The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me. For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence. This was with the install on a fast SSD. I tried a whole bunch of things and never figured out what the issue was. Then, one day, it just....went away.
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
>The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
> > The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
> That's not what the author said.
It is exactly what the author said. TFA makes a point that Windows' issues are well known and predictable. And the author would rather endure the daily nuisances infliced by Windows than fix the sporadic breakages that Linux might throw.
I've found Windows issues to be just as usage-blocking.
I tend to have better luck with google-fu when it comes to Windows problems, just though the user base being so much larger, so it's much more likely that someone's written a guide or an explanation of my exact problem, while on Linux, it's much less likely that someone's written an exact guide, but general knowledge goes further (but you need more of it to fill in the gaps).
One additional issue I've found is that in the cases there is a guide or a Stackoverflow question regarding my exact problem, the solution is 6 years out of date and may be non-functional or less than ideal, while on Windows, that solution would still work.
I usually find the exact opposite, where for Windows I can sometimes find a few SEO optimized pages with vague instructions, but for Linux I'm much more likely to hit a wiki or forum with in-depth technical information to solve my problem.
"Hi I'm Mohinder from MS MSP, MSVP, SUPERSTAR ASSIST, Can I have you restart your computer... once you do that, please report back if that fixes the problem"
ms.com "support" pages.
Meanwhile, Archi Wiki? That is like... the best thing and should be a national treasure.
> I usually find the exact opposite, where for Windows I can sometimes find a few SEO optimized pages with vague instructions,
It's been a while since I've had to look up Windows problems to be fair, so my experience on that front is a year and a bit out of date (and probably more, since most permanent issues would have been solved on my desktop install years earlier).
> but for Linux I'm much more likely to hit a wiki or forum with in-depth technical information to solve my problem.
That's part of the problem, at least in my experience. When I ran Windows, I'd find someone's article called 'Solution for $Error in $Program when doing $Thing', or a forum thread or whatever else along those lines, and it would in the best case be accurate and fix my problem, and in the worst case help me figure it out from there.
On Linux, that wiki page or forum won't have a solution for my exact problem, but it will help me figure it out. Linux's default case has often been equivalent to Windows's worst case when looking for solutions, but both of them very rarely ended in a true worst case (not finding a solution at all). Linux's solution will more often than not be transferable to other situations, so the knowledge gained is useful, while on Windows, the equivalent solution is bespoke and won't be useful in any other case.
I agree about google-fu with Windows before two years ago. "Free" LLMs, like ChatGPT, are now excellent at fixing your Linux problems. When I have a problem with my Linux box now, I just describe the issue to ChatGPT... we do diagnosis together, then it suggests some fixes. It has not failed me in more than one year, and continues to get better. (I know, I know: This damn post reads like a shill/submarine advert for ChatGPT, but I sure other LLMs are just as good at this point.)
I have a computer science degree yet continue to use Windows. Is it because I have 30 years of experiece knowing what to ignore?j I do also use WSL for the command-line.
I find that a very weird thing to write. I think the last BSOD i had was 10 years ago and when a laptop didn't work anymore, it was usually because some of its hardware broke. It's true though that over time laptops become too slow or have too little resources to run a recent (and secure) windows version over time, but that goes for most software in general.
> Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking.
This is a great point. Years ago, when Microsoft Windows was much less stable, I noticed that Windows felt like you constantly had some small nagging issues, but you could still boot and workaround it.
Sure - if one has some weird hardware? or need to use some specialist windows only software/workflow.
> they are just fucking annoying
> are either solvable without a comp sci degree,
with that argument - even ChromeOS is great. Just works. Especially for all the school kids without compsci degree or even Amazon staff (that use a modified form of chrome OS).
Something I noticed with long term windows user is that like victims of stockholm syndrome they are very often encountering weird unsolvable issues with windows but when you ask them they will tell you that everything is working well for them. They don't see any issue.
Like mouse or printer will not work when you are at home but will at work. So you live with it.
The funniest is you see the user use the computer and at regular occurence there are weird error popup showing up but the user is trained to click ok mechanically without even reading.
The worse is if like the author you use ms365 or outlook. You are in a world of pain and things suddenly breaking or with lot of unexplainable frustrations.
For example when you used outlook with an account/user and add a second one. And then delete the first one. And somehow there would be an email account associated with your whole computer that outlook is using in shadow. And like you would receive emails but sending will not work. And the only working solution in the end is to nuke everything and start again.
I switched to Linux again because on this PC Windows suddenly just doesn't run stable anymore. Even a complete reinstall didn't fix it, I assume it is some driver issue or something like that.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
>But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
This mostly means nothing because the hardware drivers between the 2 OSs are totally different.
For example you could have bad memory and Linux isn't sticking anything important there, whereas Windows is. Same with things like video drivers and storage drivers.
As someone that's salvaged a lot of old machines, sometimes some particular hardware is bad in a particular OS and replacing it with a non broken card of the same kind fixes the issue.
I recently noticed the bloat building and building. It came to the fore when I tried to install Kerbal Space Program on my T14s gen 2. I don’t really play video games, and I thought the incredibly slow performance and crashes were down to my hardware, since why would a 5 year old mid-range notebook be able to play this (probably badly optimised) 3D game?
As an afterthought I downloaded Steam and played on Debian. Worked out of the box. No crashes. Minimum of 30fps, most of the time around 50-60. It was more than playable, enough to be pretty fun.
It's funny that Windows is well known for the "BSOD", to the point it became a meme in itself.
The BSOD where the computer shits itself so much, that it gives you a nonsensical "error", which you have to use another machine to look up. Or if you want to deep-dive, you have to use 3rd party software to deal with.
Meanwhile a Linux Kernel Panic will dump out (while very technical) everything it knew at that moment...
And things like memory errors are picked up, and you can test your memory, BY STANDARD
The static checking of drivers has been a big benefit to Windows. Nowadays, a bsod is probably due to memory corruption or a hardware fault.
It's been a long time since I've seen a kernel panic in Linux, and it's been my daily driver for years. I don't use any exotic hardware on either system.
Things that are mere "annoyances" to other people are blocking to me because distraction is blocking. If I have everything set up a certain way and Windows restarts overnight, I lose my place completely. If I'm working and stupid ads pop up uninvited, or Windows takes a moment to tell me about the great new AI feature I'll never use, it throws me off. I'll take the risk that Linux won't support a piece of hardware over the guarantee that Windows will shred my attention and concentration.
Hell, MS's own "official" documentation for long-standing issues in Windows is to "disable this random key in the registry, we don't know what it is, but it 'works'"
Or "Disable IPv6".
It's so nonsensical when it comes to Windows World that people put up with that shit
I've had similar issues with Linux. Usually it's either put up with things breaking in mainline but use latest hardware or sit on LTS on older hardware with better stability.
Windows Performance Analyser and Windows Performance Recorder are pretty easy to use to troubleshoot boot performance and have a nice, simple GUI. For fairness, there's also systemd analyze on Linux
I haven't used Windows in ~5 years but at least with XP to 10 it used to be fairly well documented and not terribly hard to troubleshoot assuming you're willing to do some learning and leg work.
I'd say macOS is the worst in that department--things randomly break just like Windows and Linux but it's largely a blackbox.
I'm glad it wasn't just me... the nice thing about those mysterious issues on Linux is usually you can actually fix the issue. With Windows I needed a hacky solution just to move the stupid taskbar, or wait for Microsoft to fix it.
And diagnose too, without having a "USB of tools", like the types on LTT talk about all the time.
Mysterious binaries from shady websites, great.
I can attach a debugger to a process, I can look at the CPU/IO/Network transactions. I can see where stuff is waiting and being blocked by any of them, all with basic GNU tooling that comes with every distro, even the most minimal!
I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month.
So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still shows whatever it was showing when it froze, no USB mouse or keyboard does anything, cannot be RDP'd to cannot be pinged... hold-down-power-button only answer.
(I have swapped all the cabels, just to be sure.)
The only differences: moved it 20 meters physically, connected it to a slightly newer TV. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
TBH your problem sounds like a hardware issue. Maybe the PC's new location is warmer due to a more enclosed space, triggering more unrecoverable hardware faults.
I agree it sounds like that, but (having that same thought) I kept the temp in the living room 20℃ or less for a week but nah
My best guess at this point is the 2025 LG TVs have some different HDMI ARC something something compared to the 2019 it was plugged into before.
But also my point is that there's no way a human with 3 kids and job could ever know... it either starts working or I get a PlayStation or a different PC or whatever.
Or just tell my kids, "Hey, Death Stranding works on your Mac now, so shut the fuck up until you finish that whole game." ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
> macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
macOS maybe as long as you're only using Apple hardware. As soon as you use 3rd party peripherals, you're in for very interesting bugs that are not getting confirmed by Apple and suddenly disappear again with a macOS update (if you're lucky).
yeah — i have my kids on Macs, bc I'm lazy, but just the ones with only two USB ports and nothing else — otherwise never-ending, unresolvable nightmare unless it's just some Apple thing you're plugging in
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
Powershell is a great scripting language, but when you want to massively delete stuff I strongly suggest you use "robocopy /MIR" with an empty folder as source to be "mirrored". Much faster, better multithreaded performance, decent logging. It will save you a ton of time if we're talking about large and/or numerous files.
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
Haven’t used Windows in a while, but I remember hating the seemingly completely random “restarting in 5 minutes for a system update.” Usually at the least-opportune time
We're forced onto Windows at my employer (mostly for MDM/management reasons) and yeah, every time we're doing something, or in a meeting. Someone will drop because it want's to reboot.
I get "You need to reboot for these Dell Updates" daily...
Meanwhile in Linux world, you can switch out the entire kernel live...
Even if Windows didn't have those weird things, there are a bunch of intended behavior things that make Windows a more frustrating experience than the occasional weird things a Linux system may do.
Yeah, like key bindings in IntelliJ that might make sense on Windows or Macintosh, but conflict with Linux defaults. I switched to Linux couple of decades ago, but this second class treatment of Linux desktop is one of the reasons I'm still doing most of my work in the terminal.
Seriously! On my windows desktop, I have to let the computer sit a minute after booting before i touch the keyboard otherwise it completely wigs out and becomes partially unresponsive due to some weird issue with the AMD chipset drivers. I can see my mouse move, i can move windows around, but nothing responds to clicks and i can't open anything.
> I subconsciously tell myself 'If I just used Linux, I could be like them!'.
Your intuition was right.
Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.
You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.
You know what? I think this is dead on. Like a lot of us, I grew up in the 90s tinkering with Windows regestries and internals. That knowledge only ever really helped me with Windows systems, and it really only carried me up to Windows 7/10. After that, it felt like debugging an opaque blob, just pulling levers until something different happened and trying a blind binary search across random behaviors.
But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.
Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.
As Linux moves faster than windows I disagree.
Systemd, wayland and flatpak resetting my skills in this areas completely windows 11 is still more or less the same.
Additional the UI behavior also more often changed than windows e.g gnome 2 to newer versions many core apps are more minimal/less functions and yes I just can fork and use the old behavior as open source but then my pc is more about fixing issues like under windows.
Two thoughts (I was in the same situation, constantly trying desktop Linux then pinging back to Windows after hitting issues).
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
Similar to this, but NixOS. Having AI to help me through made this so much easier. I was sold on the idea of an 'IaC' config based machine, after a general push to move all of my processes towards full GitOps. Windows had been pretty good to me (running 4 years on the same laptop install), but it had started overheating with fans sounding like a vacuum cleaner and it was time to start over. The difference with NixOS is that sure there are issues and preferences to work through, but when I fix them, they get committed in config, and thats an investment in time rather than something that will be right until next time I have to do it. I was able to reproduce, and rebuild on a separate machine with minimal hassle (it's good to go through this process to be sure you've got it right) and that really was amazing to see. SSH keys, SMB share, monitor configurations, themes, apps, utilities - a fully set up dev machine, everything is just there. I've been planning changes on a Copilot integrated taskboard I built (https://www.agentkanban.io) and then handing them off to the agent, reviewing the changes in the VS Code git client and then apply, commit. Being able to see the number of commits makes me realise how much I was doing manually, every time I set up a new machine.
In my first years with NixOS, I really wanted to share my enthusiasm and joy with others. But I often got caught up explaining the mechanisms, the insights that it's built on. It took me a while to come around to realizing the heart of it: NixOS feels really good to use because it frees you from the uncertainty of a machine that suddenly changes underneath your feet. It gives you a system that is really easy to inspect and modify. It gives you the ability to move forward without fear. It's really liberating and relaxing in a certain way.
Historically, a sense of intimidation and the difficulty of onboarding blocked a lot of people from accessing these benefits. It's been cool to see how LLM agents have helped a lot of people get started and tap into the fun parts.
My experience with explaining NixOS is that once you get to the benefits people get intimidated and start telling how they never have these issues.
I think immutable distros/software are the most intuitive way, even if people get intimidated with the idea. What's the action you did as a junior when windows/linux/x broke? You most likely reinstalled. When encountering issues we tend to try to emulate immutability.
The sad thing about NixOS is that there's 0% chance of seeing it used at work. Even in the devops people you're lucky if people can edit a Dockerfile. Good luck spending the next 3 years explaining it might look like json but it's not, and it would help to learn the syntax.
We used nix for developer environments, and nix to define docker containers for our production services. The biggest problem is the “nix people” can become blockers if there is an issue and they aren’t around to figure it out, because most engineers are just not going to learn nix.
