That’s a bit of a weird argument to make.

We were talking about PCs with preinstalled OSes. How often do you come across DIY-built PCs with preinstalled OS?

If you select your own components you never have a preinstalled OS.

Also, most people who switch from Windows to Linux do so on existing hardware. It’s rare for people to buy a completely new PC to try out an OS. Maybe if €1000+ is something you shell out on a whim, but not if you actually work for your money.

For existing hardware you always have the hardware lottery on Linux.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)

Congratulations, you just happened to get the point that I made. And for some reason you thought that was a gotcha.

My argument was that if Linux came preinstalled on machines (apart from the current selection of tiny boutique manufacturers), these machines would be configured by the manufacturer to include only components that work well with Linux, which is not the case if you use a device that doesn’t have manufacturer support for Linux.

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

The “doesn’t come preinstalled” part is still huge, combined with the “doesn’t have first-party device manufacturer support”.

If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn’t only mean that you don’t have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don’t put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn’t have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.

And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.

I like the chart and agree with the conclusion. But shouldn’t the exponential trend line start at the same percentage in the beginning of the chart? Right now, the exponential trend line is far below the original value at start, and with exponential lines that matters.

Overall, developing (in open source or not) or creating art or whatever one is into my once advice is to cherry pick whatever strangers are telling you. You only listen to the healthy advice and everything else must be like water off a duck’s back.

This part here.

Only taking healthy advice and ignoring everything else is something you can do if you are super mentally stable. If you aren’t this is often not possible.

In commercial development that’s easy. I don’t really care about the product I am working on. I am doing a good job working on it, but it’s not my baby. Also, I am a developer, so I develop. There’s customer support people who get paid to have customers scream at them.

If this is your personal pet project, that you love and that you poured your soul in, that’s more difficult. Especially if you are already struggling with mental health.

And I don’t like it when we say “only mentally stable people who don’t mind engaging with a toxic community deserve to be FOSS developers”. That’s just not right.

Tbh, I think it’s a bit of pick your battles. GOG and Steam are mostly good companies, but it’s all closed source and I would bet money they are using AI to develop too. And they don’t even provide any way that you could check that, because their code isn’t open at all.

Is that really better than some open source dev developing with AI in broad daylight?

I totally understand why the Lutris dev shut down the discussion. The dev posted about struggling with mental health, and developing open source software is sadly really bad for your mental health. There’s just too many people who think that the code is public and thus they get a say in it, even if they didn’t contribute anything at all.

As an open source dev, you contribute without getting anything in return, and then you have to justify your actions in front of random strangers who often get quite aggressive. It’s a really big problem in the FOSS sector. Look up e.g. the controversy around Marcel Bokhorst (M66B). He almost shut down all his great FOSS projects because of all the hassle he got from randos on the internet.

I have a Quest 2 and tried to get it to run wired with Steam Link. I spent about an hour or two so far, trying to get it setup, but so far it doesn’t show up on Steam Link.

From what I have read it should be possible to get it working, but apparently it’s not as easy as on Windows, where it’s really plug and play.

That said, PCVR is not a high priority for me, hence I haven’t spent a lot of effort getting it running.

It’s immutable Fedora. Immutability is something that not even regular Fedora uses, because it causes weirdness and potential trouble if you don’t just use it as a wrapper for flatpak.

This.

The only point of brazzite is that you don’t have to spend hours setting up, configuring and debugging. If that doesn’t work, there is no point in using brazzite.

That’s the issue though. When everything works it’s great. But it’s so easy to bungle something up (be it user error or bugs in distros).

I’m running a 4070. Performance is really nice. Modern games pinned at vsync speed of 144FPS. The next day I’m down to 0.2FPS. Stays like that for a few days. Reboots don’t help. Can’t find anything debugging or googleing. After a few days it’s back up.

Turns out, I run games through heroic installed via flatpak, and flatpak keeps its own copy of Nvidia drivers. That version needs to be perfectly in sync with the system driver version. So dnf update breaks that and the games fall back to CPU rendering, and flatpak update plus reboot fixes it again. Running flatpak update first followed by dnf update makes sure performance always sucks.

Took me a very long time to figure that out, and I imagine someone without an IT background might never figure that out.

Apart from if they are going to use their PC for anything else than gaming.

Fair point about /c/linux_gaming. OPs question wasn’t really about gaming though and it was specifically about ubuntu/kubuntu.

So if anything, the OP should not have been in /c/linux_gaming, but the answers are on topic.

But even in regards to gaming, Mesa drivers are stable enough nowadays that even a bit outdated ones don’t make a lot of tangible difference unless you are hunting for every last frame. In which case a beginner’s distro isn’t for you anyway.

The average casual gamer will have no issues with Ubuntu.

Yes, but if there’s a guide on how to use some software with a Linux distro, there’s always a guide for Ubuntu and often nothing else. I can’t remember if I have ever seen a guide for 3rd party software for Brazzite.

That’s ok for someone who either does nothing or is advanced enough to adapt the guide to their OS, but for anyone between these extremes it’s a major downside.

These hoops don’t matter for beginners. They are usually fine with what Ubuntu provides, or more to the point, don’t even know what they might be missing.

Steam Survey is quite skewed by only showing what gamers use. That’s quite a hefty selection bias, and of course it shows that gamers prefer the Steam Deck and gaming distros.

The distro itself is fine for beginners. But the main advantage of Ubuntu over e.g. Linux Mint or Brazzite or any of the other beginner distros is that if e.g. third-party software has a guide on how to use it on Linux it’s almost always about Ubuntu. That is the real advantage of Ubuntu. Kubuntu doesn’t have that.

*buntu are mainly beginner distros. They work fine out of the box, but many long-term users don’t like them for ideological reasons.

The main advantage of Ubuntu over any other distro is that everything as an Ubuntu guide. The same is not true for Kubuntu, and if you stay in GUI, Ubuntu and Kubuntu share almost no similarities. The settings, the pre-installed default apps, all that differs greatly.

Thus the main reason for using *butnu is gone when using anything else than Ubuntu.

Which kinda sucks, because I like KDE much more.

Except if the gui mentions anything in regards to GUI. Ubuntu and Kubuntu’s system settings aren’t even remotely similar.

That sadly makes Kubuntu a bit of a tough sell for a beginner who wants to primarily use the GUI route, since there’s a guide for Ubuntu for almost everything but not for Kubuntu.

(Which sucks, because I like KDE way more. I of course use KDE, but that makes it kinda hard to recommend Kubuntu to a total beginner.)

Otoh, the old Windows driver still works perfectly fine on modern Windows while there just never was a Linux driver for my obscure Elan touchpad, so I can’t even source an old driver.

Recently I revived an old x86 netbook to see what I can still do with it when I put Linux on it and was negatively surprised how dead the 32-bit Linux experience is. Most distros are dropping 32bit now, with only some purpose-made old-device distros like Antix still supporting it, but also most apps have dropped 32bit years ago.

And while 32bit is old, it’s not exactly obscure.

The flip side is if your hardware is too old or obscure, there’s nobody with a financial incentive to keep it going. (That said, this can also happen in pure for-profit development)

For Epic Games use Heroic.

For Fortnite use… well, you are pretty much out of luck. A Windows VM with GPU pass-thru maybe?