Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward

This is a gotcha. The issue is probably that your user dont have the permissions to interact with udev devices.

See https://codeberg.org/fabiscafe/game-devices-udev

I've started using LibreOffice at home and I'm surprised at how snappier it is compared to Word. Exported PDFs are even lighter that the ones Word do.

FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5

People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.

At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.

My wife switched this year after only ever using Windows and pure dotnet dev.

The first thing she said was "how is it so fast"

Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.

There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.

I use FreeBSD for my daily driver. I now stream games/Windows apps from a dedicated windows VM. It's impressive technology.

There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.

If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.

Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.

I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.

I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.

I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.

You're 20 years too late for this.

The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)

Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.

I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."

Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.

> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem

This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.

Try Darktable or Ansel instead of Lightroom. I'm not gonna tell you Gimp is a good photoshop replacement though ;-)

Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.

I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.

Not all. System76, Framework, and others come to mind.

But yes, for the most part, hardware is designed for Windows and only works on Linux despite the vendor, rather than due to them.

it looks like the cause is a shutdown without flushing buffers so a file is not properly saved. Backups of any file type should be OK.

If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.

Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.

Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).

Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.

Sibling:

> there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version

Or is OSX bad because you can't put it on some random laptop off Amazon?

I have very real doubts that any laptop can support both Linux and Windows well.

> specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well

I would not describe this as "working well," let alone the "smoothest Linux experience you can have today"

Especially compared to System76, which designs their laptops for Linux, customized the firmware for Linux, and ships with Linux already installed.

She has me for tech support though and she’s a dev which helps.

I would go with popOS or Ubuntu if the tech support isn’t an option.

Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.

For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.

I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.

More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.

Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.

Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus...

Yes the user mode side is still closed, but that was never really the issue.

[0] - https://looking-glass.io/

I just have my two monitors hooked up to both my iGPU and dedicated GPU, and switch inputs if I want to use my Windows VM. It means things like colour profiles and VRR work as expected too.

[0] - https://looking-glass.io/

Actually, look at those commits! That repository is ridiculous. It's code thrown over the wall. Nobody but NVidia will ever work on that code.

M3 Macbook Air if it matters.

I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

I specifically said that I had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.

Did you buy the laptop with the intention of running Linux on it?

Did it ship with Linux preinstalled?

Did the vendor support Linux running on that computer? Like, could you call them and get them to provide you help in the case of problems?

I already had an Nvidia GPU and an eGPU case that I had bought for previous projects with AI (on Linux, but headless). I wanted to use it to play some games that are a bit too intense for the little gaming box (specifically the System Shock remake from 2023).

It's mentioned in the blog post, but getting the eGPU case and getting Nvidia stuff working with regular Gnome wasn't too bad on Linux, only took a few hours. The biggest issue was that I wanted to use the SteamOS interface and that was completely corrupted with the stable Nvidia driver. I had to move to the beta driver and it's still a little broken, but usable. The games themselves work fine.

I also had a lot of issues with audio getting increasingly scratchy as I played, to a point of being completely unusable after about an hour, and that required a lot of trial and error but eventually I was able to search my way through NixOS docs and figure it out.

The card was already two years old so I doubt I could have gotten much support from it, and I am even more skeptical that Nvidia's tech support would have known how to do anything with NixOS.