However, we felt the benefit was worth the cost, overall, especially because we used the same flakes and therefore versions across all dev and deployed envs, and we didn’t have to deal with the hassle and performance issues of running all the dev services in docker containers.
I'm the Nix guy on my small team at work and I'd love to train any of teammates on Nix stuff. One of them already has some Nix experience and I make sure to walk him through my Nix work whenever I finish something new. But it seems like no one is really interested in truly diving in like I did when I was new to Nix.
I don't really know why that is, because it doesn't seem to have to do with intelligence or general experience with adjacent skills. I think it's probably at least 30% down to temperament, but it may also be because my team is mostly fairly senior and each person has a lot of responsibilities of their own.
On the bright side, the tooling is easy enough that nonetheless, my team generally has no problems spinning up new Nix environments without me, or making small changes to the ones I've set up. And LLM agents are now good enough with Nix that I'm confident they can unblock themselves until my return whenever I'm on vacation or whatever.
Yeah, similar experience here. One pattern that was helpful for us was defining a nix file that just contained a mapping of names to lists of packages: dev, ci, and so on, so that if you wanted to install something that was on the nix search page, you could just go toss it in there and immediately get it locally. It also made it clear which package sets would wind up where, and allowed recursion so you could say that like dev was rust-base ++ rust-dev ++ js ++ common, or whatever.
Currently no NixOS at work for me, but my team is using Nix for local development environments and CI successcully via devenv.nix. I think we actually could use NixOS on my team except that we have a host of endpoint security software that we need to run on all cloud VMs, and I'm a little distant from the people who own the automation that installs it on approved AMIs.
I can second your comment about Fedora. One underrated point: Their drivers are always the best amoung all free distros. I'm not sure if there team is the most aggressive to upstream new drivers, or manufs target Fedora first. And I write this post as a regular Debian user. However, if I have a piece of hardware that has terrible drivers on Debian, almost always it will work fine on Fedora. (Grumble!)
Genuine question, how is everyone else dealing with giving agents elevated permissions? Obviously the answer is "don't", but some things are pretty harmless, like journalctl and dmesg, and are pretty useful for debugging the system.
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with
I give it passwordless sudo but don't give it permissions to automatically run commands. I just review what it's running before accepting. If it looks questionable, I interrupt and ask it to explain what/why it wants to run the thing
I use sudo -A with some openssh ui for sudo. I tell the agent to use sudo -A for anything that it needs and then it pops up with a sudo password prompt.
Using Linux is a learning experience. You will inevitably face and solve numerous problems over time, but every time you do, you come out of it understanding what's going on under the hood a little more.
Still, it can be dreadful to face even small issues when you only feel like using your computer and not fixing it. Having an LLM agent help with fixing issues is a lifesaver. Ask it what you don't understand, take note of the commands it uses or suggests while troubleshooting and fixing your issue, and you'll supercharge your learning and not get as hung up on the issues.
If someone doesn't care much to learn though, I'd say Linux is still tough to recommend.
As someone who's done the whole Helpdesk -> Sysadmin stuff, working around other "Windows Admins" they don't learn much, all they know is "Deleting this thing seemed to fix" "Reboot". They don't get any of the fundamentals of what caused an issue, or how to diagnose them properly.
I spent a lot of my career in the Windows admin space. That isn't true. Most Windows admins are sharp dudes, just like most Linux admins are sharp dudes. And a minority of Windows admins are slackers who don't try to learn, but a minority of Linux admins are slackers who don't try to learn.
Most of my experience with Windows has been googling for solutions rather than understanding the underlying system. So I guess it's a learning experience, but not in learning Windows itself, as much as learning to use search engines.
I do remember common fixes for various things, but not much of it can be extrapolated to other issues in my experience.
Contrary anecdote: I've installed and used Linux, mainly Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) on a dozen or so computers in the last ten years, including several older MacBooks, a Surface Go for my son and an HP I special ordered without Windows. I come from a Mac background and use the terminal, but I've never need to do so to get them to work. Sure I've tweaked them, but only cosmetic things like locales and default fonts. For install and use I haven't done anything special. Old MacBooks need wi-fi drivers, which usually Ubuntu will find. Besides that everything has honestly just worked for me.
Linux friction is “unpredictable” but windows friction isn’t, because you have a lot of windows experience and not much in Linux. I don’t think you’d feel the same after a few months of Linux.
Only a little over 20 years of Linux experience here. A few years ago, I daily drove Windows for work after not touching it for a decade. There were way more unsolvable riddles in that year on Windows than in my lifetime of desktop Linux usage. And no one else at the company really knew how to dig into their Windows systems, either; the mysteries I solved were all things I had to solve myself.
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
I came through with Windows certs, but had always been a Linux guy, and now work entirely with Linux. Windows people don't actually solve problems, hence the joke about "Turn it off and on again", making it into mainstream.
You will very rarely see a Windows person open up a debugger, unless they're an actual developer. Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Oh no, the NFS mount has dropped and the process is stuck trying to read it!
>Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Windows has pretty robust tooling to do the same, even if no one uses it. Process Monitor (procmon) will trivially tell you the same on Windows. Arguably the GUI is easier to use than strace since you can both proactively and retroactively apply filters. Main issue is letting it run too long and eating up a bunch of RAM with the event buffer
Ages ago I was a PC tech intern at a Windows shop, investigating bluescreens on some Dell mini PC, which I'd never really done before. Some time after I installed WinDbg and started downloading some debug symbols, one of the fulltime guys came by and said "just reinstall Windows". I'd just pinpointed the crash to some driver without figuring out more details at that time. I did it, but I was a little bit heartbroken because I knew that meant I'd never have a clear picture of what had gone wrong.
There's a real cost/benefit question involved in root cause analysis, of course. But that childhood experience turned out to be representative of what I'd continue to witness in the rest of my professional life. When you always choose expedient ignorance, you end up living and working without ever having a clear idea of what your computer is doing, and each investigation feels like another Herculean task you're obliged to skip.
Back when I used Windows I prided myself in my install age. Can't remember if I started on XP but at least made it from 7, 8, 8.1, to 10 over many years, repairing issues as they came up.
DISM largely does the same thing as reinstall without nuking all your files/settings assuming you can get it pointed at a valid source if winsxs doesn't have the thing it needs.
Full time linux user for 8 years now. The knowledge base of discussion around Linux issues is vast and usually has the answers you need. Albeit with the variety of distros and their differences you must be mote scrutable in identifying what is applicable to your situation. Stick with mainstream like Ubuntu and you will have tons of community support and knowledge to search through.
Windows 11 randomly crashes the taskbar after resuming my SO's notebook, something expected under the ugly KDE4 alpha days (and the alphas for KDE3 with kicker).
But KDE at least recovered kicker (the panel) over after a message. Windows 11 shows up nothing.
Hate to be the one to drag AI into every conversation, but I recently switched to arch linux and it's been delightful -- largely because of Claude. I have leaned on Claude heavily to diagnose and resolve issues that I probably could have theoretically solved on my own, but which also probably would have made me switch back if I didn't have help to resolve them quickly.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
I think Arch is a great general purpose distribution because it doesn't try to hide anything from the user - all the details are right out in the open. That and excellent community documentation.
I'm a lifelong Arch user (btw) but I would also call out Manjaro as a less full-contact way of using Arch. It's got a slow and stable release cycle, it's fairly reliable because it stays behind the bleeding edge like Debian does.
But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.
Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience
I'll keep knocking on wood, but as a Thinkpad user who has used fedora as a daily driver since Fedora 19, I've rarely had any issues with Linux. Battery lasts way longer than the Thinkpad I use for work (windows machine), and mine is older. I don't game though, so there's nothing that I've wanted on windows.
I have some issues with docking and audio with Arch. Maybe I am asking too much to have a docking station work perhaps. I still don't feel the need to go back to Windows however.
Why do people even use docking stations anymore? I've never used one but I have used plenty of KVM-type devices that just work over various standard usb/display ports. What's the appeal of using the specialized "docking" port?
This is a ThinkPad USB-C docking station. I think it is basically the same as what you are talking about but if not, the main convenience is that you can plug in one cable which provides power, 2 external displays and a mouse. Super great if / when it works but not reliable with Arch (not blaming the distro specifically, it could be kernel or anything in the stack).
I kinda switched to Linux when I realized that Microsoft had fractured the control panel into different areas in "Settings" and there was almost no pattern in how to get to the various system settings and diagnostic tools that had become ingrained in muscle memory for me over the course of 15-odd years.
I decided I'd rather start from scratch on Linux than Windows for reasons of Microsoft's various decisions and direction. Windows essentially pushed me away by saying my prior experience was no longer useful.
It's a decision I'm frequently reminded of how good it was.
That is true regarding prior experience. It feels better learning such well known canonical tools that have (and very likely will continue to) stand the test of time.
The new settings area is a disaster in many ways. Even beyond the fact that it broke the muscle memory of everybody who knew the old control panel, the new one still(!) doesn't have all the settings that was available before, so you still have to dig your way to the old, so it just added another layer, rather than actually simplifying the functionality.
I hate it when I see newbies ask for help with Windows, and they say the checked the settings menu, but couldn't fix it. That menu is essentially lying to them (by omission of relevant settings and information), but they aren't experienced enough to know that.
I've never experienced what the writer has, and it would be interesting to know more about their system setup to diagnose the alleged network slowness. Package manager is a network app, so it sounds to me like there is something strange going on system-wide. Perhaps the writer has a new-enough network card from a vendor that doesn't have driver support?
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
I've actually experienced this, but I don't know if it's related.
In my case, installing linux on a laptop and while everything was fine, there was an unexplained network delay. What ultimately fixed it (and I really don't know why) is I had to fix the time on my system clock to the right date/time and then got ntp setup and working correctly. My system clock was far in the past. I THINK (but don't know) that the root cause was in certificate validation. Perhaps hiccups because the certs were issued in the future?
I've also experienced vanilla linux installs breaking more often than Windows. When it's stable, it's incredibly stable, but I've been bitten by a completely vanilla install suddenly being bricked after a reboot, before I've even managed to install anything or change any settings, more than once.
Windows has a lot of annoyances and quirks, but generally it seems much more reliable that I'll at least be able to log in and look at the desktop, even when things are really messed up. The issues are usually just annoying, they don't stop me using the computer for basic tasks.
I'm using linux now, but I keep a separate windows machine just in case. It's already payed off, because my linux install is slowly breaking for no apparent reason. Sometimes the entire computer locks up completely, and sometimes after a reboot, the mouse won't move or will get stuck in a corner. I no longer try to fix these kinds of issues, I just re-install if things get annoying enough. But I've had the same windows install for five years now, and I've never managed to make a linux desktop last longer than a year.
It would be helpful if you specify the exact distro you consider "vanilla linux install". If it was some rolling release, then ok, that's expected.
But I highly doubt you will have any issues like that on a stable distro, like RHEL or Debian.
Also, Linux administration requires skills, so... :-D
I've had issues with Arch, Ubuntu, Ubuntu server, Debian, Mint, Fedora, Kali and raspberry pi OS, across about as many machines.
I'm using Mint at the moment, and it's locked up twice more since my last comment. In fairness I've narrows this issue down to some software crashing that's taking the system down with it. But can't help but feel if it was crashing on Windows, at least I'd be able to get into task manager, or it would just close, rather than needing to reboot.
I'm a little late, but get windows users should move to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT to tide you over. It's intended for stable systems and removes a lot of the bloat. Pass this message on whereever you can thanks.
It would help to know what hardware they are using. I have been running Linux on desktop PCs at home for about 20 years now. (Not a humblebrag: I am horrible at Linux admin.) I always make sure to use the most basic hardware possible. Buy a mainstream motherboard (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, etc.) with onboard sound and networking. It will be much easier to find USB, sound, and network drivers that are stable. And choose an AMD graphics card because they have much better Linux support compared to NVidia. Update the BIOS before installing Linux to have the best chance possible for a smooth installation. Also: If you distro allows it, add the "non-free" repo to get a bunch of closed source usually-more-stable drivers. I have been using (stable) Debian+KDE for all of that period and never experienced any of the author's issues. It is very hard to brick a system that I described using auto-updates on stable Debian. I'm sure other people here can chime in about other distros that are exceptionally stable.
Edit: Laptops are much harder to install Linux due to more custom hardware with poor support. However, it is getting better for the largest manufs. WiFi drivers are always the hardest to get working during a laptop install.
WINE via Crossover Linux has become very good. Also webapp versions of Office apps are mostly there and respectable if used in mixed environments.
WSL is okay but you are better going full Linux as host. Linux Mint is a good platform for most. Stable, keeping modern kernels updated, but not crazy bleeding-edge wastes of time.
You don't have to quit Windows but you can quit being hostage to Windows.
Libreoffice is also pretty good these days if you need to edit office files, impress has the most compat issues but they are rare even there. In many ways it is more capable than office ime.
Several years ago they added like 4 new "modern" UI styles that you can choose that are more fashionable. They're definitely innovating here, though I still find I'm most productive in the older style. And the sidebar for detailed properties is a huge improvement over 90s all-menu UI. Theme editing is also more accessible than in the Microsoft versions imo.
I should say that I disagree that office 97 era ux is necessarily worse than "modern". Office 365 is barely more capable than office 97 in any way that I care about.
