09/26/2024, 7:18 AM
as of now, i'm one week into my Pop!OS experience, so i thought i might post an update on my thoughts. how is it? well... i'm pretty mixed. let's start with the good; Linux is so much less intrusive than Windows has ever been. it doesn't reek of "i'm made by a multi-billion dollar tech company that only wants to sell you stuff" and i really appreciate that about it. it feels so much more homegrown, and that rocks. i will always appreciate open source software like this way more than something like Windows or Mac, since it's giving power to the people, instead of being this completely closed off, "do things our way" sort of thing. but... that's kind of where my compliments end. i dunno, it could very well be the fact that im using a version of Linux that's designed for beginners, but everything feels so similar to my normal Windows experience, except with more bugs and less support. it leads to me saying to myself, "why wouldn't i just use Windows for this?" since i know for a fact it'd work there.
first, those bugs i just mentioned. what are they? i've run into a lot of weird issues using Pop!OS so far, but the main ones are freezing, disabling my keyboard, and not waking up. i'm running Pop!OS on my laptop, and one of the main features of a laptop is putting it to sleep when you close it. understandably, i expect it to, you know, wake back up when i open it. but sometimes it just... doesn't. no matter what i do, wiggling the mouse, pressing every key, closing it and opening it back up, pressing the power button... i'm pretty much forced to just power it all the way off, then start it back up again, which is not a very good thing to have to do considering i'm using my laptop to work on things like schoolwork and this very website. i've also found that sometimes, for seemingly no reason, my comptuer will freeze for about 10 seconds, and then continue like normal. i mean, i guess it's not that big of a deal, but that's not something i've ever run into with Windows.
something a little less dire (but still pretty annoying) is that sometimes when i boot up my laptop from a shutdown, i'll find that my keyboard just... doesn't type. i can still use it to do things like change the brightness or volume, but typing is completely disabled. or sometimes the mouse won't work, and i can't even select the password textbox to type in my password. usually all it takes to fix this is a quick restart, but it's still not great that i have to do that in the first place.
finally, let's talk support. this is the main caveat most people have with switching OSes, and it's what made me so reluctant for so long. but overall, the support with Linux has been fairly good so far. it runs VSCode, OBS Studio, Firefox, Firealpaca and Kdenlive, all of which are the main "tools" i use on my computer to make stuff. OBS is a little weird with the way it handles video capture devices for some reason though, it doesn't have any option to capture audio in the source itself. i'm assuming that you're supposed to use another source specifically for the audio, but i don't know that for sure since i haven't messed around with Linux OBS for more than a couple minutes yet.
it's once you start getting into games that support starts getting really iffy. now, i don't use my laptop for all that much in terms of games, i prefer to save that for my desktop or consoles, but i do boot up a few from time to time. the two games i've tried out are Knytt Underground and World of Horror. according to its Steam page, Knytt Underground is natively supported on Linux. so i downloaded it, started it up, and it works great. certain areas suffer from some weird slowdown that isn't on Windows, but other than that it runs perfectly. but then when you try to alt-tab out of the window, you just can't interact with anything else. not only that, but it gets really hard to navigate your way back to the Knytt Underground window. to get things outside of the game to work normally you have to fully close out of the game, which is kind of annoying in a game that you can easily get lost in, making a map or a walkthrough a very helpful tool that you just don't have access to. the other game i tried was World of Horror, which actually isn't natively supported by Linux. instead, you can use something called Proton to get it running. Proton is a thing made by Valve that helps Windows programs run better on Linux. at least, i think that's what it is? operating system stuff is a really big blind spot for me when it comes to tech, if you can't tell. all i know is that it uses Wine, a Windows emulator, to run Windows games on Linux. which just begs the question, "why wouldn't i just use Windows for this?" that question becomes especially enticing when you realize that World of Horror's Proton support is a little iffy. sometimes the game freezes up for no reason, sometimes it refuses to even start, and crashes are not out of the question.
now, i'm fully aware that judging Linux gaming by two very niche games that either have iffy native support or no native support at all is a bit loaded, so take that last paragraph with a grain of salt. however, so far i've noticed a common theme with Linux. it is more capable, it has the potential to do way more than Windows, but to get to that point you really have to put in the time and effort to get it there. Linux ain't some out-of-the-box solution you can just install and do everything on immediately. but, at least for the things i use my computers for, i don't think Linux is worth the extra effort for me. it just doesn't do what i want or need it to do so far, and while yes Microsoft and corporations as a whole are smelly and bad, Windows just does what i need it to do, no questions asked, and that's what i like about it. who knows, maybe i just need more time with Linux, but as of right now it's not looking like it's gonna be my main squeeze.