Do you know how many grey beards have waited their entire lives to have a girl ask them what Linux is. You've made a lot of irc mods jealous tonight. Stack overflow responses are going to get super spicy for a couple days
I'd love to have a girl, or anyone for that matter ask me that. Though preferably not with the phrase "what the fuck" in front of it. I'd rather them ask me about it out of pure curiosity rather then out of distain and annoyance.
I don't know, given what they let Microsoft do to them I don't know if Windows users actually understand that consent is something they don't have to do.
Unfortunately gaming is about the least Linux friendly hobby there is. For most tasks you can find software that will make it relatively painless to wean people off Windows but many games, especially new ones, dont work out of the box on Linux. Most of the time, theyre going to have to fiddle with things to get games to work, if they can work and youre going to have to justify to them why they should do that.
Spend the next week sporadically troubleshooting when I get a free few minutes here and there.
After week 2, I finally decide for shits and giggles to download and install the "official" AMD driver from AMD's website instead of using the built in kernel one like every goddamn reply on every forum post has been telling me to use, because the PC's GPU is about ten years old at this point and the driver that came with the distro doesn't work with it.
3: try every proton version
4: try proton GE
5: (proccessing Vulcan shaders)
6: change launch arguments
7: use protontricks to install some weird dependancy
8: sacrifice your pets firstborn at an alter to achieve a running state
Not that hard lol, get good bitches. Also fuck you for wanting to play rainbow 6 siege. All my homies hate rainbow 6 siege.
Wrong. Also master a bunch of Proton configuration and extra parameters and then deal with abysmal performance compared to Windows.
Out of the box, Proton+Wine works on surprisingly little.
So far I've only had an issue with one game (easy to fix, I just restarted steam). I'm relatively new to Linux. (Switched because I didn't feel like paying for windows when I built my PC). To be transparent, I did use Linux a bit 5 years ago in school. But I don't think that counts.
Steam has many games but odds are most new games are windows and maybe mac only. None of activision's games have official ports and are run using WINE through the use of Lutris or some equivalent. In the past this worked ok but after a fresh install of Kubuntu 22.04, Lutris scripts do not properly install activision games like starcraft II. i.e the Lutris install script for battle.net does nothing (no files are installed, Lutris just stalls indefinitely) and the starcraft II install script just prompts you to install battle.net then goes into a loop.
I used to also think gaming and Linux are not really that compatible, but Proton being built into steam makes it easy to run pretty much any game out of the box now.
It's really a bit like what we used to do when we poked at autoexec.bat and whatnot when running DOS games back when dinosaurs roamed the land.
It's not really complicated, you just have to prod here and there until it works (unless it just doesn't because some kind of anti-consumer software lock just won't play nice with Wine, although that's becoming less common nowadays).
OTOH, things that aren't Linux friendly... corporate accounting, an awful lot of dedicated software for niche industries... There's no lack of things that are still complicated in Linux.
The problem though is that we are in 2023, a good 32 years after Linux came out. It shouldnt feel like you are in the DOS era. One of the problems that dawns on me is the real issue is a lack of consistency. Sometimes things work great, sometimes they dont. A lot of people arent having the same issues I and many others do which is frustrating because of how the community reacts when someone brings up those inconsistencies. There are a lot of people that dont run into them for one reason or another and all they see is people bitching about from their POV, seemingly nonexistent problems.
I use both Linux and Windows (Linux professionally, windows personally)
Got a buddy of mine that will wax on for hours about how windows is pointless and should have been replaced by Linux years ago. I'll then go "Cool, so uh, did that game download yet? Lets play!" Then start up the game. Four hours later and he's still trying to get the sound to work or make the graphics display while continuing his rant on how user friendly Linux is.
Like, Linux is great and all, but fuck me, it's not user friendly.
Tbf you have to fiddle about with the game's graphics settings anyways. I think lots of pc gamers are fine with having to fiddle with things. Heck seems like everyone wo ever bought a steam deck does nothing but fiddle with it. For some that is actually the most fun thing about it all.
There are also a number of compatibility issues on Windows itself thanks to the mess of DirectX workarounds they need to add to the drivers with each new game.
I knew about Linux when I was 10, and Linux was only like 2 years old at the time. How does someone be online in any capacity these days and not know about Linux? Linux users are everywhere and they never stop talking about Linux!
I heard the name Linux from Minecraft being available on "Windows, Mac, & Linux" when I was maybe 12-13 (2014-15), but I never looked into it, and all I thought of it was it was some kind of really obscure operating system. I wondered why I'd never seen a Linux computer in tech stores. And Windows seemed perfectly fine, so why would I need to use it? "It probably has some crazy UI that nobody can understand"(except I didn't know what 'UI' was at that age)
That's back than... I've been using Linux as my daily driver now since mid 2021, and I've been on Manjaro for nearly 1 & a half years.
However, I've met barely anyone who even knows what "a Linux" is. I've met a guy who was only using Kali Linux because he wanted to hack or something; and a friend at my church who manages a lot of the technology and computers: him and his father tried using Ubuntu about 10 years ago when he was a late teen. Than there's another guy at my church who, despite never having used Linux in his life; surprisingly new a lot about it and was able to help me solve a display issue I was having earlier this year. I've nearly gotten my Mum onto Linux Mint for her laptop 😂, because she really only makes documents, browses websites, and checks emails, and really doesn't need to be paying for Windows & having updates forced on her regularly. As a matter of fact, I'm downloading it for her as I type.
It is normal your friend doesn't understand what you are talking about since what you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
Thank you for making this distinction. I've never heard this before. Especially not thousands of times by the most socially well-adjusted people on the planet.