The article is really poor in details about what exactly is OPs workflow in windows and Linux, so we are only left to wonder. But it seems to me that the unpredictably of Linux and therefore the predictability of windows is in part because friction in windows is known to him while Linux is not, and also in part because maybe by accident the way he uses windows play nicely with it. Maybe if the user didn't distro hop so often he would have been more familiar with the architecture of the system and these issues like fedora update system breaking down (surprising because bazzite is based on fedora and it's been rock solid for a while, can't help but think OP is doing something really wrong there, but APT in Ubuntu for instance does tend to break for no reason, so I'll throw him a bone). It's like giving up often on something and blaming the thing for its unfamiliarity.
Does windows bloat bother you? It bothers me. Ever tried doing a windows install from something like tiny10 and then use the system? Nothing works quite right.
I empathize with the frustrations with Linux, and I certainly used to have them. But about 5 years ago I just... stopped having any issues at all. I switched to Debian around then, which may or may not fully explain the improvement. Point is, I've barely thought about or actively maintained or troubleshooted my operating system for several years now.
I feel like Windows 11 was literally JUST in the headlines for bricking PCs with one of their forced updates. I get that *nix is not for everyone, but it is VERY rare that you hit an issue with one of the more popular distros that hasn't already been hit and with a documented answer on a reputable forum with an easy search. When I've had issues with Windows stuff, you have less information to go on usually, just some BSoD or similar and the forum posts seem to be heavily moderated (post chains read like a generic tech support call - have you tried restarting etc etc) and hard to find an answer. Just my anec-data. You usually get a very verbose error message when Linux issues arise and pasting the error message into a search will usually point you right where you need to be.
Using Fedora for years, but not on workstation. Because of Adobe, the only reson that I stick with Windows LTSC IoT.
And no, Gimp is not alternative. Neither Affinity, bucause lack of linux support. Or Capture One. Only DaVinci resolve is competition to Premiere because of linux support.
I'm curious if Adobe ends because of unsustainable pricing models and aggressive terms of use (no offline more than week, constant data sending to adobe servers) or because of Ai. Because post-production via complex tools will soon became obsolete compared to prompt-like editing.
Also you might prefer gimpshop(or whatever the latest PS-ified gimp is these days), as the default hotkeys in gimp are shit. Ctrl, shift, and alt have universal contexts beyond Adobe products that gimp completely ignores.
Just like Macs and the stupid command button. And don't even think of remapping, say the clipboard, to use Ctrl. Many apps just won't honor it. Because that would just make too much sense.
PhotoPea does not support colour profiles - browser limitations. Also GPU acceleration is limited and does not work with large PSD/PSB files. No camera RAW, no advanced selection and healing tools. No plugins.
PhotoPea might work for casual editing. That's not why I use Adobe.
I tried linux as a desktop on and off for over 25 years. As an server OS it's more than ok and everything I worked in last years got deployed to linux (because BSD lacks OCI containers)
In fact, I am using now Pop!_OS in parallel with Windows. But linux desktop experience still feels broken when compared with Windows and macOS.
I want to install the system with the defaults, not spend time configuring it and have an "it just works" experience. But even if I spend tons of time configuring and fiddling with it, something will fail, there will be problems, something won't work at all, something won't work properly and something will require complex workarounds that take time and exhaust my patience.
Before trying Pop!_OS I tried CachyOS. It provided me a broken desktop experience but in a different way.
Probably the best linux desktop experience now is provided by WSL2, followed by ChromeOS.
I'm learning that while Windows has a bad rap in some tech circles, its surprisingly still pretty well regarded. This past school year my daughter and niece both moved from Windows to Macs. A couple of weekends ago I asked them both how they liked it -- they seemed to transition well to the Mac. They both said the same thing -- Windows was better at basically everything except the Message app and iPhone mirroring, but those two things made the Mac totally worth it since, as they put it, phone beats laptop.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
I think Windows (and some, but not all, Linux window managers/DEs) are really kings of "general productivity" type work that macOS is really unintuitive about.
I daily drive a MBP now, and have since the M1 air released, but even this many years later I still think the more windows-y desktop metaphor is superior for any type of work that requires heavy multi-tasking (which I do as a sysadmin type role).
Apple tends to assume you are working inside one app at a time, on one workspace at a time. This is evident from the get go with how the OS treats apps & windows/documents as separate, and how Cmd+Tab only switches between apps, not app windows.
Without third party tools, it's a terrible OS for actually managing multiple windows and contexts and that throws people off because nearly everything else outside of mobile doesn't use that paradigm. Context switching is expensive on macOS, by design, but most general user's and office workers work involves heavy context switching, and frequently.
When I had my Mac I'd ALT+TAB to switch between windows, and then everything would disappear.
I used to do support for a "Marketing Agency" so was a 100% Mac shop, and it was interesting to get calls to say they couldn't recover documents. Or a shared document was locked, because OSX had it open perpetually in the taskbar...
On MacOS (at least my older version on a 2015 MBP), Cmd-~ switches between app windows. Totally undiscoverable but knowing that restores a lot of usability.
It helps, but is still fundamentally different behavior. It's now two key strokes Cmd-Tab to Chrome, then Cmd-~ to switch between chrome windows (with no switcher UI).
The windows-y alt-tab at least shows a preview of all windows, and so its one key stroke to tab through everything.
Of course people are going to generally prefer the thing they’ve already been using and are comfortable with, especially if they are forced to use something else entirely.
On the flip side, I run a Windows gaming laptop alongside my Mac. It is a constant source of rage to the point that I am genuinely shocked at how bad things are and regularly suspect that the people who choose to use it are the victims of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
Strongly agree, and this makes Linux head and shoulders above Windows for everyday computing now. Because it's more text-native than Windows and in-depth technical documentation is more easily available, AI agents are simply more capable on Linux.
Absolutely agree with the OP! My first Linux installation was in 1993 when I hauled dozens of floppies from my Uni back home (X-Windows was like 15 floppies?). Even remember emailing to Linus about some issue and he responded. Ever since I _wanted_ to be using Linux but was always put off for all the reasons described in that post. I wanted a nice OS so I can do my school/work/hobbies but not constantly having to work on that OS, figure out dozens of config files, brick the system etc.
At this point WSL2 is more than filling this void. I even stopped using VMWare since WSL is that good.
Linux user since 1994, did some tiny dev for the kernel back then.
Linux as a server is very good, and there is not much discussion on that front.
Linux as a desktop system is fine. I could live with it for the added value of having a flexible, predictible system. Windows is much more polished but, again, this is a tradeoff I would happily make.
The problem are applications. And particularly Outlook. I have to use Outlook because of its integration with the calendar, Zoom, ... This is the Outlook client for on-premises Exchange.
OWA suck to the point I simply cannot look at it (the one coming with Exchnage on premises, I do not the MS365 one). Without Outlook working seamlessly I am done.
This is really a pain - one software that stops an extended trial.
Once or twice a year, for the last 20+ years, I am doing a one week full immerison in Linux desktop for my work. I keep a separate laptop for the Windows-only activities.
Between malfunctions on a multi-screen setups, audio problems with applications, issues with sleep recovery on some monitors, etc. -- Winodws is much more polished
Sure YMMV but I am making active attempts at moving, with the will to move, but it is not as good yet.
windows absolutely has unpredictable issues that are easily solved by just using linux. i spent months trying to figure out why windows would randomly wake from sleep in the middle of the night turn my monitor on and wake me up. no amount of tweaking settings or reading logs ever fixed it. it was simpler to just use a linux distro or shut windows down
Yeah same but I'm out of options. I don't like Linux on the desktop but I like Windows' privacy stance and use-hostile behaviour less. My Mac isn't much better. What I really hate is being forced into this corner.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
What a quite absurd conclusion. If you want to use your camera then just use it and stop looking for excuses. I find people who moan about the OS UI are just nitpicking. Nothing is perfect and it's there to provide utility for the task at hand. Pick one and get on with life.
My intention is not to dismiss the blog's argument about using Linux but my experience running an Ubuntu LTS in my main computer has been straightforward, easy and as problem-free as one could expect. I'm sure other Linux distros offer a similar experience.
I get that every person is different, so what works for someone might be dysfunctional for someone else. But I wonder if there's a growing tendency to over-emphasise things that aren't "perfect" or the perceived friction caused by different ways to approach or solve things.
Perhaps it's my own personal bias but the same way I like using Ubuntu, I think Windows is fine, as well as MacOs. They're fine the same way many other products I use are. Often, I struggle to find big differences between the stuff I use. I mean, I can see the differences (often small, rarely big), but I'm the same guy. I'm not that special.
My experience too: "Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make)."
I'm not a windows user anymore, haven't been for a decade or so, but it wasn't until a couple months that I finished the switch when I moved from windows to bazzite in my gaming rig.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
It is largely what one is used to but for me windows was always this unknowable black box, sure, you could get good at it but there was always so much, no source, many interlinked subsystems. when things work it is not so bad. when they don't... Linux was a lot better, especially if you use a more minimal distro, But even it is this huge confusing mess. What really clicked for me was when I tried openbsd, it was the first time I felt like I had a system I really understood. I started with a router, now I am one of those wierdos who use it on the desktop. I would not actually recommend it to anyone, like I said it is largely what you are used to. but for me linux always felt more knowable than windows.
>asking me to decide whether to increase the limit
I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.
I gotta say, Fedora plus KDE - have not had any major issue, and certainly none as bad as desktop utility performance degradation on Windows 11. Probably a little more fragile feeling than Windows 10, but it honestly has felt basically same, which I wasn't expecting.
I think the web page delayed loading is often server-side these days trying to detect bots. Especially with a dynamic IP.... You'll generally be fine after that first detection flags you as human. Also this seems to affect firefox moreso than some other browsers, but that's subjective.
Also, if you're familiar with sysinternals suite for Windows there's a Linux equivalent to all the tools with nice GUIs. So you should be able to track down most process-caused performance issues fairly easily without knowing all the appropriate CLI commands.
I would speculate myself instead the more likely thing is related to:
- dns cache configuration
- wlan power saving which is kind of aggressive since Linux has had some power management issues
It's really why I go for a minimal distro, debian with xfce. There's not many components, they're not "tuned", and I can just kinda research any issues myself and find what works. Usually there's some pretty big gaps (missing a whole component, wildly malfunctioning, high resource utilization) and then it's easy to figure out. There's not much code, or really hard scripts to understand. Just maybe enable debug on the service. Learn where the developers put diagnostics (about:support is a godsend). You get to architect your hardware's success and get a rock-solid system. But yeah, if it's weird it might be weird for a while, haha.
For my setup I think the last few lessons were like:
- use gamescope for X11 Wine/Proton (huge.)
- Firefox profile reset to fix hardware decoding (followed some good guides and some bad guides)
- to make changes use the same git tag as your distro so the deps are easily in-reach.
I can't say I like Windows in any way, except perhaps nostalia for NT 3.51 or XP. I can however relate to 'modern Linux' experiences. I've tried using some new-fangled ones and instead of being delighted by the new hotness, just want my old Xubuntu the way I remember (but with good wifi, sound, sleep, hidpi, multimonitor support). My latest disappointment was KDE Plasma/Wayland--very modern in ways I don't appreciate. There was something simple I couldn't adjust (forget which) and tonnes of settings for things I don't care about at all.
The OS/Desktop is not the show, it's the stage/floor.
I've tried Windows a few times over the years and every time I regretted it. From nagging notifications, random restarts while I sleep (for "updates"), ads in the start menu, ai shoved into every orifice, to constant "updates required" after you just updated.
On the bright side, the battery life was better on Windows and sure-- games work. The latter is slowly becoming the norm on Linux as well.
This brings back all this nostalgia. I used to be all linux everywhere I could. The CD linux loaders on random machines work would make me use with work. Linux distros you'd get in a book from Borders. :) Loved it all. But then I had to edit video and images in a 24 hour film festival. And the pain. It just couldn't work constitently. Had to find someone with a mac to get it done. I know these days are so different with better image and video editors and many years of improvements. But still kind of shy from adopting linux again as a daily driver. Too stuck on Apple and OSX now
My situation is somewhat similar. I always try to migrate from Windows 10 to Linux, but (probably) thanks to my NVIDIA card (GTX 1050) I experience huge mouse cursor and DE animation lags, specially with KDE and Wayland. In Linux Mint this issue happens less, but still does, and that bothers me.
On the other hand, Debian Xfce on my old Acer laptop with a i3-370M runs superb - Windows feels like a downgrade there.
I tried debian and found Ubuntu to be more stable, i.e., bugs are less annoying. Throughout the years I've been stuck with bug that would irritate but the linux experience is still miles ahead compared to windows. Not using terminal is a PITA that I just keep windows for whatever I really cannot run in Linux (the list is getting shorter).
With LLMs I've been able to tackle bugs to a level that either fix or lower down the annoyance level. It's still not perfect, but the tradeoff is in linux favor IMO.
So, the complaint is that Linux (Fedora + KDE Plasma) is unstable after a week of usage and daily update? I'm not sure about Fedora as I'm using Arch (also with KDE Plasma on wayland). Everything is very stable for me. I `paru -Syu` whenever I remember or when VS Code shows at the lower corner that there's a new version.
"¿Por qué no los dos?" A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enough to do serious work are $200-400 and can be accessed remotely from Windows by VNC or RDP.
To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
> I don't want to use this thing, it sucks. Also, I don't want to change it one bit.
People really dislike change, it's the same thing about some freak thing that happens like twice that you heard of, like shark attacks, but still drive their ton and half vehicles for thousands of hours a year. People accepted those issues as part of the thing, they blame Linux in general when an application doesn't work, but never blame Windows in general when the OS doesn't work.
