Yeeeeeah, so “reinstall your OS from scratch” is a dealbreaker. You realize that if we’re on SMASHES WINDOWS territory you can’t ever, ever, EVER tell people to reinstall their OS from scratch, let alone what is, from a normie’s perspective, an entirely different OS. I’d argue that even the relatively simple rollback in Bazzite/Fedora atomic distros in general is a dealbreaker for most nromal users, at least with the current UX.
BTW, just to clarify how far from ready this is for mainstream adoption, Mint is a no-go because last I checked they still had no official HDR support (or VRR? Not sure about VRR, which is its own issue), so it’s just missing mandatory features for my gaming setup. Ubuntu has its own set of problems. Back when I was distro hopping for this setup Bazzite ended up being the only thing to simultaneously do surround sound out of the box (kinda, close enough) and VRR/HDR out of the box as well with embedded Nvidia drivers. Things may have changed, but I’m not distro hopping anymore.
I have a different thing with Cachy on it and it’s… fine? But the Arch-ness of it all rubs me personally the wrong way. Either way I’m not wiping my OS. If Fedora doesn’t work then it’s gonna be Windows because I have better things to do with my time.
So that’s how mainstream adoption works, for anybody keeping track.
IDK where you find ‘normies’ that have any idea what vrr and hdr even mean and those types tend to not even notice when they are running 60hz on a 265hz monitor with the resolution set wrong. My users are a bit more advanced than that but I’ve had 7 more people ask me to help them switch to bazzite or arch based distros since should be built in apps like notepad started bugging out for them and apart from things like ‘how install repack?’ or helping with mods, which they would have asked me for regardless of os, I haven’t had to do any further actual work on their systems and the one that had an hdr display proudly told me about looking up how ge proton and one steam launch option/environment variable will enable it.
There were literally huge G-Sync logos in the boxes of the last three TVs I helped people buy. When you plug in a game console and press the settings button on my current display in game mode it pops up a large HUD element that says “VRR” and displays the type of VRR currently active and the current framerate. Every other option and metric is hidden away in a sub-menu.
Not that this matters, because the point of VRR is you don’t need to know it’s there. If it’s working, the drivers and the display should talk to each other transparently. The end result if you have a Windows machine with VRR and a Linux machine that doesn’t support it and you plug them both to the same display is, again, that the Windows game will look smoother, regardless of how many fps it’s spitting out.
And as always, a reminder I’ve given many, many, many times in my life, both personally and professionally, “it works on my machine” means nothing and doesn’t mean there’s no bug or that your code isn’t crap. Your anecdotal experience and my anecdotal experience aren’t the same, because I have a showstopper bug and your seven friends don’t, which still means there’s a showstopper bug.
Yes that is my blind spot that I have created. I go into a store, I see g-sync is nvidia, and assume it won’t work. I have been avoiding stuff that I know doesn’t work or suspect won’t within the decade, for decades. I’ve been recommending friends and family avoid certain specific brands/tech buzzwords on the basis that it probably won’t work in a few years when the maker decides to drop support for version 1 and similar scenarios, or the ‘surprise’ real life case of windows really crossing the line on how shitty they can get away with and making people want to switch and coming to me to ask if this or that linux distro would work for them.
It’s not like reinstalling Windows wasn’t the best way to make it usable after couple of years.
And sure, HDR is the issue with SMASHING Windows? I always laugh at people who say ‘Linux is not ready for 99% of users’ then point out a feature only 1% uses.
I have not tried Bazzite, so maybe it’s a lot better than Fedora, maybe even Fedora changed, as I dropped it over a decade ago.
That hasn’t been the case since… what? Windows 7? All the Win 10/11 installs I have around the place are some version of the preinstalled OEM Windows setup or the initial install I made when I did it myself. There is no meaningful performance degradation on any of them that I can notice, and I believe there have been benchmarks done recently showing similar outcomes. Linux can’t afford to argue about Windows XP issues as if they were current. For the record, no, Windows won’t force you to reset mid-work to make an install anymore, either. It defaults to installing updates on reboot, just like Bazzite (you can turn it off on Bazzite and not on Windows, though).
Also, HDR is absolutely not “a feature only 1% uses”. The past four monitors I’ve purchased had HDR support, not because I wanted it, just because it came with them. My last laptop came with it out of the box. All the TVs I’ve purchased for myself and relatives for many years have it (not even sure if they make non-HDR TVs anymore, in fact). It’s supported by all current-gen consoles, now the Switch 2 has added support for it, too. It’s also supported by the Steam Deck, incidentally.
So no, not a niche feature anymore, by a long shot. It’s baseline compatibility for any display made this decade. And for a gaming computer it’s an absolute must, especially if you want to do TV out with it, which I do. As will the upcoming Steam Machine. Again, can’t SMASH WINDOWS for gaming if games outright look better on Windows than Linux when they come out of my screen. That’s not how that works.
Even if that wasn’t the case, though. My monitors are already HDR. This is about the OS being compatible with the hardware I already own. I’m not paying for features I can’t use because the software is incompatible with it for no good reason.
FWIW, Bazzite isn’t any better than Fedora, it’s just… Fedora. It has a couple of gaming-friendly features, including booting into a controller interface by default (which doesn’t work well on Nvidia cards, so meh) and specific compatibility for certain gaming hardware, particularly for handhelds and gaming laptops, which can be very useful if you’re on a portable gaming device that struggles under Windows but is not officially supported on SteamOS. You can rebase directly from it to the Fedora atomic distro matching your DE if you want (can’t rebase across DE’s, annoyingly).
