• FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Someone coming from Windows would just use the proprietary drivers. It isn’t like they’re not used to using proprietary software.

    The open source drivers (Arch: ‘nvidia-open’, not ‘nvidia’) have different problems but installing a completely open source system is an advanced task. If a user just wants to install a driver with the least effort then they’d just install the nvidia package and not the open source drivers.

    It isn’t a dealbreaker it’s just a thing to know. Anybody who’s at the point of trying Linux will have had to wade through a sea of people informing them of Nvidia issues, anti-cheat issues, etc.

    The trade-off is that you can use an operating system that isn’t shoving ads in your face, spying on you and forcing you to get a new PC with a TPM.

    For some people that is the dealbreaker. They often find that giving up HDR for a few months, not playing Apex Legends and typing into a terminal is a small price to pay for being able to trust your operating system to be working for you and not for shareholders.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      What do you mean, often? What’s “often”? Linux’s install base is what? 2-5% on desktop PCs, tops? And much of that has been fairly stable for a long time.

      So who are these aggravated masses that are evening out the 90% of dedicated GPU users and the mass of people who just don’t seem to have much of a problem and definitely not a motivation to move to Linux specifically?

      There’s a bit of size blindness in the community, where any movement is seen to be momentous and every inconvenience a turn of the tide and it comes off a bit delusional.

      Also, “a thing to know” is one thing too many for people who bought a prebuilt PC and never touched anything about it until they bought the next one. And if they do buy a new GPU or whatever they expect to just jam it in there, turn the thing on and expect everything to work right away. Having to wade through all those warnings about Nvidia and anticheat is itself an aggressive way of disincentivizing moving for many people. Honestly, I have a running Linux install and if I have to hear one more time that Mint is the best distro for Windows users and works just fine out of the box I may scream and take a sledgehammer to my boot drive.