I really want to use linux but for me its the software. Games I play use anticheat that doesn't work. Software I use for 3d printing doesn't work without hours of workarounds. VR is poorly supported if at all. Usually every year I'll try linux, use it for a month or so, then be forced back to windows after running into a hard block, with the dozen ads forced down my throat welcoming me back. Hopefully one day I can commit to it.
Yeah this is my experience too, but different software. Sometimes there are ways to get something to work after hours/days of tweaking, and sometimes the answer is just no. It's unfortunate, I like *nixes, and have used them off and on for 30+ years, I just can't do it as a daily driver.
I don't get it, I've been using Ubuntu from the very early days, that's probably 20 years now. And I really didn't encounter any serious problems. Over the years, I had one instance of driver update breaking wifi. That said, it was always on a Thinkpad or my own desktop PC.
You can just use Windows and run your required Linux distro inside WSL2. That's exactly my setup—I'm a heavy user of both, as I need both systems daily.
In my experience, I've seen this get messy having to have some apps on the windows filesystem and reading and writing back and forth to the WSL layer for various files. It works, it's just a degraded experience compared to what I have seen going all in on either side.
You get the hardware/driver support of Windows, things like GPU/drive/network/window sharing in the out of the box config, and there are very few graphical apps for Linux which
don't run graphically in Windows in the first place (but the reverse is not as true).
I loved it for my work laptop but then Apple Silicon MacBooks came along and forced a main OS due to the hardware (though nowadays Asahi is pretty good on the older ones). I suppose on a home use case you get big multiplayer game DRM support as well (different people will consider that a plus or minus).
Maybe if the ”Linux-curious” would stop using distros like Omarchy and other riced up Arch derivatives and instead try something like vanilla Debian or Fedora, they could spend more time using Linux and less time whining about how unstable ”Linux” is because you don’t understand what a rolling distro is.
It's not about rolling release vs. stable release. It's about Arch's "KISS" design focusing on simplicity for implementers rather than for users, which results in brittle, under-engineered tools. NixOS unstable, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian Sid are all more stable than Arch.
It's a cult of false simplicity (like most cults of simplicity).
I think the battle linux vs windows showcases how, in the long run, free software tends to win. In 50+ years, windows will be a footnote in the history of technology, in 100+ years, linux will still be going strong as a multi-generational human endeavor started by a young nerd in the early 90's.
> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.
It's not really applicable nowadays as you can just ask any agent to solve most linux issues for you, it's literally 1 prompt away and you can snapshot your FS to be safe prior and lock it down to avoid agent mistake.
100% agree. The two examples are garden-variety computer problems and not articulated with any degree of precision for someone who claims to have attempted to troubleshoot them. It's either AI-generated or the author has only elementary Linux know-how (which is cool, but we don't need to take their wholesale dismissal of an entire ecosystem quite as seriously).
Everything got better except for icon themes and the introduction of avahi, pulseaudio and systemd. Icon themes peaked with KDE3 where they had subtle animations and the Tango project which had very recognizable colorful icons.
I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.
I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.
There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.
> Windows friction is predictable. [...] These things are annoying, but they're known. I can dismiss them, turn them off, and move on. Barely 10 seconds is lost.
> Linux friction is unpredictable. [..] The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
The good news is this is largely a matter of experience: if you can push through and get used to doing root cause analysis on Linux, you'll find that desktop Linux issues tend to become transparent and easy to fix. If you stick to distros that support rollbacks, you also win back the option to defer anything that feels likely to be a time sink until either you have time/patience/interest, or someone else has fixed the issue and sent their fix upstream.
The bad news is that it's an experience issue: if you want to get to the other side of it, you have to invest in building the skill. The age old tongue-in-cheek advice is actually still good: install Gentoo. (Install Arch if you want a diet version of the experience.) The desktop Linux userland is indeed Lego, and if you go through the process of piecing it together instead of grabbing a preassembled kit, even just once, you will build a new troubleshooting muscle that serves you well for a long time. Can you find the energy for that? Can you make the time? Probably, but it won't be effortless. Maybe you'll even need to dual-boot, or have two computers for a while.
But I promise it's an issue of familiarity, intuition, and skill. You absolutely can cultivate those things.
The distro-hopping and vanilla installs are the problem imo -- with Linux it is possible to strip your system down to the basic functionality so that you can actually understand everything what's going on and not be surprised. What is so refreshing is to realize that you don't need to pull in some baroque package you don't understand because the part of it you want is just 3 lines of bash and one line in a config file or whatever. But to get there you have to learn how to use the tools.
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
The article is a bit hand-wavey. I won't deny their issue, they had it, but of course people here will have their opinion about the tradeoffs. For me CachyOS working near flawlessly on multiple machines. It's truly free with no forced ads or telemetry or product integrations.
If Windows works for a person or they need it for certain software that's fine. For me, I'm living a Linux-default life for the first time and it's nice.
this resonates with my experience. once every 3 years I try linux as primary OS for my home PC, I do small stuff with C/python, browse web and play factorio. I use linux in VM on my job daily, so I am not a beginner, but gosh, linux sucks. Everything breaks constantly even when doing NOTHING. Nothing ever works installing first try, you always end up googling stupid error message and stumble upon 250 other idiots that try to solve same issue. after trying 5 solutions, one (or combo) will hopefully work.
Then, you can hang-up entire system by a stupid python script or your own buggy program and I miss unkillable always working task manager that can recover almost every hanger (and just stfu about reisub) without needing to restart the whole system and killing my FKIN FLOW! ugh. I just use WSL2 for rare cases where I need my unix build tools and forever abandoned the idea of switching to linux. Life is too short wasting it on googling some nonsense shit that just have to fucking work.
> I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore.
Until Microslop OS decided on its own that you haven't had a reboot in a while and since we're at it some of the drivers you desperately need suddenly are not kosher anymore.
When stuff breaks I prefer something I'm actually allowed to repair. That's just me.
In Windows, problems are felt universally... everyone and their mother is having the same problem and googling surfaces it easily.
It's the fragmentation in linux that will always make it tough for "normies". Distro differences is obvious first thing, but the two big ones are desktop environments (gnome/kde/etc) and app package formats (flatpak/snap). These add friction and more problems (I heard you like packaging: here's another package format and big ass repository for you. And portals? really?).
I just keep to a simple desktop in fedora using rpm/dnf and build from source if I have to. Yes, I know that's not an answer for normies, but there's not going be simple answers.
I had a similar experience some years ago. On-off with Linux/macOS, but it was clear that I only had to take the pain long enough to overcome the urge to switch back to my good old macOS.
And what can I say: It worked. There are still aspects I'm missing (Preview app, Mail) and other Aspects I really hate (Printing on my Canon MB5150 just does not work) but I stayed. I found workarounds and solutions, fought my way through the distro-jungle and I'm glad I made it.
All in all I think it is more a know-how Problem, than a Problem with the system itself.
However, if you don't have this time, it's understandable but how much time goes into experimenting every year and then switching back?
This was my experience with linux the first times I used it years ago when I lived in a different state, but I tried it last year and it's night and day.
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
Here are some minor things that always went sour on Windows:
Webcam's settings would always get reset semi-randomly
The date from the clock would frequently disappear
Mic's volume would often get lowered
Other than that, with Windows 10 Pro it was super solid on 12 year old hardware. Never crashed, all games I could play were fine and I did heavy Docker based development, highly leveraging WSL 2. Also recorded tons of videos (screencasts with a webcam).
Switched to native Linux. Had a rough start but it improved after going down a few rabbit holes.
My GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) didn't play nice with Wayland. The official NVIDIA drivers have big problems allocating system memory when GPU memory is filled causing apps to crash constantly[0]. Games were lagging and stuttering. My whole machine would pause for 5-10 seconds and then unpause, a few times a day.
Ended up having to modify a udev setting on my SSD to enable max_performance for its power management and the machine never paused again.
Switched to an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU and all of the GPU related problems went away, and the games I played stopped stuttering and lagging.
Now it's quite stable but there's still 3 problems. I've gone down pretty deep rabbit holes for each one but didn't resolve them.
If I'm downloading a file with Firefox and I start a Docker container that involves configuring a Docker network, my file download will get interrupted. Not 100% of the time but pretty close to it. I tried a million settings individually and nothing has stopped this behavior.
If pretty heavy I/O or network traffic is happening while recording a video with OBS, sometimes my webcam's audio will get desync'd from the the video, making my lips move a half second after the video happens. Tried a ton of different PipeWire settings here, couldn't find out a resolution.
If I'm on a video call in a browser with Firefox (Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, etc.), usually after about 45-60 minutes folks will say my audio is getting really choppy and I have to reload the browser for it to get fixed. I tried a ton of things other than switching browsers and it made no effect.
Nothing in the journalctl logs for any of the above 3 issues are present.
I'm not posting this expecting someone to fix it, but I can relate with the OP in that Windows "just works".
I don't mind going down these rabbit holes if I find a resolution and when it's working, it's a much better environment for me than Windows without question.
I'm not switching back to Windows but there is certainly an expectation that there could be issues. This is the sole reason why I wouldn't recommend Linux to all of my technical friends, unless they are die hard into tech and fully understand what they're getting into.
This completely resonates with my experience. I have amassed enough familiarity with Linux having used and tried out all kinds of distros to the point of being able to assist others in setting up and diagnosing their systems, but I myself keep drifting back to W10. There remains a "homely" feeling to it that keeps eluding Linux distros.
I switched to bazzite-dx for my personal computer ~6 months ago.
i7-13700K / 5070 Ti / 32GB DDR4 / 5120x1440 240Hz HDR
It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.
It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).
Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.
The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."
Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.
Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.
As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.
Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.
Bizarre PoV from my perspective. The failure of modern computing is Apple
UI drivel and Ubuntu is particularly bad since it has that silly settings UI. May LLMs free us of Jobs and the need to know where to click and how to describe our computing experience like a mall we are lost in.
The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me. For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence. This was with the install on a fast SSD. I tried a whole bunch of things and never figured out what the issue was. Then, one day, it just....went away.
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
>The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
> > The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
> That's not what the author said.
It is exactly what the author said. TFA makes a point that Windows' issues are well known and predictable. And the author would rather endure the daily nuisances infliced by Windows than fix the sporadic breakages that Linux might throw.
Known consistent breakages, than maybe sometime breakages..
make it make sense.
I've found Windows issues to be just as usage-blocking.
I tend to have better luck with google-fu when it comes to Windows problems, just though the user base being so much larger, so it's much more likely that someone's written a guide or an explanation of my exact problem, while on Linux, it's much less likely that someone's written an exact guide, but general knowledge goes further (but you need more of it to fill in the gaps).
One additional issue I've found is that in the cases there is a guide or a Stackoverflow question regarding my exact problem, the solution is 6 years out of date and may be non-functional or less than ideal, while on Windows, that solution would still work.
I usually find the exact opposite, where for Windows I can sometimes find a few SEO optimized pages with vague instructions, but for Linux I'm much more likely to hit a wiki or forum with in-depth technical information to solve my problem.
"Hi I'm Mohinder from MS MSP, MSVP, SUPERSTAR ASSIST, Can I have you restart your computer... once you do that, please report back if that fixes the problem"
ms.com "support" pages.
Meanwhile, Archi Wiki? That is like... the best thing and should be a national treasure.
"run sfc /scannow"
"that didn't work. That has never done or found anything"
"I'm just going to close this issue as solved"
Most support posts
> I usually find the exact opposite, where for Windows I can sometimes find a few SEO optimized pages with vague instructions,
It's been a while since I've had to look up Windows problems to be fair, so my experience on that front is a year and a bit out of date (and probably more, since most permanent issues would have been solved on my desktop install years earlier).
> but for Linux I'm much more likely to hit a wiki or forum with in-depth technical information to solve my problem.
That's part of the problem, at least in my experience. When I ran Windows, I'd find someone's article called 'Solution for $Error in $Program when doing $Thing', or a forum thread or whatever else along those lines, and it would in the best case be accurate and fix my problem, and in the worst case help me figure it out from there.
On Linux, that wiki page or forum won't have a solution for my exact problem, but it will help me figure it out. Linux's default case has often been equivalent to Windows's worst case when looking for solutions, but both of them very rarely ended in a true worst case (not finding a solution at all). Linux's solution will more often than not be transferable to other situations, so the knowledge gained is useful, while on Windows, the equivalent solution is bespoke and won't be useful in any other case.
I agree about google-fu with Windows before two years ago. "Free" LLMs, like ChatGPT, are now excellent at fixing your Linux problems. When I have a problem with my Linux box now, I just describe the issue to ChatGPT... we do diagnosis together, then it suggests some fixes. It has not failed me in more than one year, and continues to get better. (I know, I know: This damn post reads like a shill/submarine advert for ChatGPT, but I sure other LLMs are just as good at this point.)
> They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer
If this were true there’d be no need for IT/tech support services.
I have a computer science degree yet continue to use Windows. Is it because I have 30 years of experiece knowing what to ignore?j I do also use WSL for the command-line.
I mean, how much "CompSci" do you apply to your OS on e day-to-do. Or even to diagnose an issue?
I feel that was half of this article...The author did ZERO investigations
> Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying.
Apart from the ones that are completely 100% usage-blocking.
I find that a very weird thing to write. I think the last BSOD i had was 10 years ago and when a laptop didn't work anymore, it was usually because some of its hardware broke. It's true though that over time laptops become too slow or have too little resources to run a recent (and secure) windows version over time, but that goes for most software in general.
