It’s wild to me that even MS and the WSL play nicely with mesa but not Nvidia, God forbid Nvidia play nicely.
I think this strategy makes perfect sense and is really working.
Most of the open source community uses Linux or Mac for development. Windows is pretty much an afterthought. You even sometimes see “cross platform” projects that don’t work on Windows.
But now that you can use WSL for all that development there’s much less reason to use Linux in the first place. At my company we have a couple of hundred people using Linux, and we’re considering all moving to Windows with WSL because the hardware support on Linux is just too unreliable - random crashes, laptops not going to sleep when you close them, poor thermals, bad memory management, etc.
It’s funny because everything you describe is exactly the problems my company had with all of our laptops on windows 11 and not linux, every single one has been reported dozens of times with windows 11, especially on 24h2.
Plus additional like installing printer drivers smashing Microsoft office fonts together, teams in a restart loop because an update changed a registry value that is just plain broken, even a problem where windows secretly and silently mutes the microphone, but says literally everywhere that it is enabled and unmuted such that you have to use the audio troubleshooter to unmute it (and now that doesn’t work because they replaced the audio troubleshooter with a shitty LLM that literally only checks if there are drivers installed).
Laptops not going to sleep when you close them is also like the #1 issue on all windows forums because of stupid fucking modern sleep that you can’t disable.
This is a similar situation to mine. I tried running Linux on my work laptop, ran into too many issues that made it unreliable. Especially during business trips, when I really needed my laptop to work.
Not to mention that I still needed to use business tools that are only available on Windows. Redacting and signing PDFs in Acrobat, creating images for Windows machines (I’m also the IT department), Autodesk software, etc.
Windows + WSL allows me to get the best of both worlds, with all my Linux apps running alongside my Windows ones on the same hypervisor. I just wish they would support PCI device passthrough, as part of my job involves writing and debugging kernel drivers for some custom FPGA accelerators.
I must just be really lucky then? I’ve been running Linux exclusively for about a decade, including on my laptops and while my most recent laptop is from System76 every laptop I had before this one and all the HW in my desktop was purchased without considering Linux compatibility because I literally haven’t had hardware compatibility issues in years. I thought those issues were from Linux of the past and my own experience agrees with that. Weird.
I must just be really lucky then? I’ve been running Linux exclusively for about a decade, including on my laptops and while my most recent laptop is from System76 every laptop I had before this one and all the HW in my desktop was purchased without considering Linux compatibility because I literally haven’t had hardware compatibility issues in years. I thought those issues were from Linux of the past and my own experience agrees with that. Weird.
I’ve had zero compatibility issues (other than garbage docking stations using display link) but I was always just buying Dell. I just tried an Asus and have a ton of problems. Hardware is still an issue on Linux unless you’re using the most common shit.
Daily driving OpenSuse for ~20 years.
Interesting, before my system76 laptop I had an HP, and before that a Dell. My desktop has had both gigabyte and Asus mobos in it over the years. I personally run Debian but I self compile my kernel, mostly for debloat and minor preference changes.
Yeah based on my experience of lots of people using Linux in companies, you’re pretty lucky.
But obviously it can both be true that most people have no issues and it’s really unreliable. Like, I would guess 20% of people in my company have serious issues with Linux - random crashes and not going to sleep in bags. That’s really bad! But still 80% of people have no issues, which is why you always see confused comments like yours on forums saying they don’t have any problems.
How many of lthe “problems” with Linux are a direct result of decades of M$ lawsuits and FUDD. M$ is a pro-Zionist, genocide supporting, Mossad backing, evil entity currently forcing Copilot into GitHub. M$ is not to be trusted.
