It really depends on your hardware. I have a Dell XPS with an 11th gen Intel i5 that I'm running Fedora (Gnome desktop environment) on and it was rock solid from minute one. Things to check: Make sure your network card is supported. Intel network cards are some of the better choices for open source compatibility. On most laptops this can be swapped out if necessary. Camera Touchpad Fingerprint sensor Sound driver Any niche functions or modules. Think things like a secondary display on the keyboard, speciality ports etc. Support is much better now than in the past and remember you don't need everything to work to have a good time. My fingerprint sensor doesn't work but it didn't work well under windows so no big loss for me. You can always use a live bootable USB drive to test your hardware without having to commit to anything. This will tell you a lot about the experience you might have after installation. Heck, if you're board you can try this right now and it won't touch your current hard drive or operating system.

better than Linux ever was before I did Linux on the desktop for 15 years. I was primarily Windows at home, Linux at work. With a job change, I took a detour through Mac for a couple of years, then WSL hit, and I ran Windows for quite a while. I dropped back in, but only at home when Bookworm landed. I was playing Steam games with video acceleration right out of the gate. For a lot of people, it's just going to work right out of the gate, and updates are just going to work. Now that a lot of shit's going Electron, a lot of apps that had an edge in windows are now identical through their web interfaces. If you're not playing games with a lot of anti-cheat, using proprietary hardware or don't need access to some windows-only apps (or you can put up with Wine), all the distros are up to the point where they operate just as you'd expect them to.

That HN thread was such a shitshow lol. Also I dont think there is anything credible to suggest this increase from 4.6% to 5% is due to 'non linux users' or steamdeck. Steamdeck has contributed sure but desktop linux is growing but every single metric (steam hardware survey, PH Desktop user survey, US Gov traffic, tech youtuber trends, etc). useless antidote: My friend who is a non techie gamer and she plays a lot of anti cheat type multiplayer games ASKED me to help her switch to linux mint and even when I said thats a bad idea she shouldnt switch she still wanted to. She ended up loving it even though there was a few pain points (fucken nvidia dual screen config on x11) and i think a few of her other friends have even switched after hearing her say it works well.

Don't forget Tizen too; MeeGo's other bastard offspring. I think Tizen is still around?

Well then fuck delta.

You just need a window into their world. Carry your Linux phone and tether it to an old android, install what you need and turn it off. carry two things, like some kind of asshole that carries two things!? When I was 19, we all carried cameras and mp3 players around too. It's hardly a stretch.

Ти сука. Слава Україні.

…but, just because we’ve gotten ahead of trouble and found solutions thus far, doesn’t mean that an unintended bit of code, or hardware fault, or lack of imagination can’t cause consequences further down the road. Absolutely true. I guess my thought is that the benefits of our rapid growth outweigh the consequences of forgotten technology. I'll admit though, I'm not unbiased. I have a vested interest. I do very well professionally being the bridge of some older technologies to modern ones myself.