Okay, but it's more that there are a lot of things you simply cannot do in Windows. It's got extremely poor hardware and software support.
is it better to have a thousand paper cuts, or a limb injury? I guess it depends on the person...
> that their issues are usage-blocking
What?
Sure - if one has some weird hardware? or need to use some specialist windows only software/workflow.
> they are just fucking annoying
> are either solvable without a comp sci degree,
with that argument - even ChromeOS is great. Just works. Especially for all the school kids without compsci degree or even Amazon staff (that use a modified form of chrome OS).
Frankly nowadays Windows is rage inducing. Dark patterns, annoying pop-ups, mandatory single sign-on.
Something I noticed with long term windows user is that like victims of stockholm syndrome they are very often encountering weird unsolvable issues with windows but when you ask them they will tell you that everything is working well for them. They don't see any issue.
Like mouse or printer will not work when you are at home but will at work. So you live with it.
The funniest is you see the user use the computer and at regular occurence there are weird error popup showing up but the user is trained to click ok mechanically without even reading.
The worse is if like the author you use ms365 or outlook. You are in a world of pain and things suddenly breaking or with lot of unexplainable frustrations. For example when you used outlook with an account/user and add a second one. And then delete the first one. And somehow there would be an email account associated with your whole computer that outlook is using in shadow. And like you would receive emails but sending will not work. And the only working solution in the end is to nuke everything and start again.
I switched to Linux again because on this PC Windows suddenly just doesn't run stable anymore. Even a complete reinstall didn't fix it, I assume it is some driver issue or something like that.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
>But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
This mostly means nothing because the hardware drivers between the 2 OSs are totally different.
For example you could have bad memory and Linux isn't sticking anything important there, whereas Windows is. Same with things like video drivers and storage drivers.
As someone that's salvaged a lot of old machines, sometimes some particular hardware is bad in a particular OS and replacing it with a non broken card of the same kind fixes the issue.
I recently noticed the bloat building and building. It came to the fore when I tried to install Kerbal Space Program on my T14s gen 2. I don’t really play video games, and I thought the incredibly slow performance and crashes were down to my hardware, since why would a 5 year old mid-range notebook be able to play this (probably badly optimised) 3D game?
As an afterthought I downloaded Steam and played on Debian. Worked out of the box. No crashes. Minimum of 30fps, most of the time around 50-60. It was more than playable, enough to be pretty fun.
It's funny that Windows is well known for the "BSOD", to the point it became a meme in itself.
The BSOD where the computer shits itself so much, that it gives you a nonsensical "error", which you have to use another machine to look up. Or if you want to deep-dive, you have to use 3rd party software to deal with.
Meanwhile a Linux Kernel Panic will dump out (while very technical) everything it knew at that moment...
And things like memory errors are picked up, and you can test your memory, BY STANDARD
At least for me, the BSOD is way less common than it used to be. I don't think I've seen one for years now.
The static checking of drivers has been a big benefit to Windows. Nowadays, a bsod is probably due to memory corruption or a hardware fault.
It's been a long time since I've seen a kernel panic in Linux, and it's been my daily driver for years. I don't use any exotic hardware on either system.
Things that are mere "annoyances" to other people are blocking to me because distraction is blocking. If I have everything set up a certain way and Windows restarts overnight, I lose my place completely. If I'm working and stupid ads pop up uninvited, or Windows takes a moment to tell me about the great new AI feature I'll never use, it throws me off. I'll take the risk that Linux won't support a piece of hardware over the guarantee that Windows will shred my attention and concentration.
Hell, MS's own "official" documentation for long-standing issues in Windows is to "disable this random key in the registry, we don't know what it is, but it 'works'"
Or "Disable IPv6".
It's so nonsensical when it comes to Windows World that people put up with that shit
I've had similar issues with Linux. Usually it's either put up with things breaking in mainline but use latest hardware or sit on LTS on older hardware with better stability.
Windows Performance Analyser and Windows Performance Recorder are pretty easy to use to troubleshoot boot performance and have a nice, simple GUI. For fairness, there's also systemd analyze on Linux
I haven't used Windows in ~5 years but at least with XP to 10 it used to be fairly well documented and not terribly hard to troubleshoot assuming you're willing to do some learning and leg work.
I'd say macOS is the worst in that department--things randomly break just like Windows and Linux but it's largely a blackbox.
I'm glad it wasn't just me... the nice thing about those mysterious issues on Linux is usually you can actually fix the issue. With Windows I needed a hacky solution just to move the stupid taskbar, or wait for Microsoft to fix it.
And diagnose too, without having a "USB of tools", like the types on LTT talk about all the time.
Mysterious binaries from shady websites, great.
I can attach a debugger to a process, I can look at the CPU/IO/Network transactions. I can see where stuff is waiting and being blocked by any of them, all with basic GNU tooling that comes with every distro, even the most minimal!
So true.
I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month.
So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still shows whatever it was showing when it froze, no USB mouse or keyboard does anything, cannot be RDP'd to cannot be pinged... hold-down-power-button only answer.
(I have swapped all the cabels, just to be sure.)
The only differences: moved it 20 meters physically, connected it to a slightly newer TV. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
TBH your problem sounds like a hardware issue. Maybe the PC's new location is warmer due to a more enclosed space, triggering more unrecoverable hardware faults.
I agree it sounds like that, but (having that same thought) I kept the temp in the living room 20℃ or less for a week but nah
My best guess at this point is the 2025 LG TVs have some different HDMI ARC something something compared to the 2019 it was plugged into before.
But also my point is that there's no way a human with 3 kids and job could ever know... it either starts working or I get a PlayStation or a different PC or whatever.
Or just tell my kids, "Hey, Death Stranding works on your Mac now, so shut the fuck up until you finish that whole game." ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
You could look into EDID settings, lots of weird quirks around that spec.
> macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
macOS maybe as long as you're only using Apple hardware. As soon as you use 3rd party peripherals, you're in for very interesting bugs that are not getting confirmed by Apple and suddenly disappear again with a macOS update (if you're lucky).
yeah — i have my kids on Macs, bc I'm lazy, but just the ones with only two USB ports and nothing else — otherwise never-ending, unresolvable nightmare unless it's just some Apple thing you're plugging in
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
Powershell is a great scripting language, but when you want to massively delete stuff I strongly suggest you use "robocopy /MIR" with an empty folder as source to be "mirrored". Much faster, better multithreaded performance, decent logging. It will save you a ton of time if we're talking about large and/or numerous files.
/MIR /MT:16
Kick those threads way up.
Historically, when my Windows was getting slow first thing I'd empty the thrash. Often it was the answer.
Which in the grand scheme of things, shouldn't "slow down" a system. But this is Windows where it burns IO for no reason
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
Haven’t used Windows in a while, but I remember hating the seemingly completely random “restarting in 5 minutes for a system update.” Usually at the least-opportune time
We're forced onto Windows at my employer (mostly for MDM/management reasons) and yeah, every time we're doing something, or in a meeting. Someone will drop because it want's to reboot.
I get "You need to reboot for these Dell Updates" daily...
Meanwhile in Linux world, you can switch out the entire kernel live...
Even if Windows didn't have those weird things, there are a bunch of intended behavior things that make Windows a more frustrating experience than the occasional weird things a Linux system may do.
Yeah, like key bindings in IntelliJ that might make sense on Windows or Macintosh, but conflict with Linux defaults. I switched to Linux couple of decades ago, but this second class treatment of Linux desktop is one of the reasons I'm still doing most of my work in the terminal.
To be fair, for IntelliJ, just switch the keymap to the gnome or KDE one (yes, it comes with them ootb) and that problem is fixed.
If you're like me and never use the Gnome/KDE shortcuts, just disable/switch those
Seriously! On my windows desktop, I have to let the computer sit a minute after booting before i touch the keyboard otherwise it completely wigs out and becomes partially unresponsive due to some weird issue with the AMD chipset drivers. I can see my mouse move, i can move windows around, but nothing responds to clicks and i can't open anything.
DDR 5 memory training and a new BIOS that enables Memory Context Restore by default?
> I subconsciously tell myself 'If I just used Linux, I could be like them!'.
Your intuition was right.
Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.
You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.
You know what? I think this is dead on. Like a lot of us, I grew up in the 90s tinkering with Windows regestries and internals. That knowledge only ever really helped me with Windows systems, and it really only carried me up to Windows 7/10. After that, it felt like debugging an opaque blob, just pulling levers until something different happened and trying a blind binary search across random behaviors.
But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.
Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.
As Linux moves faster than windows I disagree. Systemd, wayland and flatpak resetting my skills in this areas completely windows 11 is still more or less the same.
Additional the UI behavior also more often changed than windows e.g gnome 2 to newer versions many core apps are more minimal/less functions and yes I just can fork and use the old behavior as open source but then my pc is more about fixing issues like under windows.
Two thoughts (I was in the same situation, constantly trying desktop Linux then pinging back to Windows after hitting issues).
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
[1] For example, there is some ridiculous problem with wayland and notifications on GNOME at least, see this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/work_items/358?... which has to be disabled with an extension unless you want to go insane
Similar to this, but NixOS. Having AI to help me through made this so much easier. I was sold on the idea of an 'IaC' config based machine, after a general push to move all of my processes towards full GitOps. Windows had been pretty good to me (running 4 years on the same laptop install), but it had started overheating with fans sounding like a vacuum cleaner and it was time to start over. The difference with NixOS is that sure there are issues and preferences to work through, but when I fix them, they get committed in config, and thats an investment in time rather than something that will be right until next time I have to do it. I was able to reproduce, and rebuild on a separate machine with minimal hassle (it's good to go through this process to be sure you've got it right) and that really was amazing to see. SSH keys, SMB share, monitor configurations, themes, apps, utilities - a fully set up dev machine, everything is just there. I've been planning changes on a Copilot integrated taskboard I built (https://www.agentkanban.io) and then handing them off to the agent, reviewing the changes in the VS Code git client and then apply, commit. Being able to see the number of commits makes me realise how much I was doing manually, every time I set up a new machine.
In my first years with NixOS, I really wanted to share my enthusiasm and joy with others. But I often got caught up explaining the mechanisms, the insights that it's built on. It took me a while to come around to realizing the heart of it: NixOS feels really good to use because it frees you from the uncertainty of a machine that suddenly changes underneath your feet. It gives you a system that is really easy to inspect and modify. It gives you the ability to move forward without fear. It's really liberating and relaxing in a certain way.
Historically, a sense of intimidation and the difficulty of onboarding blocked a lot of people from accessing these benefits. It's been cool to see how LLM agents have helped a lot of people get started and tap into the fun parts.
My experience with explaining NixOS is that once you get to the benefits people get intimidated and start telling how they never have these issues.
I think immutable distros/software are the most intuitive way, even if people get intimidated with the idea. What's the action you did as a junior when windows/linux/x broke? You most likely reinstalled. When encountering issues we tend to try to emulate immutability.
The sad thing about NixOS is that there's 0% chance of seeing it used at work. Even in the devops people you're lucky if people can edit a Dockerfile. Good luck spending the next 3 years explaining it might look like json but it's not, and it would help to learn the syntax.
We used nix for developer environments, and nix to define docker containers for our production services. The biggest problem is the “nix people” can become blockers if there is an issue and they aren’t around to figure it out, because most engineers are just not going to learn nix.
However, we felt the benefit was worth the cost, overall, especially because we used the same flakes and therefore versions across all dev and deployed envs, and we didn’t have to deal with the hassle and performance issues of running all the dev services in docker containers.
I'm the Nix guy on my small team at work and I'd love to train any of teammates on Nix stuff. One of them already has some Nix experience and I make sure to walk him through my Nix work whenever I finish something new. But it seems like no one is really interested in truly diving in like I did when I was new to Nix.
I don't really know why that is, because it doesn't seem to have to do with intelligence or general experience with adjacent skills. I think it's probably at least 30% down to temperament, but it may also be because my team is mostly fairly senior and each person has a lot of responsibilities of their own.
On the bright side, the tooling is easy enough that nonetheless, my team generally has no problems spinning up new Nix environments without me, or making small changes to the ones I've set up. And LLM agents are now good enough with Nix that I'm confident they can unblock themselves until my return whenever I'm on vacation or whatever.
Yeah, similar experience here. One pattern that was helpful for us was defining a nix file that just contained a mapping of names to lists of packages: dev, ci, and so on, so that if you wanted to install something that was on the nix search page, you could just go toss it in there and immediately get it locally. It also made it clear which package sets would wind up where, and allowed recursion so you could say that like dev was rust-base ++ rust-dev ++ js ++ common, or whatever.
Currently no NixOS at work for me, but my team is using Nix for local development environments and CI successcully via devenv.nix. I think we actually could use NixOS on my team except that we have a host of endpoint security software that we need to run on all cloud VMs, and I'm a little distant from the people who own the automation that installs it on approved AMIs.
I can second your comment about Fedora. One underrated point: Their drivers are always the best amoung all free distros. I'm not sure if there team is the most aggressive to upstream new drivers, or manufs target Fedora first. And I write this post as a regular Debian user. However, if I have a piece of hardware that has terrible drivers on Debian, almost always it will work fine on Fedora. (Grumble!)
Genuine question, how is everyone else dealing with giving agents elevated permissions? Obviously the answer is "don't", but some things are pretty harmless, like journalctl and dmesg, and are pretty useful for debugging the system.
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with
I give it passwordless sudo but don't give it permissions to automatically run commands. I just review what it's running before accepting. If it looks questionable, I interrupt and ask it to explain what/why it wants to run the thing
I use sudo -A with some openssh ui for sudo. I tell the agent to use sudo -A for anything that it needs and then it pops up with a sudo password prompt.
