More, it works on way, way more machines than Windows 11 does, so is it really that bad that some edge cases and 20 year old hardware still doesn’t work well.
Regular desktop stuff and gaming usually works fine. Problems start cropping up when you try to use some more advanced GPU-powered apps, or do development yourself. I’ve encountered even older OpenGL apps that fail to start unless you force them to use the Mesa software renderer.
Yeah, usually the issue I’ve seen is when drivers are optimized for specific games to show off hardware performance and then another application or game tries to emulate that game to take advantage of that optimization, but then the optimizations change and the application now is creating conflicts and errors, just as am example. If drivers followed more open standards and optimized to those instead of trying to draw out a few more FPS to market incremental upgrades rather than all that proprietary junk, it probably would solve some of those issues. But otherwise unless the applications keep up with reverse engineering the proprietary stuff, doing that ends up binding the application to a specific driver version and/or hardware. There’s some value in optimizing specific hardware to specific software. It’s how MACs and iPhones and such have always been successful. But outside of controlled ecosystems like Apple, it is a big burden for app developers to not have reliable middle layers.
But not long ago it used to be that even just desktop environments like KDE and GNOME were super unstable on NVIDIA drivers. That seems to be a thing of the past, mostly, but older hardware does still have some of those issues and a lot of Linux users were brought to Linux to support older hardware. And so there still some bad reputation out there more than realistic expectations of a market that’s driven by today’s profit over keeping existing customers happy or future profit.
I haven’t had issues in ages, with Fedora at least. My laptop has NVIDIA and my desktop has AMD. Both are pretty stable.
Ahh the classic “it works on my machine” - yeah, good for you. The year of the linux desktop can all be run on your machine in particular.
More, it works on way, way more machines than Windows 11 does, so is it really that bad that some edge cases and 20 year old hardware still doesn’t work well.
Regular desktop stuff and gaming usually works fine. Problems start cropping up when you try to use some more advanced GPU-powered apps, or do development yourself. I’ve encountered even older OpenGL apps that fail to start unless you force them to use the Mesa software renderer.
Yeah, usually the issue I’ve seen is when drivers are optimized for specific games to show off hardware performance and then another application or game tries to emulate that game to take advantage of that optimization, but then the optimizations change and the application now is creating conflicts and errors, just as am example. If drivers followed more open standards and optimized to those instead of trying to draw out a few more FPS to market incremental upgrades rather than all that proprietary junk, it probably would solve some of those issues. But otherwise unless the applications keep up with reverse engineering the proprietary stuff, doing that ends up binding the application to a specific driver version and/or hardware. There’s some value in optimizing specific hardware to specific software. It’s how MACs and iPhones and such have always been successful. But outside of controlled ecosystems like Apple, it is a big burden for app developers to not have reliable middle layers.
But not long ago it used to be that even just desktop environments like KDE and GNOME were super unstable on NVIDIA drivers. That seems to be a thing of the past, mostly, but older hardware does still have some of those issues and a lot of Linux users were brought to Linux to support older hardware. And so there still some bad reputation out there more than realistic expectations of a market that’s driven by today’s profit over keeping existing customers happy or future profit.
Same with Arch, they were slower to adopt Wayland but stability has been fine for the last decade.