Yeeeeeah, so “reinstall your OS from scratch” is a dealbreaker. You realize that if we’re on SMASHES WINDOWS territory you can’t ever, ever, EVER tell people to reinstall their OS from scratch, let alone what is, from a normie’s perspective, an entirely different OS. I’d argue that even the relatively simple rollback in Bazzite/Fedora atomic distros in general is a dealbreaker for most nromal users, at least with the current UX.
BTW, just to clarify how far from ready this is for mainstream adoption, Mint is a no-go because last I checked they still had no official HDR support (or VRR? Not sure about VRR, which is its own issue), so it’s just missing mandatory features for my gaming setup. Ubuntu has its own set of problems. Back when I was distro hopping for this setup Bazzite ended up being the only thing to simultaneously do surround sound out of the box (kinda, close enough) and VRR/HDR out of the box as well with embedded Nvidia drivers. Things may have changed, but I’m not distro hopping anymore.
I have a different thing with Cachy on it and it’s… fine? But the Arch-ness of it all rubs me personally the wrong way. Either way I’m not wiping my OS. If Fedora doesn’t work then it’s gonna be Windows because I have better things to do with my time.
So that’s how mainstream adoption works, for anybody keeping track.
IDK where you find ‘normies’ that have any idea what vrr and hdr even mean and those types tend to not even notice when they are running 60hz on a 265hz monitor with the resolution set wrong. My users are a bit more advanced than that but I’ve had 7 more people ask me to help them switch to bazzite or arch based distros since should be built in apps like notepad started bugging out for them and apart from things like ‘how install repack?’ or helping with mods, which they would have asked me for regardless of os, I haven’t had to do any further actual work on their systems and the one that had an hdr display proudly told me about looking up how ge proton and one steam launch option/environment variable will enable it.
There were literally huge G-Sync logos in the boxes of the last three TVs I helped people buy. When you plug in a game console and press the settings button on my current display in game mode it pops up a large HUD element that says “VRR” and displays the type of VRR currently active and the current framerate. Every other option and metric is hidden away in a sub-menu.
Not that this matters, because the point of VRR is you don’t need to know it’s there. If it’s working, the drivers and the display should talk to each other transparently. The end result if you have a Windows machine with VRR and a Linux machine that doesn’t support it and you plug them both to the same display is, again, that the Windows game will look smoother, regardless of how many fps it’s spitting out.
And as always, a reminder I’ve given many, many, many times in my life, both personally and professionally, “it works on my machine” means nothing and doesn’t mean there’s no bug or that your code isn’t crap. Your anecdotal experience and my anecdotal experience aren’t the same, because I have a showstopper bug and your seven friends don’t, which still means there’s a showstopper bug.
Yes that is my blind spot that I have created. I go into a store, I see g-sync is nvidia, and assume it won’t work. I have been avoiding stuff that I know doesn’t work or suspect won’t within the decade, for decades. I’ve been recommending friends and family avoid certain specific brands/tech buzzwords on the basis that it probably won’t work in a few years when the maker decides to drop support for version 1 and similar scenarios, or the ‘surprise’ real life case of windows really crossing the line on how shitty they can get away with and making people want to switch and coming to me to ask if this or that linux distro would work for them.
It’s not like reinstalling Windows wasn’t the best way to make it usable after couple of years.
And sure, HDR is the issue with SMASHING Windows? I always laugh at people who say ‘Linux is not ready for 99% of users’ then point out a feature only 1% uses.
I have not tried Bazzite, so maybe it’s a lot better than Fedora, maybe even Fedora changed, as I dropped it over a decade ago.
That hasn’t been the case since… what? Windows 7? All the Win 10/11 installs I have around the place are some version of the preinstalled OEM Windows setup or the initial install I made when I did it myself. There is no meaningful performance degradation on any of them that I can notice, and I believe there have been benchmarks done recently showing similar outcomes. Linux can’t afford to argue about Windows XP issues as if they were current. For the record, no, Windows won’t force you to reset mid-work to make an install anymore, either. It defaults to installing updates on reboot, just like Bazzite (you can turn it off on Bazzite and not on Windows, though).
Also, HDR is absolutely not “a feature only 1% uses”. The past four monitors I’ve purchased had HDR support, not because I wanted it, just because it came with them. My last laptop came with it out of the box. All the TVs I’ve purchased for myself and relatives for many years have it (not even sure if they make non-HDR TVs anymore, in fact). It’s supported by all current-gen consoles, now the Switch 2 has added support for it, too. It’s also supported by the Steam Deck, incidentally.
So no, not a niche feature anymore, by a long shot. It’s baseline compatibility for any display made this decade. And for a gaming computer it’s an absolute must, especially if you want to do TV out with it, which I do. As will the upcoming Steam Machine. Again, can’t SMASH WINDOWS for gaming if games outright look better on Windows than Linux when they come out of my screen. That’s not how that works.
Even if that wasn’t the case, though. My monitors are already HDR. This is about the OS being compatible with the hardware I already own. I’m not paying for features I can’t use because the software is incompatible with it for no good reason.
FWIW, Bazzite isn’t any better than Fedora, it’s just… Fedora. It has a couple of gaming-friendly features, including booting into a controller interface by default (which doesn’t work well on Nvidia cards, so meh) and specific compatibility for certain gaming hardware, particularly for handhelds and gaming laptops, which can be very useful if you’re on a portable gaming device that struggles under Windows but is not officially supported on SteamOS. You can rebase directly from it to the Fedora atomic distro matching your DE if you want (can’t rebase across DE’s, annoyingly).