This seems like the final technology in containing and categorizing different PC uses into different virtual machines, while still having good feel even in contained things. If set up right you can have a seamless experience tabbing between a host system and virtual system, and you can do whatever you can normally do in either one! Wanna use linux, but Discord hardly works and you like to play Halo too much to figure out how to dodge it’s anti-linuxcheat system? Now you can switch to linux and just run a single script to pull up a fully gaming capable (near bare metal performance) windows system right inside a linux system. Idk about y’all but as far as cool technology to talk about in here goes… this definitely fits for me. I feel like if more people knew this was something you could do relatively easily (if you enjoy tinkering with your OS) with MOST consumer Nvidia cards (20 series and older), Linux would’ve already passed 5%. What do y’all think about it? The ability to, off a single consumer CPU and GPU, host several acceptable, mid-performance, cloud accessible (or just virtually separate, locally accessible) PCs?
Wut? I use Discord in Linux (Nobara) and it works just fine, including activity detection and screen sharing. Sure, Discord on Linux had some limitations in the past, but that’s no longer an issue, assuming you’re using a decent gaming-optimised distro like Nobara.
Highly unlikely. The low market share is mainly because a) Linux does not come pre-installed on most computers - the vast majority of users just buy prebuilt computers and use whatever OS it came with and don’t tinker with their systems and b) most people like to use whatever system they’re familiar with and will not change unless they have a very very compelling reason for switching.
In fact the only reason why the marketshare jumped recently is thanks to Steam Deck. If we want Linux numbers to go up, we need more systems like the Steam Deck, and more companies like Valve to work with upstream kernel and other projects to implement much needed features and accelerate development efforts.
Between the discord devs outright refusing to do any kind of sound capture for linux screen sharing for several years, many updates requiring you to manually download and install a fresh tarball instead of being automatically applied like on windows, and refusal to maintain any kind of package on most repositories, I’d say it doesn’t properly support linux. I do like Nobara’s version of it, whatever they’ve done (I haven’t looked much into it but it definitely seems custom to Nobara, or at least Red hat) though.
And speaking purely from personal experience with no real way to verify statistically (so take this with a rather large grain of salt), there are a LOT of CS or CE major types that would love to switch to it, but will be faced with random tools that they need like microchip studio, or some particular CAD software, just not working at all. For those that I’ve talked with at any length, if they could spin up a VM that effectively fully works as if it’s bare metal, including proper display out that matches the monitor, whenever they need those few specific things, they would switch. They may not be many compared to 100% of global internet users, but they could certainly make up for 2%.
That said I mostly agree that devices like the steam deck are where linux is gonna grow, I just think that it would be going faster if more devs were able to daily drive it and care more about it, instead of having to be stuck reliant on Windows
On my Linux machine, I still can only get apps running on xwayland to show up in screen sharing. GUIs on Linux were a mistake, it’s a mess all around.