MudMan

I self host those, too.

I am nobody in the scale of this conversation.

I think there’s a business opportunity in simplifying self hosting into a commodity (have your people call my people, we’ll talk), but nobody is taking advantage of it other than, say, Synology, and they are still way too complicated and mostly only concerned with selling you hard drives.

Apple and Google aren’t going to invent the iNAS or the Servoor until they can find a path to datamining and revenue in those that beats hosting things themselves, and that time is probably never. So while everybody uses Gmail and Facetime and ChatGPT nobody selfhosts.

Heh. It’s a very software-centric view. Open source trivializes things that can run as software on readily available hardware, but if there’s a linear relationship between cost of hardware/manufacture and results you aren’t solving much of the gatekeeping. There’s plenty of open source availability for a lot of stuff, from email to LLMs, that nobody self-hosts. The problem isn’t the underlying reproduction rights.

I will say this, I don’t care about what the author or anybody else “supports”. If we should have learned something from the last decade or two is that “support” means jack shit.

I care about regulation. And just like I think education, transportation, medical patents, health care and other key resources should be fundamentally public by law, the same is true of other technologies.

Honestly, the whole thing should be way more standardized, handled directly from BIOS without having to interrupt the boot and support fast booting instead of bringing up a menu every time. It’s weird that crappy, cheap ARM handhelds with Android/Linux dual boot handle this better than x64 devices

On Linux you can already boot to Windows (Bazzite even installs a script that does this into your Steam library to enable easy switching from Game Mode). I am not sure if there’s something readily available to do this on Windows, but either way it’s a massive waste of time to boot into one thing to then boot into the other. It’s even a waste of time to have to step through any menus at all to select a boot option.

The reason he’s actually giving to keep Windows is software compatibility for multiplayer games and other unsupported things. Using it as a fallback is just another reason he adds at the end when troubleshooting his broken bootloader.

He’s not wrong about any of it, although for recovery you’ll likely have a harder time accessing the Linux FS from Windows than the other way around, so having a recovery Linux on an external drive is good advice regardless.

I mean… sure, but by that point he has recommended dual booting multiple times already. Using Windows as a recovery system is just the last reason he gives. By that point he has already suggested that people main Linux and keep a cracked/not activated version of Windows in the back for other reasons.

The OP gives the sense that it’s purely circular logic: he is only recommending dual booting because his dual boot setup corrupted his bootloader. That’s not what the video is saying.

Sure. No argument from me here.

That’s just life, though. You so very often have to solve problems someone else created that get in your way but not theirs.

That this is type of issue is relatively familiar territory, at least in Fedora-based distros. I can’t promise it’s the exact same known issue I encountered in the past, but it sure seems similar.

I disagree. This is way more interesting than “mildly”. “Very”, even.

And, once again, nobody cares.

You are substituting your interests for the market. I’m happy that you’re happy with what you have, but your opinion isn’t relevant here.

What is relevant is what is installed in the hardware that is selling and will sell in the next few years. Nobody is shipping 5700s on prebuilts in 2026.

You want to see Linux in more systems? You get that by selling more systems with preinstalled Linux that don’t give people an incentive to revert them back to Windows and by getting more people with preinstalled Windows on new systems to at least dual boot.

You and I are sunk cost. We’re the residual 2% of users that were already using Linux before Valve shipped one prebuilt handheld system with that level of setup. I care about people buying the second one from Lenovo and about convincing Asus to make more of these and eventually about extending those options to tablets, prebuilts and laptops as well as handhelds.

That’s how you both increase the Linux install base and add more third party support on both drivers and software. And hey, good news, you get to keep replaying Bioshock all you want forever. But you’re not the priority here.

Why would it be? Again, nobody cares.

The GPU makers want to sell you new GPUs, so they don’t care. The game makers don’t have much of an incentive to cater to whatever percent of the 10% of AMD users are stuck on ancient hardware, so it’s not cost effective for them to care. The users are glad to extend the life of some devices, I’m sure, but the narrow band of software and features this enables is just going to get smaller over time as new software comes out, so as a collective the amount of caring will only go down.

Again, you are talking about edge cases. We are considering a blob of several billion devices in a rat race to sell, refresh and upgrade billions more. Linux will grow as it comes preinstalled in new devices, justifying additional support from manufacturers in a constructive loop. I’m not against it serving as a remedial OS to salvage old ewaste at all, but that’s not how you turn it into a major player on desktop devices.

Oh, and for the record, I have some 6 series AMD GPUs around the house still. Even with native RT your assessment of their modern viability is… optimistic.

I dual boot on most of my devices and I have PCs around the house going back to Windows 95.

