Nowadays Windows is filled with adware and is fairly slow, but it wasn’t always like this. Was there a particular time where a change occurred?
Video recording: OBS
Video editing: DaVinci Resolve or Kdenlive
VR: Doesn’t work on linux very well at the moment, it’s a hit or miss, especially on Nvidia
Programming: VSCode
3D modelling: Blender
PCB Design: No idea, never looked into it
MIDI instruments & synthesisers: No idea, never looked into it
Nvidia gamestream: Yk, I wish I could be more helpful, but I don’t have an Nvidia card
Any obscure hardware, unless you can find linux-specific drivers likely won’t work… Linux isn’t perfect for every use case at the moment, mostly because software support from big brands like Adobe is pretty poor, but you could try it out as a weekend project or a time waster…
Okay, thanks for the suggestions, but I wasn’t asking for suggestions. I wanted to see if the person whose switch was “painless” had the array of use cases I have. I suspect probably not, I’d be interested to hear what it was.
I’ve already found that OBS hangs when recording from my camera. VLC has a terrible inferface and I have to launch it with hacky shell scripts to get it to remember my camera settings, but it works.
Also Blender is not a CAD program. There is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD for most of my cases.
For PCB design, kiCAD is a good open source program.
There are plenty of open source music programs too.
Gamestream has Sunshine and Moonlight FOSS programs. I have the Moonlight client working, but the Sunshine server just won’t find it on the network. I’ve messed with the firewall every way I know how, and nothing works. Sunshine works on Windows, but has lag, so the only thing I’ve made work properly is the NVidia gamestream server with the Moonlight FOSS client. I’ve heard Sunshine is better on Linux, but not if it doesn’t work.
The hardware is a pain in the butt. I would love to know if my steering wheel runs on OpenSimWheel protocols, but the configurator is proprietary and requires uploading the config after each startup of the wheel. No idea how it’ll go on Linux.
All of these are solutions I wouldn’t recommend to the non-tech-savvy. It’s such a slog to get any of it working, and I need to go through it for each new task. That’s why I don’t follow through. It’s not for lack of software suggestions.
A switch to linux can be “painless”, depending on the usecase of the user. I’m (learning to be) a web developer, which can be done on literally any OS, so if I were to switch to linux now and not 3-4 years ago, the switch would be pretty painless. But everyone has their use case and linux just plain does not work for some of them at the moment…
I dd it the other way around.
Switched to Linux (LDME about 12 months ago) and the things I couldn’t do I didn’t bother with. I have so many things that interest me I just spend more time on them and found some new stuff.
I was dual booting a few years back because I had a bunch of stuff I couldn’t do in Linux and said fcuk it this time. In retrospect I wish I had adopted that philosophy earlier.
