It will install and "work". But the 3d graphics won't. And even though it's pretty easy nowadays, it's still not easier than OS X, especially if you want to transfer files and settings from another machine.
And then the sound will glitch and cut out, with the graphical FPS varying wildly in games and sometimes frames being delayed by hundreds of milliseconds or more. That's my personal experience, anyway; I really wish I could say Linux works well, but on a 2008 Dell PC with a common chipset the sound does not even work reliably with the latest version of Ubuntu, nor does a common AMD Radeon chipset with the official fglrx drivers.
It's not like it doesn't work, it worked fine 90% of the time. But 90% is not enough; when even Half-Life 2 is completely unplayable (on hardware which easily runs it in Windows), something's wrong.
Every issue you described are issues from 2-3 years ago. They have all been solved, especially in the major distros. A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of the box" with zero tweaking. Honestly. (I run full-time Linux desktops on everything from old repourposed warehouse workstations that were bought in the windows 2000 days, all the way through dual booting my modern gaming rig... it just works).
And to touch on your gaming comment -- actually, Valve has found the same games perform better on Linux using OpenGL than they do on Windows. So much so, that they were surprised at how well they performed. So much so, that many many other gaming companies are now re-releasing and/or planning future releases on Linux. The day of Linux gaming is here...
>Every issue you described are issues from 2-3 years ago.
Sorry, these issues were experienced by me this year. On hardware that is not defective as it works flawlessly on Windows.
>They have all been solved, especially in the major distros.
No they haven't. It has not been fixed. Neither my GPU issues nor my Audio issues have been fixed.
>A current version 14.x of Ubuntu, or version 20+ of Fedora will work "out of the box" with zero tweaking.
It was running out of the box. It just didn't work properly.
>And to touch on your gaming comment -- actually, Valve has found the same games perform better on Linux using OpenGL than they do on Windows.
Yes, I know. OpenGL works, and all that. However, the harsh reality I have found is that the graphics drivers didn't work properly and frames would be delayed (not elongated; delayed) making Half-Life 2 unplayable under both WINE and natively.
I echo this 100%. Even after significant tweaking it wasn't smooth enough. I can handle lower FPS than Windows, but delays, full blown glitches, flat out incompatibilities just rule it out for me.
Well, I"m sorry your experience was bad. I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing.
Valve has (figuratively) bet the house on Linux as tomorrow's gaming platform... and I'm confident they would not have done so without Linux being ready for prime-time.
As a note, don't game under WINE. WINE is great for applications and such, but a game designed to run on windows won't work quite right even on WINE. But, if you install the Native Linux Steam client and have Steam download/install the Native Half-Life 2 for Linux... I assure you, it works flawlessly... as-does all Source games now, Unity games, Unreal games, CryTek games (or at least they can be ported native now).
> I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing.
Phoronix seems to assure otherwise. It feels like every day I read about a minor performance bump with RadeonSI and then a 10fps regression. The proprietary drivers are clunky and don't seem to play nice with my multimonitor setup. Needless to say, my attempts on Ubuntu 14.04 this year on my very standard i5 3570K / AMD 7950 rig have not been very successful. I had this one awful text rendering bug (artifacting) with both the proprietary and apt-get open drivers. Only when I compiled Mesa from Git did I fix it. Taking a step back, running Hackintoshed OS X felt more reliable in the 3D graphics department, and I used it for over 6 months before dropping back to Windows 7 full time.
I wish, wish, wish to use Linux full time. I really do. I'm sure if I had older/integrated graphics hardware my problems would disappear. Unfortunately I need dedicated hardware to drive a dual link DVI (Korean 27") and two more HDMI/single link DVIs.
I'm sure the driver support will come with time. Maybe around the time Wayland/Mir take off. I'll be waiting. My MacBook is my rock, of course.
I'm not sure what you mean by "3d graphics won't [work]", they do just fine. Transferring files/settings is also a non-issue. I think it's been a long while since you looked at or used a Linux desktop. They have come a long long way in the past 5 years.
Not sure how it can be any easier other than getting a computer pre-installed (which you can now too, but, admittedly not as common as I would like). I mean, you have to put a disk into some hardware at some point and click some install button...
It's not a like-for-like comparison when you restrict what OS X will run to what Apple say it will run on (ie. only their hardware) but you don't keep the same expectation by requiring your Linux distribution to run on some other, random hardware.