I am also proposing that “just this week I installed Linux for my mom” becomes the next “year of Linux desktop” and is treated with similar derision, because man.

In all seriousness, this is delusional. All Windows devices out there work out of the box and come with Windows preinstalled, so there isn’t an installation in the first place, just a first time setup. Installing Windows the way I like it takes some tinkering, but MS’s assumption is that most normies don’t have a way they like at all and will happily take the default. They are right about this.

There is certainly more clicking on a Windows install in that you have to say no to a bunch of stuff, but it’s ultimately fairly equivalent these days.

The problem with Linux isn’t installing it (sweaty Arch users aside), the problem is what happens next. You can get lucky and have everything work, particularly with Bazzite and other distros that have a narrow focus and provide specific installers targeted to specific hardware, but if something in your PC doesn’t work out of the box you’re SoL.

In the example from this video the guy found out their AMD GPU was running about 25% slower than expected, so now what? And that’s before he reaches an ungraceful boot failure and is stuck out of the OS instead of going into an automated recovery process.

You have to troubleshoot on Windows as well, as you do on any computer, but the likelihood of hitting an issue in the first place is lower due to it being the baseline platform, and the paths to a resolution are also more streamlined. That’s the definition of harder to set up and maintain.

The sooner the Linux community gets over the delusional bubble they live in after getting their systems set up and fine tuned the faster a transition to Linux for more people will be. The delusional rah-rah isn’t helping.

I should add that in my experience Linux developers and maintainers are WAY less unrealistic about the current state of Linux in these areas than vocal online advocates. This is more a community problem than a development or strategy problem, although there’s some of both in there as well.

You are listing edge cases. Nobody cares.

You buy a laptop, you install Linux and it goes. That’s the bar for mainstream usage.

If you have an older computer that no longer gets MS or AMD updates it’s cool that Linux can be installed on it and be marginally safer, but it’s disingenuous to not acknowledge that in that scenario unsupported Windows still works, by definition. For people on older hardware their older hardware is already working.

Linux can, at best, have a lighter footprint (and be less full of decades of leftover garbage) and make some forward compatibility available on very old devices, but it’s not unlocking hardware that wasn’t working because it didn’t have drivers. Windows does do that in general, and especially for newer or niche hardware. Lying to ourselves about this is not doing anybody any favours.

It does make it so.

I get so tired of shouting this from the rooftops in the general direction of FOSS devs and advocates. UX is the only thing that matters. If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t exist.

No, Linux doesn’t have “much better hardware support than Windows”. It is harder to set up and maintain, so it’s worse. It doesn’t matter if you can make it work. It doesn’t matter if you can make things work that don’t work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn’t go, then it’s worse.

This doesn’t make me mad because I want to defend Windows, this makes me mad because I really, REALLY want Linux to do well, along with other FOSS alternatives to enshittified commercial software, and this is an absolute brick wall blocker for that. I don’t know how FOSS spaces take away control from whiny engineers who think the current situation is functional, but somebody needs a UX equivalent of a Linus Torvalds shouting abuse at coworkers about how garbage their UX is (that everybody finds hilarious for some reason. Maybe the next step is getting some HR).

You can also set up Grub to default to your last boot. I forget the exact setting name, but it’s a Google away. That’s what the guy in the video did, too.

If Windows can screw up his bootloader then the problem is with the bootloader.

To clarify for people not clicking through, he didn’t recommend dual booting because his install broke, he recommends dual booting to work around software incompatibilities. Which is pretty good advice, I just wish it was faster, smoother and less janky.

I had Fedora bork up on me on each kernel update for a while and force me to rebuild… something. It’s been a while, I forget what the underlying issue was.

People like to claim Windows updates are more problematic than Linux updates because they install without permission, but it’s not really true. For one thing, Bazzite updates in the background just like Windows does (it just does it on user reboot as opposed to forcing a reboot).

It’s Wayland only, I’m pretty sure.

Yes it is.

For the end user, if one platform has driver support and the other one doesn’t, then one platform works and the other one does not.

“It’s not my bug” is a thing engineers get to say to close issues on their backlog, but it doesn’t magically fix the problem for the end user if the other side says the same thing (or doesn’t care).

If you want people to use Linux, then Linux has to work, and that includes the third party drivers.

I always assumed this is because of jet lag making me hungry and sleepy at weird hours because I’m so rarely in a hotel unless I’m in a different time zone. Does this happen to people when they are in a nearby hotel, too?

I mean, I’m far from the most dextrous human on the planet, but so far I’ve managed to sneeze a piece of wood into oblivion.

If anything I’ve been a lot closer to cracking my skull by being momentarily unable to stand upright in the shower. I guess your mileage may vary.