To your point 1, they claimed to have been using fedora on their most recent attempt.
Using Linux is a learning experience. You will inevitably face and solve numerous problems over time, but every time you do, you come out of it understanding what's going on under the hood a little more.
Still, it can be dreadful to face even small issues when you only feel like using your computer and not fixing it. Having an LLM agent help with fixing issues is a lifesaver. Ask it what you don't understand, take note of the commands it uses or suggests while troubleshooting and fixing your issue, and you'll supercharge your learning and not get as hung up on the issues.
If someone doesn't care much to learn though, I'd say Linux is still tough to recommend.
> Using Linux is a learning experience.
Do you think that Windows *isn't* a learning experience?
As someone who's done the whole Helpdesk -> Sysadmin stuff, working around other "Windows Admins" they don't learn much, all they know is "Deleting this thing seemed to fix" "Reboot". They don't get any of the fundamentals of what caused an issue, or how to diagnose them properly.
I spent a lot of my career in the Windows admin space. That isn't true. Most Windows admins are sharp dudes, just like most Linux admins are sharp dudes. And a minority of Windows admins are slackers who don't try to learn, but a minority of Linux admins are slackers who don't try to learn.
Most of my experience with Windows has been googling for solutions rather than understanding the underlying system. So I guess it's a learning experience, but not in learning Windows itself, as much as learning to use search engines.
I do remember common fixes for various things, but not much of it can be extrapolated to other issues in my experience.
Contrary anecdote: I've installed and used Linux, mainly Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) on a dozen or so computers in the last ten years, including several older MacBooks, a Surface Go for my son and an HP I special ordered without Windows. I come from a Mac background and use the terminal, but I've never need to do so to get them to work. Sure I've tweaked them, but only cosmetic things like locales and default fonts. For install and use I haven't done anything special. Old MacBooks need wi-fi drivers, which usually Ubuntu will find. Besides that everything has honestly just worked for me.
Linux friction is “unpredictable” but windows friction isn’t, because you have a lot of windows experience and not much in Linux. I don’t think you’d feel the same after a few months of Linux.
30 years of Linux here. Windows issues are easier to fix as they are usually consistently broken and well documented due to the huge user ase.
Only a little over 20 years of Linux experience here. A few years ago, I daily drove Windows for work after not touching it for a decade. There were way more unsolvable riddles in that year on Windows than in my lifetime of desktop Linux usage. And no one else at the company really knew how to dig into their Windows systems, either; the mysteries I solved were all things I had to solve myself.
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
Thank you! This is exactly my position too.
I came through with Windows certs, but had always been a Linux guy, and now work entirely with Linux. Windows people don't actually solve problems, hence the joke about "Turn it off and on again", making it into mainstream.
You will very rarely see a Windows person open up a debugger, unless they're an actual developer. Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Oh no, the NFS mount has dropped and the process is stuck trying to read it!
Oh no, reboot
>Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Windows has pretty robust tooling to do the same, even if no one uses it. Process Monitor (procmon) will trivially tell you the same on Windows. Arguably the GUI is easier to use than strace since you can both proactively and retroactively apply filters. Main issue is letting it run too long and eating up a bunch of RAM with the event buffer
Ages ago I was a PC tech intern at a Windows shop, investigating bluescreens on some Dell mini PC, which I'd never really done before. Some time after I installed WinDbg and started downloading some debug symbols, one of the fulltime guys came by and said "just reinstall Windows". I'd just pinpointed the crash to some driver without figuring out more details at that time. I did it, but I was a little bit heartbroken because I knew that meant I'd never have a clear picture of what had gone wrong.
There's a real cost/benefit question involved in root cause analysis, of course. But that childhood experience turned out to be representative of what I'd continue to witness in the rest of my professional life. When you always choose expedient ignorance, you end up living and working without ever having a clear idea of what your computer is doing, and each investigation feels like another Herculean task you're obliged to skip.
Back when I used Windows I prided myself in my install age. Can't remember if I started on XP but at least made it from 7, 8, 8.1, to 10 over many years, repairing issues as they came up.
DISM largely does the same thing as reinstall without nuking all your files/settings assuming you can get it pointed at a valid source if winsxs doesn't have the thing it needs.
That just isn't true. Windows admins are just like any other. Most are sharp dudes who know stuff, some few are slackers who don't learn.
Full time linux user for 8 years now. The knowledge base of discussion around Linux issues is vast and usually has the answers you need. Albeit with the variety of distros and their differences you must be mote scrutable in identifying what is applicable to your situation. Stick with mainstream like Ubuntu and you will have tons of community support and knowledge to search through.
Until your machine goes into a coma when you close the lid. On mainstream Ubuntu.
This shit still happens today.
Windows 11 randomly crashes the taskbar after resuming my SO's notebook, something expected under the ugly KDE4 alpha days (and the alphas for KDE3 with kicker).
But KDE at least recovered kicker (the panel) over after a message. Windows 11 shows up nothing.
That happens on Windows as well.
Twice in 1 year I've had my bootloader entry just disappear after a reboot. No idea what happened. Wasn't tied to any particular update either.
If I were non-technical, it would ruin my week.
In zero way is that true, vast majority of Windows "fixes" aren't even that.
MS's own documentation is incredibly lacking in actual resolution to problems, just always shifting or work arounds.
Hate to be the one to drag AI into every conversation, but I recently switched to arch linux and it's been delightful -- largely because of Claude. I have leaned on Claude heavily to diagnose and resolve issues that I probably could have theoretically solved on my own, but which also probably would have made me switch back if I didn't have help to resolve them quickly.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
I think Arch is a great general purpose distribution because it doesn't try to hide anything from the user - all the details are right out in the open. That and excellent community documentation.
I'm a lifelong Arch user (btw) but I would also call out Manjaro as a less full-contact way of using Arch. It's got a slow and stable release cycle, it's fairly reliable because it stays behind the bleeding edge like Debian does.
But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.
Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience
I'll keep knocking on wood, but as a Thinkpad user who has used fedora as a daily driver since Fedora 19, I've rarely had any issues with Linux. Battery lasts way longer than the Thinkpad I use for work (windows machine), and mine is older. I don't game though, so there's nothing that I've wanted on windows.
I have some issues with docking and audio with Arch. Maybe I am asking too much to have a docking station work perhaps. I still don't feel the need to go back to Windows however.
Why do people even use docking stations anymore? I've never used one but I have used plenty of KVM-type devices that just work over various standard usb/display ports. What's the appeal of using the specialized "docking" port?
This is a ThinkPad USB-C docking station. I think it is basically the same as what you are talking about but if not, the main convenience is that you can plug in one cable which provides power, 2 external displays and a mouse. Super great if / when it works but not reliable with Arch (not blaming the distro specifically, it could be kernel or anything in the stack).
To fix my Thinkpad USB-C docking station on Arch, I asked Gemini and just followed what it said. It took a few minutes.
I've definitely tried that with claude code. It seems AGI will be needed to solve this one.
There are no more docking stations. The dedicated dock port died many years ago, and everything has been USB-C/Thunderbolt ever since.
Which really isn't too much different, docking ports were by and large PCI with extra sauce
For lazy arch try manjaro. I love arch, but I am lazy so my machines mostly just run manjaro. Same fun, less of these issues
I kinda switched to Linux when I realized that Microsoft had fractured the control panel into different areas in "Settings" and there was almost no pattern in how to get to the various system settings and diagnostic tools that had become ingrained in muscle memory for me over the course of 15-odd years.
I decided I'd rather start from scratch on Linux than Windows for reasons of Microsoft's various decisions and direction. Windows essentially pushed me away by saying my prior experience was no longer useful.
It's a decision I'm frequently reminded of how good it was.
It was funny in early versions of W10, that various "settings" menu's were just links back to the control panel....
That is true regarding prior experience. It feels better learning such well known canonical tools that have (and very likely will continue to) stand the test of time.
The new settings area is a disaster in many ways. Even beyond the fact that it broke the muscle memory of everybody who knew the old control panel, the new one still(!) doesn't have all the settings that was available before, so you still have to dig your way to the old, so it just added another layer, rather than actually simplifying the functionality.
I hate it when I see newbies ask for help with Windows, and they say the checked the settings menu, but couldn't fix it. That menu is essentially lying to them (by omission of relevant settings and information), but they aren't experienced enough to know that.
I've never experienced what the writer has, and it would be interesting to know more about their system setup to diagnose the alleged network slowness. Package manager is a network app, so it sounds to me like there is something strange going on system-wide. Perhaps the writer has a new-enough network card from a vendor that doesn't have driver support?
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
https://docs.zeropolis.net/doku.php/tech:cachyos
I've actually experienced this, but I don't know if it's related.
In my case, installing linux on a laptop and while everything was fine, there was an unexplained network delay. What ultimately fixed it (and I really don't know why) is I had to fix the time on my system clock to the right date/time and then got ntp setup and working correctly. My system clock was far in the past. I THINK (but don't know) that the root cause was in certificate validation. Perhaps hiccups because the certs were issued in the future?
One of the various reasons Debian apt still uses HTTP is to avoid SSL Timing errors like that
I've also experienced vanilla linux installs breaking more often than Windows. When it's stable, it's incredibly stable, but I've been bitten by a completely vanilla install suddenly being bricked after a reboot, before I've even managed to install anything or change any settings, more than once.
Windows has a lot of annoyances and quirks, but generally it seems much more reliable that I'll at least be able to log in and look at the desktop, even when things are really messed up. The issues are usually just annoying, they don't stop me using the computer for basic tasks.
I'm using linux now, but I keep a separate windows machine just in case. It's already payed off, because my linux install is slowly breaking for no apparent reason. Sometimes the entire computer locks up completely, and sometimes after a reboot, the mouse won't move or will get stuck in a corner. I no longer try to fix these kinds of issues, I just re-install if things get annoying enough. But I've had the same windows install for five years now, and I've never managed to make a linux desktop last longer than a year.
It would be helpful if you specify the exact distro you consider "vanilla linux install". If it was some rolling release, then ok, that's expected. But I highly doubt you will have any issues like that on a stable distro, like RHEL or Debian. Also, Linux administration requires skills, so... :-D
I've had issues with Arch, Ubuntu, Ubuntu server, Debian, Mint, Fedora, Kali and raspberry pi OS, across about as many machines.
I'm using Mint at the moment, and it's locked up twice more since my last comment. In fairness I've narrows this issue down to some software crashing that's taking the system down with it. But can't help but feel if it was crashing on Windows, at least I'd be able to get into task manager, or it would just close, rather than needing to reboot.
And now after yet another crash I've lost an entire days work that was previously saved. Seriously tempted to switch back to windows.
What hardware are you running? I haven't had issues like you describe in the last decade.
Same, the times of weird WiFi issues is gone
I'm a little late, but get windows users should move to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT to tide you over. It's intended for stable systems and removes a lot of the bloat. Pass this message on whereever you can thanks.
https://massgrave.dev/faq
It would help to know what hardware they are using. I have been running Linux on desktop PCs at home for about 20 years now. (Not a humblebrag: I am horrible at Linux admin.) I always make sure to use the most basic hardware possible. Buy a mainstream motherboard (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, etc.) with onboard sound and networking. It will be much easier to find USB, sound, and network drivers that are stable. And choose an AMD graphics card because they have much better Linux support compared to NVidia. Update the BIOS before installing Linux to have the best chance possible for a smooth installation. Also: If you distro allows it, add the "non-free" repo to get a bunch of closed source usually-more-stable drivers. I have been using (stable) Debian+KDE for all of that period and never experienced any of the author's issues. It is very hard to brick a system that I described using auto-updates on stable Debian. I'm sure other people here can chime in about other distros that are exceptionally stable.
Edit: Laptops are much harder to install Linux due to more custom hardware with poor support. However, it is getting better for the largest manufs. WiFi drivers are always the hardest to get working during a laptop install.
WINE via Crossover Linux has become very good. Also webapp versions of Office apps are mostly there and respectable if used in mixed environments.
WSL is okay but you are better going full Linux as host. Linux Mint is a good platform for most. Stable, keeping modern kernels updated, but not crazy bleeding-edge wastes of time.
You don't have to quit Windows but you can quit being hostage to Windows.
Libreoffice is also pretty good these days if you need to edit office files, impress has the most compat issues but they are rare even there. In many ways it is more capable than office ime.
The UI is still terrible, still on the level of Microsoft Office 97.
Several years ago they added like 4 new "modern" UI styles that you can choose that are more fashionable. They're definitely innovating here, though I still find I'm most productive in the older style. And the sidebar for detailed properties is a huge improvement over 90s all-menu UI. Theme editing is also more accessible than in the Microsoft versions imo.
Sure, they have a wonky-looking ribbon now, but try doing anything more advanced, and you’re back to Office 97-era UX.
I should say that I disagree that office 97 era ux is necessarily worse than "modern". Office 365 is barely more capable than office 97 in any way that I care about.
Go to Edit > User Interface. There are 7 options including various ribbons like Microsoft Office.
The article is really poor in details about what exactly is OPs workflow in windows and Linux, so we are only left to wonder. But it seems to me that the unpredictably of Linux and therefore the predictability of windows is in part because friction in windows is known to him while Linux is not, and also in part because maybe by accident the way he uses windows play nicely with it. Maybe if the user didn't distro hop so often he would have been more familiar with the architecture of the system and these issues like fedora update system breaking down (surprising because bazzite is based on fedora and it's been rock solid for a while, can't help but think OP is doing something really wrong there, but APT in Ubuntu for instance does tend to break for no reason, so I'll throw him a bone). It's like giving up often on something and blaming the thing for its unfamiliarity.
