First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
Made the switch recently too, I only use the windows box for gaming so went with bazzite-kde. Games were up and running in no time, though I am still noodling over getting Japanese IME working in one though haven't given it any effort yet.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
I have well-specked Windows box dedicated to gaming ONLY. Nothing else on it, just my Steam collection. I keep it updated and re-install it from scratch every few months (Windows is known to slow down with time).
Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.
A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.
Setting up a Japanese IME in a so-called 'immutable' distro is a good way of developing a drinking problem. Tip: you really don't want ibus, you want fcitx5. No offence to the ibus developers, but ibus is garbage, fcitx is way, way better.
same issue, for me its mostly working but properly recognizing jp keyboard is still a wip for me (can't get forward-slash/yen symbol or kana keys working smh) probably i am kissing something obvious...
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
Same here, now running Fedora KDE but with an Nvidia card it is exceedingly buggy. Doing a single system update the normal way made the kernel version unbootable. I also had some (I suspect) OOM related full freezed that forced me to hard shut off the computer. The UX is really that good though when things work.
I love KDE Plasma but I gave up on it because Mint Cinnamon runs my RTX perfectly rock solid. I could not find a KDE distro that did not have some issue.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
My parents run a Windows PC as, from what I can tell, a home for stray botnets. The main uses are checking email and working on Word documents. (They have a laptop and iPad, respectively, which does most of their work, so it's an infrequently consulted machine.)
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
Given that I've been using actively this just month, my opinion is bit biased.I run myself basically Fedora 43 KDE version: https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
Fedora.
I've introduced it to many people, all coming from windows, with great luck.
Based on use case and individual, it may need a few programs installed that otherwise aren't, and about 7 minutes of patience to learn the UI.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
ZorinOS keeps it easy and consistent if you are familiar with windows.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
Mint offers LTS releases (in lock-step with Ubuntu) and Cinnamon is familiar and highly usable, with Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice bundled. Make sure Timeshift is targeting a sane location before you let them loose on it.
I had a Windows laptop set up to dual boot Linux recently, and Mint was the one that gave me the least hassle. Cinnamon edition looks a lot like Windows 10, too, before they broke everything.
I have a story quite similar to yours, both timeframe, KDE and fedora, but I did instead switch to CachyOS instead.
But regarding your Nvidia issue, I did get it working on Fedora first, but it was remarkably cumbersome (I put the blame squarely on Nvidia though). I used this guide:
Generally, people who think apple has made good os ui/experience choices like gnome, people who are used to windows or like to tinker like kde, people who are comfortable with linux and want to specialize their workflows for greater productivity go tiling window managers (I personally like hyprland but a big part of that is it's the first tiling window manager I managed to get key combos to my liking before the big change of tiling pissed me off so much that I fled back to kde. I also don't mind the drama because I too hold political beliefs that would be characterized as center right libertarian sympathizing in the 80's and 90's but were labelled fascism 2017-2024ish. There are other options, niri is interesting, sway is an old standby that I never liked the aesthetic of.)
Try Activities and set a shortcut to Meta-Tab to switch between activities. I love it so much for running several projects at once and keeping all my browser/terminal/IDE/SSH together and out of each others way. You can also use Meta-Q to bring up a list.
Also, Meta-T for snapping windows into tiles with Shift-Drag multiplies that organization.
The sheer productivity gains of using Plasma makes Windows look pathetic.
“Microsoft president Pavan Davulur tweeted on Nov. 10 that ‘Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere”
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
I'm sure a lot of people are waiting for peak AI fatigue to jump in with a simple OS that is actually user-friendly and doesn't try to cram an "agentic AI" into your computer with you.
Apple is only bottlenecked from doing the same by their AI products not working.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
That's the thing: amazing hardware. I want two things: good hardware and software I trust. It's going to be hard to trust a for-profit company selling a closed source OS, but Apple is doing a much better job of consistently talking and walking respect for user privacy for many years. There may be another reason beyond incompetence that they're not rushing out half-baked chatbots wrapped in privacy disasters.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
You can disable these if you don't want them, and if you do, then "Come to Linux, we're missing important features" is not going to be a winning pitch.
I still want to switch, have been trying for like 8 years. Not yet unfortunately.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
I highly recommend you give Shotcut a chance. I am a total beginner with video editing but unlike kdenlive (sorry, still a cool project) it gave me much bigger "professional product" vibes.
