Had a slow day yesterday so thought, why not wipe the gaming PC and put Linux on it.
I work with Linux every day for work so I wanted a debian-based distro as that’s what I’m most familiar with. After a short impulsive-driven search, I picked pika-os. Never heard of it but thought I’d give it a go.
Picked KDE, installed the OS, booted first time and immediately regretted it. No network. I have a 2.5G Realtek 8125 nic and whilst it was detected, it was showing RX packets as “dropped”. Couldn’t install firmware-realtek as it conflicted with linux-firmware. Tried the Realtek website, what a mess that is, compiled a driver, couldn’t get it to load. Ended up finding a git repo that created .deb packages for all realtek drivers.
Got network up and running and its all been great from there. Last time I tried this in 2021 I had loads of issues but so far, other than having to download a later version of Proton and select it in a game, or add some command-line arguments in Steam, its been great!
I’m so surprised that every app I normally use on Windows is either available as a Linux native app, works with emulation (bottles) or there is a decent alternative.
Definitely, 100%, the Linux desktop is ready.
Realtek stuff is a major pain it seems. I’m guessing that is why FreeBSD is will known for being fine with nearly anything but realtek.
Not that I really use it by my AMD MoBo runs an Intel NIC for a reason. I started 10G networking a while back. Was a pain to get my Mellanox ConnectX3 working on windows. Linux didn’t even blink.
I tried switching a long time ago. And every 3 or 4 years since. I’m happy I have. Things got a lot better in the last few years.