Does windows bloat bother you? It bothers me. Ever tried doing a windows install from something like tiny10 and then use the system? Nothing works quite right.
The rest of my argument as to why windows is less predictable than Linux is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150812
"I've been distro-hopping for probably twenty years. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, and most recently Fedora with KDE Plasma."
Missing : good old debian :)
The only one with a non buggy installer that can actually do LUKS with LVM as a first class citizen
Install anything KDE if you enjoy the welcome screen crashing and random Plasma crashes :) Particular shout out to Kubuntu for the awful installer
I empathize with the frustrations with Linux, and I certainly used to have them. But about 5 years ago I just... stopped having any issues at all. I switched to Debian around then, which may or may not fully explain the improvement. Point is, I've barely thought about or actively maintained or troubleshooted my operating system for several years now.
I feel like Windows 11 was literally JUST in the headlines for bricking PCs with one of their forced updates. I get that *nix is not for everyone, but it is VERY rare that you hit an issue with one of the more popular distros that hasn't already been hit and with a documented answer on a reputable forum with an easy search. When I've had issues with Windows stuff, you have less information to go on usually, just some BSoD or similar and the forum posts seem to be heavily moderated (post chains read like a generic tech support call - have you tried restarting etc etc) and hard to find an answer. Just my anec-data. You usually get a very verbose error message when Linux issues arise and pasting the error message into a search will usually point you right where you need to be.
Using Fedora for years, but not on workstation. Because of Adobe, the only reson that I stick with Windows LTSC IoT.
And no, Gimp is not alternative. Neither Affinity, bucause lack of linux support. Or Capture One. Only DaVinci resolve is competition to Premiere because of linux support.
I'm curious if Adobe ends because of unsustainable pricing models and aggressive terms of use (no offline more than week, constant data sending to adobe servers) or because of Ai. Because post-production via complex tools will soon became obsolete compared to prompt-like editing.
PhotoPea works in any browser on any platform.
Also you might prefer gimpshop(or whatever the latest PS-ified gimp is these days), as the default hotkeys in gimp are shit. Ctrl, shift, and alt have universal contexts beyond Adobe products that gimp completely ignores.
Just like Macs and the stupid command button. And don't even think of remapping, say the clipboard, to use Ctrl. Many apps just won't honor it. Because that would just make too much sense.
PhotoPea does not support colour profiles - browser limitations. Also GPU acceleration is limited and does not work with large PSD/PSB files. No camera RAW, no advanced selection and healing tools. No plugins.
PhotoPea might work for casual editing. That's not why I use Adobe.
I tried linux as a desktop on and off for over 25 years. As an server OS it's more than ok and everything I worked in last years got deployed to linux (because BSD lacks OCI containers)
In fact, I am using now Pop!_OS in parallel with Windows. But linux desktop experience still feels broken when compared with Windows and macOS.
I want to install the system with the defaults, not spend time configuring it and have an "it just works" experience. But even if I spend tons of time configuring and fiddling with it, something will fail, there will be problems, something won't work at all, something won't work properly and something will require complex workarounds that take time and exhaust my patience.
Before trying Pop!_OS I tried CachyOS. It provided me a broken desktop experience but in a different way.
Probably the best linux desktop experience now is provided by WSL2, followed by ChromeOS.
I'm learning that while Windows has a bad rap in some tech circles, its surprisingly still pretty well regarded. This past school year my daughter and niece both moved from Windows to Macs. A couple of weekends ago I asked them both how they liked it -- they seemed to transition well to the Mac. They both said the same thing -- Windows was better at basically everything except the Message app and iPhone mirroring, but those two things made the Mac totally worth it since, as they put it, phone beats laptop.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
I think Windows (and some, but not all, Linux window managers/DEs) are really kings of "general productivity" type work that macOS is really unintuitive about.
I daily drive a MBP now, and have since the M1 air released, but even this many years later I still think the more windows-y desktop metaphor is superior for any type of work that requires heavy multi-tasking (which I do as a sysadmin type role).
Apple tends to assume you are working inside one app at a time, on one workspace at a time. This is evident from the get go with how the OS treats apps & windows/documents as separate, and how Cmd+Tab only switches between apps, not app windows.
Without third party tools, it's a terrible OS for actually managing multiple windows and contexts and that throws people off because nearly everything else outside of mobile doesn't use that paradigm. Context switching is expensive on macOS, by design, but most general user's and office workers work involves heavy context switching, and frequently.
When I had my Mac I'd ALT+TAB to switch between windows, and then everything would disappear.
I used to do support for a "Marketing Agency" so was a 100% Mac shop, and it was interesting to get calls to say they couldn't recover documents. Or a shared document was locked, because OSX had it open perpetually in the taskbar...
On MacOS (at least my older version on a 2015 MBP), Cmd-~ switches between app windows. Totally undiscoverable but knowing that restores a lot of usability.
It helps, but is still fundamentally different behavior. It's now two key strokes Cmd-Tab to Chrome, then Cmd-~ to switch between chrome windows (with no switcher UI).
The windows-y alt-tab at least shows a preview of all windows, and so its one key stroke to tab through everything.
OSX works well if you're in the Apple eco-system, just because it's all built to interop.
But as a Linux user, who had a stint on OSX because it's closer to Unix, I hated it.
Simple things like keyboard shortcuts doing the entirely opposite of what I expected (which is my fault in reality) but doing stupid things themselves
Of course people are going to generally prefer the thing they’ve already been using and are comfortable with, especially if they are forced to use something else entirely.
On the flip side, I run a Windows gaming laptop alongside my Mac. It is a constant source of rage to the point that I am genuinely shocked at how bad things are and regularly suspect that the people who choose to use it are the victims of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
I know this will be controversial, but we have ai CLI tools now and they can make navigating Linux and fixing issues much easier.
If you have a problem open the agent and tell it, give it the access (after backup of course), let it figure it out for you.
Then when it has ask it what it did and what the issues were.
Doing this massively reduces the friction of even very advanced Linux issues that you don't have time to look at.
And at the end you can document the solution or turn it into scripts that you keep forever.
Strongly agree, and this makes Linux head and shoulders above Windows for everyday computing now. Because it's more text-native than Windows and in-depth technical documentation is more easily available, AI agents are simply more capable on Linux.
Absolutely agree with the OP! My first Linux installation was in 1993 when I hauled dozens of floppies from my Uni back home (X-Windows was like 15 floppies?). Even remember emailing to Linus about some issue and he responded. Ever since I _wanted_ to be using Linux but was always put off for all the reasons described in that post. I wanted a nice OS so I can do my school/work/hobbies but not constantly having to work on that OS, figure out dozens of config files, brick the system etc.
At this point WSL2 is more than filling this void. I even stopped using VMWare since WSL is that good.
Linux has got a LOT better, but the whole "recompile the kernel" stuff was still around in the early 2000's
Linux user since 1994, did some tiny dev for the kernel back then.
Linux as a server is very good, and there is not much discussion on that front.
Linux as a desktop system is fine. I could live with it for the added value of having a flexible, predictible system. Windows is much more polished but, again, this is a tradeoff I would happily make.
The problem are applications. And particularly Outlook. I have to use Outlook because of its integration with the calendar, Zoom, ... This is the Outlook client for on-premises Exchange.
OWA suck to the point I simply cannot look at it (the one coming with Exchnage on premises, I do not the MS365 one). Without Outlook working seamlessly I am done.
This is really a pain - one software that stops an extended trial.
> Windows is much more polished
This is absolutely not true anymore.
Once or twice a year, for the last 20+ years, I am doing a one week full immerison in Linux desktop for my work. I keep a separate laptop for the Windows-only activities.
Between malfunctions on a multi-screen setups, audio problems with applications, issues with sleep recovery on some monitors, etc. -- Winodws is much more polished
Sure YMMV but I am making active attempts at moving, with the will to move, but it is not as good yet.
Like I said, this is not a showstopper for me.
windows absolutely has unpredictable issues that are easily solved by just using linux. i spent months trying to figure out why windows would randomly wake from sleep in the middle of the night turn my monitor on and wake me up. no amount of tweaking settings or reading logs ever fixed it. it was simpler to just use a linux distro or shut windows down
Yeah same but I'm out of options. I don't like Linux on the desktop but I like Windows' privacy stance and use-hostile behaviour less. My Mac isn't much better. What I really hate is being forced into this corner.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
What a quite absurd conclusion. If you want to use your camera then just use it and stop looking for excuses. I find people who moan about the OS UI are just nitpicking. Nothing is perfect and it's there to provide utility for the task at hand. Pick one and get on with life.
Get Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT to tide you over. It's intended for stable systems and removes a lot of the bloat.
https://massgrave.dev/faq
> I don't like Linux on the desktop
The massively wide variety of desktop options makes your opinion difficult to assess. Which have you tried?
Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, i3, Enlightenment.
Been trying for 30 years.
Would you say you prefer windows 11 to all of those though??
Not tried it. I have a fairly heavily locked down Windows 10 LTSC build.
My intention is not to dismiss the blog's argument about using Linux but my experience running an Ubuntu LTS in my main computer has been straightforward, easy and as problem-free as one could expect. I'm sure other Linux distros offer a similar experience.
I get that every person is different, so what works for someone might be dysfunctional for someone else. But I wonder if there's a growing tendency to over-emphasise things that aren't "perfect" or the perceived friction caused by different ways to approach or solve things.
Perhaps it's my own personal bias but the same way I like using Ubuntu, I think Windows is fine, as well as MacOs. They're fine the same way many other products I use are. Often, I struggle to find big differences between the stuff I use. I mean, I can see the differences (often small, rarely big), but I'm the same guy. I'm not that special.
My experience too: "Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make)."
I'm not a windows user anymore, haven't been for a decade or so, but it wasn't until a couple months that I finished the switch when I moved from windows to bazzite in my gaming rig.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
It is largely what one is used to but for me windows was always this unknowable black box, sure, you could get good at it but there was always so much, no source, many interlinked subsystems. when things work it is not so bad. when they don't... Linux was a lot better, especially if you use a more minimal distro, But even it is this huge confusing mess. What really clicked for me was when I tried openbsd, it was the first time I felt like I had a system I really understood. I started with a router, now I am one of those wierdos who use it on the desktop. I would not actually recommend it to anyone, like I said it is largely what you are used to. but for me linux always felt more knowable than windows.
>asking me to decide whether to increase the limit
I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.
I gotta say, Fedora plus KDE - have not had any major issue, and certainly none as bad as desktop utility performance degradation on Windows 11. Probably a little more fragile feeling than Windows 10, but it honestly has felt basically same, which I wasn't expecting.
I think the web page delayed loading is often server-side these days trying to detect bots. Especially with a dynamic IP.... You'll generally be fine after that first detection flags you as human. Also this seems to affect firefox moreso than some other browsers, but that's subjective.
Also, if you're familiar with sysinternals suite for Windows there's a Linux equivalent to all the tools with nice GUIs. So you should be able to track down most process-caused performance issues fairly easily without knowing all the appropriate CLI commands.
I would speculate myself instead the more likely thing is related to:
- dns cache configuration
- wlan power saving which is kind of aggressive since Linux has had some power management issues
It's really why I go for a minimal distro, debian with xfce. There's not many components, they're not "tuned", and I can just kinda research any issues myself and find what works. Usually there's some pretty big gaps (missing a whole component, wildly malfunctioning, high resource utilization) and then it's easy to figure out. There's not much code, or really hard scripts to understand. Just maybe enable debug on the service. Learn where the developers put diagnostics (about:support is a godsend). You get to architect your hardware's success and get a rock-solid system. But yeah, if it's weird it might be weird for a while, haha.
For my setup I think the last few lessons were like:
- use gamescope for X11 Wine/Proton (huge.)
- Firefox profile reset to fix hardware decoding (followed some good guides and some bad guides)
- to make changes use the same git tag as your distro so the deps are easily in-reach.
My favorite new discovery for debian in particular is their extensive functional docs. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/
absolutely adore this.
I can't say I like Windows in any way, except perhaps nostalia for NT 3.51 or XP. I can however relate to 'modern Linux' experiences. I've tried using some new-fangled ones and instead of being delighted by the new hotness, just want my old Xubuntu the way I remember (but with good wifi, sound, sleep, hidpi, multimonitor support). My latest disappointment was KDE Plasma/Wayland--very modern in ways I don't appreciate. There was something simple I couldn't adjust (forget which) and tonnes of settings for things I don't care about at all.
The OS/Desktop is not the show, it's the stage/floor.
I can't really relate to this post at all.
I've tried Windows a few times over the years and every time I regretted it. From nagging notifications, random restarts while I sleep (for "updates"), ads in the start menu, ai shoved into every orifice, to constant "updates required" after you just updated.
On the bright side, the battery life was better on Windows and sure-- games work. The latter is slowly becoming the norm on Linux as well.
You are not supposed to use Windows 11. Use any of Windows 10's enterprise versions, the difference is night-and-day.
This brings back all this nostalgia. I used to be all linux everywhere I could. The CD linux loaders on random machines work would make me use with work. Linux distros you'd get in a book from Borders. :) Loved it all. But then I had to edit video and images in a 24 hour film festival. And the pain. It just couldn't work constitently. Had to find someone with a mac to get it done. I know these days are so different with better image and video editors and many years of improvements. But still kind of shy from adopting linux again as a daily driver. Too stuck on Apple and OSX now
My situation is somewhat similar. I always try to migrate from Windows 10 to Linux, but (probably) thanks to my NVIDIA card (GTX 1050) I experience huge mouse cursor and DE animation lags, specially with KDE and Wayland. In Linux Mint this issue happens less, but still does, and that bothers me.