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
Thanks for the suggestion and reminder! I remember trying Shotcut many years ago and it was worse (IMO) than Kdenline at the time.
The good news is I gave it a quick spin just now and it has come a -really- long ways since then. Within 10 minutes I had an ok workflow for doing cuts / ripple deletes. You can add text with individually colored words and styles, add a background shape behind the text and also add effects like drop shadows, glows and other things. All done graphically in the video preview.
It's no where near as intuitive as Camtasia but I think it's very usable and over time I'm sure I'll get used to its features.
I just hope it's stable, I'll edit a couple of videos and see how it goes.
Not in a long time but their pricing page says a bunch of paid features don't work on Linux such as advanced titles and other enhanced effects.
I don't know if that will apply to me since their site doesn't explain what they are in detail but it already rubs me the wrong way that they classify themselves as cross OS compatible, but a bunch of stuff doesn't work on Linux.
I would essentially be paying $200 just to export to 1080p since the free version is limited to 720p. Except I'd likely need the $420 version since the pricing page says you can't adjust the h264 bit-rate option without the pro version. I could maybe justify the cost if the paid features worked on Linux but the ones that sound interesting and related to me (title editing, effects, etc.) do not.
Have you looked at the video editor in Blender? I'm not much into video editing, but Blender as a whole is very solid, supports H.264 and AAC as far as I can see.
I don't know who said it, but it fits the current Windows vs Linux moment perfectly. "Most people don’t want control. They want optionally having control."
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
> DAP gets its raw data from a Google Analytics account.
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
This has been true of any tracking. They track but the numbers don’t ever add up and are never the true experience.
(MarTech does a better job but still has error rates)
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
ChromOS is Linux in the way that Android is linux. Technically it has a Linux kernel, but that's it. It is not a Linux desktop under your control. It's a strictly proprietary OS you have very little control of. It's not Linux in the way that literally everyone else means the word.
PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".
Google has been working on Fuchsia, a new open source OS which in theory can replace Linux as the base of ChromeOS and Android
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
Consumer grade windows machines have been barely useable, for a decade plus, due to pre installed crap ware. I stopped helping family members long ago. I tell them install Linux and I’ll help you. A few have and have been very happy!
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
It's not toxic to not offer infinite support for a platform you don't have familiarity with. Just like if you are vegan it's not toxic to refuse to prepare a meaty hamburger.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
This is the way I went - Framework feels like the most mainstream way to have hardware that supports Linux, ships to lots of countries, etc. I installed Fedora first with GNOME but now with KDE Plasma. It's been good!
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
The great thing about open source is that there's a whole ecosystem of developers that you can pay to fix your obscure hardware problem. Self-reliance is great, but field servicability without being beholden to the trade secrets of a single monopolist is a much better deal for society.
I installed Bazzite on a NUC, and what it did was really sell me on getting a Steam Machine. Bazzite works well enough, but it has a few small bugs (e.g. performance degrades if I run Gamescope), and my NUC is old and underpowered. The general Steam experience, though, is fantastic.
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
Even if you run fully Valve hardware you are still going to be subject to the usual finicky-ness when connecting external devices (e.g. if you use multiple monitors, issues with the open source AMD GPU drivers; etc.).
What about a Mac? macOS isn't exactly Linux, but you can run a lot of Linux command line things just fine on it, and Apple will always make sure macOS works 100% on the Macs they sell.
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First, I installed GNOME based Fedora 43, that was a mistake. I got it working "somewhat" like Windows, with Dash to Panel etc. widgets, but stability was not there after all the hacks.
Then I figured I try KDE Plasma, and this is so close to Windows that I made the switch permanent. Even little things like double-clicking on top, or bottom resize handle vertically maximizes the window, like in Windows.
KDE is not just better than Windows, but it is way more configurable out of the box. I really like window rules, which allows to set window locations, always on top settings for specific Chrome PWAs or other windows. KDE Settings panel is light years ahead of Windows, it has all the settings in one place, kind of like the old Control Panel.
There is rough spots, but not that many... I did end up buying AMD GPU, as with Nvidia GPU I had bunch of bugs.
I wanted to switch to Linux for a long time now because Windows Subsystem for Linux just wasn't good enough, it was mediocre. All the development happens with tools that have bash scripts as a glue. Windows was a hindrance at this point for me.
Right now I'm trying to learn to write small native Wayland GUI apps that use minimalish amount of memory, this is a bit tricky compared to Win32, but with new toolkit libraries pretty doable.
