linux VM can do 120+hz and GPU passthrough.
Yeah but I think Linux VM is more convenient for me as I don't have to switch back and forth between operating systems. I can have both operating systems in front of me at once.
I can keep the VM running while playing games with my friends on the Windows host.
This is a straight up lie. Vanguard is most difficult one to bypass and running it on vm is not difficult but impossible. Where did you even hear about running valorant on anything other than windows?
LoL people on a Linux subreddit supporting a game that doesn't work on Linux only because the developers don't want it to. And actively ban Linux users, pretending it's for keeping cheaters off but that's laughable.
We just have to wait until Windows 12, the cloud OS, and dual boot will be no more. All that'll be necessary is a browser and a fast internet connection. CoD and Valorant players though... dunno what to do about them. Pro gaming won't be possible without running windows locally to get the highest framerate.
The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.
Even if that didn't already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn't have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)
A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they'd roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.
And even if somehow that didn't get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a "switch" that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can't boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you're booting into Linux.
Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.
Hmmmm, I think you interpreted my comment as microsoft trying to make dual booting impossible? I meant it wouldn't be necessary anymore, because one would just require linux with a browser to access windows if need be.
The simplest way I can imagine to forcefully disable dualbooting is do what Malus does: control the hardware and only allow one signed OS on there. Don't trust anything else.
Ive literally never heard of that. Windows can overwrite grub/your bootloader though (easy fix, just boot into a live usb and reinstall grub).
If Linux eats your Windows install that's a serious bug. That means it's overwritten data on a drive that's not even mounted, without you directing it to do so.
Disclaimer: I'm not knowledgeable about the "under the hood" things on Linux OR Windows. I've just heard it can happen and really don't want that for myself.