On the other hand, Debian Xfce on my old Acer laptop with a i3-370M runs superb - Windows feels like a downgrade there.
I tried debian and found Ubuntu to be more stable, i.e., bugs are less annoying. Throughout the years I've been stuck with bug that would irritate but the linux experience is still miles ahead compared to windows. Not using terminal is a PITA that I just keep windows for whatever I really cannot run in Linux (the list is getting shorter).
With LLMs I've been able to tackle bugs to a level that either fix or lower down the annoyance level. It's still not perfect, but the tradeoff is in linux favor IMO.
So, the complaint is that Linux (Fedora + KDE Plasma) is unstable after a week of usage and daily update? I'm not sure about Fedora as I'm using Arch (also with KDE Plasma on wayland). Everything is very stable for me. I `paru -Syu` whenever I remember or when VS Code shows at the lower corner that there's a new version.
"¿Por qué no los dos?" A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enough to do serious work are $200-400 and can be accessed remotely from Windows by VNC or RDP.
To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
> I don't want to use this thing, it sucks. Also, I don't want to change it one bit.
People really dislike change, it's the same thing about some freak thing that happens like twice that you heard of, like shark attacks, but still drive their ton and half vehicles for thousands of hours a year. People accepted those issues as part of the thing, they blame Linux in general when an application doesn't work, but never blame Windows in general when the OS doesn't work.
I went through this phase too before finally having had enough of windows/osx. This person hasn't suffered enough from them.
I really want to use linux but for me its the software. Games I play use anticheat that doesn't work. Software I use for 3d printing doesn't work without hours of workarounds. VR is poorly supported if at all. Usually every year I'll try linux, use it for a month or so, then be forced back to windows after running into a hard block, with the dozen ads forced down my throat welcoming me back. Hopefully one day I can commit to it.
Yeah this is my experience too, but different software. Sometimes there are ways to get something to work after hours/days of tweaking, and sometimes the answer is just no. It's unfortunate, I like *nixes, and have used them off and on for 30+ years, I just can't do it as a daily driver.
I don't get it, I've been using Ubuntu from the very early days, that's probably 20 years now. And I really didn't encounter any serious problems. Over the years, I had one instance of driver update breaking wifi. That said, it was always on a Thinkpad or my own desktop PC.
I agree that friction in Linux is less predictable. But I always found it VERY motivating to learn things.
You can just use Windows and run your required Linux distro inside WSL2. That's exactly my setup—I'm a heavy user of both, as I need both systems daily.
In my experience, I've seen this get messy having to have some apps on the windows filesystem and reading and writing back and forth to the WSL layer for various files. It works, it's just a degraded experience compared to what I have seen going all in on either side.
Is there a reason you don't do the contrary?
You get the hardware/driver support of Windows, things like GPU/drive/network/window sharing in the out of the box config, and there are very few graphical apps for Linux which don't run graphically in Windows in the first place (but the reverse is not as true).
I loved it for my work laptop but then Apple Silicon MacBooks came along and forced a main OS due to the hardware (though nowadays Asahi is pretty good on the older ones). I suppose on a home use case you get big multiplayer game DRM support as well (different people will consider that a plus or minus).
The best situation is when everyone has available and uses the operating system (and everything else) that they deserve.
There are much more annoying defaults in windows that are unmentioned, for instance the autoupdate automatic restarts.
I don't think I quite understand this problem. Can't you just tell it to only reboot after hours?
Maybe if the ”Linux-curious” would stop using distros like Omarchy and other riced up Arch derivatives and instead try something like vanilla Debian or Fedora, they could spend more time using Linux and less time whining about how unstable ”Linux” is because you don’t understand what a rolling distro is.
Distro wars are pointless when the main point of friction remains the upward fight that is getting useful software to run on Linux.
It's not about rolling release vs. stable release. It's about Arch's "KISS" design focusing on simplicity for implementers rather than for users, which results in brittle, under-engineered tools. NixOS unstable, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Debian Sid are all more stable than Arch.
It's a cult of false simplicity (like most cults of simplicity).
I think the battle linux vs windows showcases how, in the long run, free software tends to win. In 50+ years, windows will be a footnote in the history of technology, in 100+ years, linux will still be going strong as a multi-generational human endeavor started by a young nerd in the early 90's.
> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.
"update tool was bricked"? What?
Use Winpodx and run Windows apps as a container in Linux
https://github.com/kernalix7/winpodx
It's not really applicable nowadays as you can just ask any agent to solve most linux issues for you, it's literally 1 prompt away and you can snapshot your FS to be safe prior and lock it down to avoid agent mistake.
100%. I was finally about to permanently switch a year ago and agents have been a game changer.
Never judge a masochist. No kink shaming here. Never judged Oscar for where he lived either.
Haha, I love Linux, but I can't quit MacOs/iOs.
As many complaints as I have about Apple and MacOS and iOS, their products hit a niche and commoditized it.
That's basically just *nix + a fancy (but less so by the day) DE + product lock-in.
You're missing that it's also a *nix with broad commercial app support which is important for a lot of folks, myself included.
Everything else can be re-created yourself on Linux except for that.
this is it. it’s everything i want except for gaming
linux can be a massive time sink at times unfortunately
Is this AI generated? The “two things broke” reasons are just so laughably bad in a real world context yet strangely vague.
100% agree. The two examples are garden-variety computer problems and not articulated with any degree of precision for someone who claims to have attempted to troubleshoot them. It's either AI-generated or the author has only elementary Linux know-how (which is cool, but we don't need to take their wholesale dismissal of an entire ecosystem quite as seriously).
MS-Windows ME was the reason I jumped ship to GNU+Linux.
I'm honestly surprised why it's taking the rest such a long time.
That was a long time ago - from your experiences, you think Linux has changed for better or remains same?
Everything got better except for icon themes and the introduction of avahi, pulseaudio and systemd. Icon themes peaked with KDE3 where they had subtle animations and the Tango project which had very recognizable colorful icons.
I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.
I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.
There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.
> Windows friction is predictable. [...] These things are annoying, but they're known. I can dismiss them, turn them off, and move on. Barely 10 seconds is lost.
> Linux friction is unpredictable. [..] The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
The good news is this is largely a matter of experience: if you can push through and get used to doing root cause analysis on Linux, you'll find that desktop Linux issues tend to become transparent and easy to fix. If you stick to distros that support rollbacks, you also win back the option to defer anything that feels likely to be a time sink until either you have time/patience/interest, or someone else has fixed the issue and sent their fix upstream.
The bad news is that it's an experience issue: if you want to get to the other side of it, you have to invest in building the skill. The age old tongue-in-cheek advice is actually still good: install Gentoo. (Install Arch if you want a diet version of the experience.) The desktop Linux userland is indeed Lego, and if you go through the process of piecing it together instead of grabbing a preassembled kit, even just once, you will build a new troubleshooting muscle that serves you well for a long time. Can you find the energy for that? Can you make the time? Probably, but it won't be effortless. Maybe you'll even need to dual-boot, or have two computers for a while.
But I promise it's an issue of familiarity, intuition, and skill. You absolutely can cultivate those things.
The distro-hopping and vanilla installs are the problem imo -- with Linux it is possible to strip your system down to the basic functionality so that you can actually understand everything what's going on and not be surprised. What is so refreshing is to realize that you don't need to pull in some baroque package you don't understand because the part of it you want is just 3 lines of bash and one line in a config file or whatever. But to get there you have to learn how to use the tools.
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
The article is a bit hand-wavey. I won't deny their issue, they had it, but of course people here will have their opinion about the tradeoffs. For me CachyOS working near flawlessly on multiple machines. It's truly free with no forced ads or telemetry or product integrations.
If Windows works for a person or they need it for certain software that's fine. For me, I'm living a Linux-default life for the first time and it's nice.
this resonates with my experience. once every 3 years I try linux as primary OS for my home PC, I do small stuff with C/python, browse web and play factorio. I use linux in VM on my job daily, so I am not a beginner, but gosh, linux sucks. Everything breaks constantly even when doing NOTHING. Nothing ever works installing first try, you always end up googling stupid error message and stumble upon 250 other idiots that try to solve same issue. after trying 5 solutions, one (or combo) will hopefully work. Then, you can hang-up entire system by a stupid python script or your own buggy program and I miss unkillable always working task manager that can recover almost every hanger (and just stfu about reisub) without needing to restart the whole system and killing my FKIN FLOW! ugh. I just use WSL2 for rare cases where I need my unix build tools and forever abandoned the idea of switching to linux. Life is too short wasting it on googling some nonsense shit that just have to fucking work.
Sorry but wtf is that guy on?
> I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore.
Until Microslop OS decided on its own that you haven't had a reboot in a while and since we're at it some of the drivers you desperately need suddenly are not kosher anymore.
When stuff breaks I prefer something I'm actually allowed to repair. That's just me.
Or…just use BSD
I love Linux and I quit windows
In Windows, problems are felt universally... everyone and their mother is having the same problem and googling surfaces it easily.
It's the fragmentation in linux that will always make it tough for "normies". Distro differences is obvious first thing, but the two big ones are desktop environments (gnome/kde/etc) and app package formats (flatpak/snap). These add friction and more problems (I heard you like packaging: here's another package format and big ass repository for you. And portals? really?).
I just keep to a simple desktop in fedora using rpm/dnf and build from source if I have to. Yes, I know that's not an answer for normies, but there's not going be simple answers.
I had a similar experience some years ago. On-off with Linux/macOS, but it was clear that I only had to take the pain long enough to overcome the urge to switch back to my good old macOS.
And what can I say: It worked. There are still aspects I'm missing (Preview app, Mail) and other Aspects I really hate (Printing on my Canon MB5150 just does not work) but I stayed. I found workarounds and solutions, fought my way through the distro-jungle and I'm glad I made it.
All in all I think it is more a know-how Problem, than a Problem with the system itself.
However, if you don't have this time, it's understandable but how much time goes into experimenting every year and then switching back?
This was my experience with linux the first times I used it years ago when I lived in a different state, but I tried it last year and it's night and day.
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
I moved to Linux from Windows 6 months ago.
Here are some minor things that always went sour on Windows:
Other than that, with Windows 10 Pro it was super solid on 12 year old hardware. Never crashed, all games I could play were fine and I did heavy Docker based development, highly leveraging WSL 2. Also recorded tons of videos (screencasts with a webcam).Switched to native Linux. Had a rough start but it improved after going down a few rabbit holes.
My GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) didn't play nice with Wayland. The official NVIDIA drivers have big problems allocating system memory when GPU memory is filled causing apps to crash constantly[0]. Games were lagging and stuttering. My whole machine would pause for 5-10 seconds and then unpause, a few times a day.
Ended up having to modify a udev setting on my SSD to enable max_performance for its power management and the machine never paused again.
Switched to an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU and all of the GPU related problems went away, and the games I played stopped stuttering and lagging.
Now it's quite stable but there's still 3 problems. I've gone down pretty deep rabbit holes for each one but didn't resolve them.
If I'm downloading a file with Firefox and I start a Docker container that involves configuring a Docker network, my file download will get interrupted. Not 100% of the time but pretty close to it. I tried a million settings individually and nothing has stopped this behavior.
If pretty heavy I/O or network traffic is happening while recording a video with OBS, sometimes my webcam's audio will get desync'd from the the video, making my lips move a half second after the video happens. Tried a ton of different PipeWire settings here, couldn't find out a resolution.
If I'm on a video call in a browser with Firefox (Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, etc.), usually after about 45-60 minutes folks will say my audio is getting really choppy and I have to reload the browser for it to get fixed. I tried a ton of things other than switching browsers and it made no effect.
Nothing in the journalctl logs for any of the above 3 issues are present.
I'm not posting this expecting someone to fix it, but I can relate with the OP in that Windows "just works".
I don't mind going down these rabbit holes if I find a resolution and when it's working, it's a much better environment for me than Windows without question.
I'm not switching back to Windows but there is certainly an expectation that there could be issues. This is the sole reason why I wouldn't recommend Linux to all of my technical friends, unless they are die hard into tech and fully understand what they're getting into.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi...
Never had an issue with GNU/Linux in the past decade. Everything "just worked". Maybe the author is a MS shill spreading lowkey FUD?
This completely resonates with my experience. I have amassed enough familiarity with Linux having used and tried out all kinds of distros to the point of being able to assist others in setting up and diagnosing their systems, but I myself keep drifting back to W10. There remains a "homely" feeling to it that keeps eluding Linux distros.
I switched to bazzite-dx for my personal computer ~6 months ago. i7-13700K / 5070 Ti / 32GB DDR4 / 5120x1440 240Hz HDR
It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.
It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).
Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.
The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."
Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.
Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.
As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.
Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.
1Password simply doesn’t work on immutable distros. instant deal breaker for me
> gamescope
Okay, that does sound pretty dang nice for older games.
Bizarre PoV from my perspective. The failure of modern computing is Apple UI drivel and Ubuntu is particularly bad since it has that silly settings UI. May LLMs free us of Jobs and the need to know where to click and how to describe our computing experience like a mall we are lost in.
It's as predictable as how much you sudo.
you can now ask a coding agent to debug & fix these issues
some people are stubborn
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