Other issues were Bluetooth dongle not being compatible though I happened to have one that is. Ironically the old one doesn't seem to have the same temporary connection issues I was seeing on Windows. And also fingerprint reader is probably in the worst spot, "compatible" but not functioning, i.e. can enroll a print but never recognize it.
All-in-all I'm fine with it, especially once the IME works. But there are still too many issues to recommend to users that want a working experience out-of-the-box, which should be most users.
Unfortunately I am somewhat skeptical on how things will improve. One issue I see is there are way too many forks, many versions of wine, even the xiv launcher I use is a fork. There was a fork of libfprint that I was curious to try but in the end avoided given the sensitive nature of the library. Appreciate the enthusiasm, but it doesn't seem like moving towards a stable state when there is so much forking happening.
Everything else is done on Linux laptop (I used Mint and Fedora at various points in time). It's a Thinkpad so there's no issues whatsoever, everything works out of the box. I don't have to worry about my data being leaked, or an update crashing everything, or latest AI feature breaking the features I need, or malware infection (or not as much at least). I have all the browsers, email clients, word processors, spreadsheets, development IDEs, graphical and all kinds of software I need. For free.
A few years down the road, as Linux becomes more and more mainstream and game devs start paying more attention to compatibility? I'll happily put Linux on the gaming rig and that'll be all.
Aaaah, old Control Panel. One of the things that made me realise that I'm now better at administering a Linux system than a Windows one is that the old Control Panel has been replaced by a series of other screens that don't link together by the same concepts that Control Panel used as groupings.
I think the old Control Panel still exists, but they make it hard to find, and if that's the case then it's not going to exist much longer.
It really is one of the things / realisations that properly ended Windows for me.
As nice as KDE Plasma is, nothing is as good as the RTX actually working perfectly. It is a dream.
What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.
KDE is generally considered close to a Windows experience, although, I'm afraid the "start" menu is still affixed to the left hand side and not in the middle of the taskbar (which is weird). It also doesn't bother with too much telemetry and all that stuff.
Kubuntu is Ubuntu but with the KDE front end, instead of the Gnome one or whatever it is. Being Ubuntu it supports Secure Boot which ticks a box.
It is just as easy to install as any other mainstream Linux distro, which is very easy. Its also quite easy to upgrade. I do recommend that you stick to Long Term Supported (LTS) releases.
I took a customer's "redundant" laptop (destined for land fill, too old, ran slow for Win10) about five years ago and repurposed it for my grand-daughter and stuck Kubuntu on it. If you recall we were heading into Covid related lockdown back then and this was for her to access school remotely.
She is still using it! I have updated it from 18.04 to 24.04 remotely through an OpenVPN tunnel. Try doing that with Windows ...
However, for folks who don't want to install some random packages, maybe Atomic version of the distro is better: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
Atomic Linux desktops has the neat feature for ability to "rollback" if installation fails. A lot like with ChromeOS, the updates are done in atomic fashion and the flipped over to new version.
Normal Linux distributions are more mutable, atomic are lot more immutable.
I went with Popos. It is simpler than KDE for someone with dexterity and mild cognitive issues. Plus it fixes a lot of the annoying ubuntu / gnome decisions like snaps and hiding the taskbar etc.
There were a few initial teething questions in the first week, but 6 months in now and no other issues (apart from forgetting her password). Highly recommend.
I think it’s pretty good for non dev users. The distro doesn’t provide any earth shattering new innovations but they spend efforts to polish the interface and make it easy to use.
Its pretty good for people who just want a working system and don’t care about whether it’s linux or something else.
But regarding your Nvidia issue, I did get it working on Fedora first, but it was remarkably cumbersome (I put the blame squarely on Nvidia though). I used this guide:
https://github.com/Comprehensive-Wall28/Nvidia-Fedora-Guide
Also, Meta-T for snapping windows into tiles with Shift-Drag multiplies that organization.
The sheer productivity gains of using Plasma makes Windows look pathetic.
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
Granted, I think Apple has slightly better execution, but that's pretty subjective, I suppose.
1. https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.
DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.
If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.
Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.
On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.
Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.
IMO it is more polished, built-in effects are better, runs stable on Windows for me (so you can try it anytime before switching to Linux) and it looks nice.
I was editing video gameplay footage with kdenlive some time ago (on Windows) and it was indeed very hard (and also crashed a bunch). In fact i think i switched when i also wanted to overlay text in a certain way (a timer in my case) which seemed to be impossible to make look halfway decent.
The good news is I gave it a quick spin just now and it has come a -really- long ways since then. Within 10 minutes I had an ok workflow for doing cuts / ripple deletes. You can add text with individually colored words and styles, add a background shape behind the text and also add effects like drop shadows, glows and other things. All done graphically in the video preview.
It's no where near as intuitive as Camtasia but I think it's very usable and over time I'm sure I'll get used to its features.
I just hope it's stable, I'll edit a couple of videos and see how it goes.
It dates back to the 1990s and has used in Hollywood movies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks
There is a free version to try out with limited features, then subscriptions and also options to pay just once ($200 or $420).
I don't know if that will apply to me since their site doesn't explain what they are in detail but it already rubs me the wrong way that they classify themselves as cross OS compatible, but a bunch of stuff doesn't work on Linux.
I would essentially be paying $200 just to export to 1080p since the free version is limited to 720p. Except I'd likely need the $420 version since the pricing page says you can't adjust the h264 bit-rate option without the pro version. I could maybe justify the cost if the paid features worked on Linux but the ones that sound interesting and related to me (title editing, effects, etc.) do not.
Blender is amazingly designed and robust but it's really optimized for 3D design, not editing screencasts.
Many DAWs are also video editing systems nowadays, I believe Reaper has a decent one.
Windows gives you the worst of both worlds. It restricts the control over the things that matter, and dumps unnecessary knobs on everything else.
Linux flipped that. It stays out of your way, lets you change what you actually care about, and never fights you for ownership of your own computer.
Linux won/is winning because it quietly became the place where your computer feels like yours again.
Dead Comment
A lot of adblockers also block GA. See [0], it's basically half of adblockers (by usage).
Technically-savvy users are both more likely to use adblockers, and more likely to switch to Linux, and more likely to alter the default settings of their adblocker to make it block more stuff. Also privacy-aware users, counter-cultural users, etc.
So the data is probably underestimating the amount of Linux sessions because it can't see them.
> By DAP's count, the Linux desktop now has a 5.8% market share.
We can probably up that by another couple of percentage points at least, just from this effect.
At extremes, if we accept the argument that the vast majority of Linux users will be using an ad-blocker that they have configured to block GA, then 5.8% seems incredibly low.
[0] https://www.quantable.com/analytics/whats-blocking-google-an...
I think you’re right. I think it might even be double.
Which means pretending that every single "unknown" desktop, which is a larger percentage than the Linux desktops, are Linux.
And also by considering ChromeBooks, which also have a larger percentage than Linux, are Linux.
Dead Comment
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
ARE YOU ENJOY MY LINUX? IT'S FULL OF JOY, RIGHT? YOU ARE HAPPY!!! YOU ALL WILL BE HAPPY!!!
___
seriously though, I do enjoy my arch, but I would never force someone to use linux by not providing help. It's basically same vibe, as with Microhard forcing it's AI vision of OS. Don't be that toxic, your relatives needed your help, and not your narcissism.
If you really think, they need to switch, show them the benefits of it. Show them nice UI, ease of use. Ensure, all their needs can be fulfilled by a given set of apps.
it's currently not possible to go linux, if you need photo editing - darktable and rawtherapee are just not there yet. Very far from there, honestly, if you compare with stuff like capture one - by contrast DT and RT would feel like a masochistic toys. I have to keep dual boot because of that.
Yes, a toxic version of this exists, but simply refusing to do a thing isn't toxic.
I'm the computer support person for a few family members, and my familiarity with Windows these days is getting so minimal that the only way I may be able to continue to offer support is if they switch to Linux anyway.
So, rather than an ultimatum, it's more just practicality.
Which is why I'm strongly considering a Steam Cube.
But I will say, after 18 months it's starting to show a little bit of bit rot. E.g. for some reason the bootloader refuses to remember to boot into the most recent kernal/OS combination I have installed - it works if I intervene during boot and manually select it, but it seems to often revert to an older combo. And there are starting to be some odd little bugs with external storage drives and the file browser... I haven't looked too deeply into it, but I expect these are Fedora problems, not Framework problems. Maybe I brought them upon myself by tinkering a bit too much with some drivers (not strictly necessary, I was trying to do some unusual A/V stuff I wouldn't normally bother with, but it was for a friend...)
The terrible thing is that you are probably unqualified to do driver surgery without taking on more work than the problem is worth to you to fix.
It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
RIP Zareason