Why people gave up using linux?

I switched to a Mac a couple years ago but I'll always at least keep a Linux VM and a separate Linux laptop just in case.

As for why, generally speaking, Apple puts a lot of really, really good work into making a machine that feels immediately productive with little fiddling around, they're ahead of the pack in some ways, and for advanced stuff it's "good enough".

My reasons:

Cross-device integration (at least with Apple) - I already use an iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. The integration between iOS and macOS is just really, really good. Android+Linux just doesn't come anywhere close. And that's even if you put in the hours it'd take to set a bunch of disparate apps up to try to replicate it. Anyone telling you otherwise is completely full of bullshit or is showing that they actually haven't used Apple devices.

Using my iPad as a secondary display takes literally 2 clicks.
Setting my Apple Watch to unlock my laptop takes literally 4 clicks.
Casting my screen or even just sound takes 2 clicks.
Handoff is just magic. If you recently used something on your phone and have the matching app on your Mac, you get a shortcut in your Dock to load whatever you had on your phone on your computer to pick up where you left off. If I am in a Signal chat, I can instantly open the chat I was viewing on my phone. Same for browsing websites, text messages, and a bunch of things.
Airdrop between devices "just works".
If I connect to a wifi access point from my phone, my laptop will prompt me to automagically copy the password over (i think) bluetooth. Or if I'm at a friend's house and they use an iPhone, they'll get a prompt to share their wifi network password with me.

Device restoration - Restoring a Mac is just impressive for how little effort it requires. If someone stole my laptop, I can drive 15 mins to an Apple Store, buy a new laptop, point it at my NAS, and be back running in an hour or less to exactly where I left off. Similarly, If I buy a brand new laptop, copying data from the old one to the new one is incredibly boring -- in all of the right ways. All apps/info/config/etc gets moved over. No weird quirks or workarounds or anything needed.
M-series laptops - At the time, there were no other good options for ARM CPU laptops, especially ones that can be spec'd to 64GB of RAM. The M CPU laptops are crazy fast and efficient. I can literally use my laptop for 9-10 hours in a day going full-hardcore, and still have juice to spare. Yeah I know Asahi Linux works for the most part now, but I don't have time anymore to beta-test my main box.
Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.
Software - I wanted to save this for last since everyone quotes this first. I wanted to meddle with music and Ardour doesn't really scratch the itch the same way Logic Pro does. Another example: as bad as the Mac version of Microsoft Office is, it's still far more nicer feeling than LibreOffice and requires much less work to get a good looking presentation/etc. out the door on a time crunch.

Breath of fresh air comment here on Lemmy.
- It really is, after reading whole threads about people shitting on Apple products for no good reason. Not criticism, but name calling etc
We definitely have a long way to go in Linux land lol.
- Yeah :/
  
  I almost wonder how far (as an example) System76 or someone could get by mirroring Apple’s approach: build a range of devices and focus aggressively on gluing them together without a care in the world for anything else.
  
  I know Samsung tries for their devices with Windows, but their software always felt like there’s an internal competition for who can add the most number of controls to each UI and it comes across as very clunky.
Superb write-up, well done! Echoes my experience completely.
There are good paid alternatives for music. The question was about Linux, not FOSS. Comparing to Ardour is unfair
- Because in yanks number out of ass 87.74% of threads of “why use X? Linux has Y, it’ll do everything you want”
  
  Ardour/LO/etc are great for what they are and have their uses, but there are some apps that just aren’t available on Linux and the claimed alternatives really don’t work.
This is my experience as well. I would add: if you like to tinker and have time to spare, use Linux. If you want a Unix and have more money than time, buy a Mac.
This is going to sound weird, but what WiFi system do you use?

I currently use an ASUS mesh system and it’s utter trash with Apple devices.
- I’m using a EnGenius EWS377AP and don’t have any complaints.
  
  I had Ubiquiti gear but had some quirks and still wanted something a bit advanced. I don’t know how well meshing works though.
Regarding point 2, this was why deadmau5 used Mac for a long time during his live gigs. He likes the predictability of a Mac, it makes it easy for him to get back going if something goes wrong.

He's had to stop using it for the Cube stuff though, since it requires a lot of Windows software.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it's a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won't catch on for the average PC user.

Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.

I'm comfortable using a terminal, but with my Linux machines s common pattern is:

Need to get some software working. Find how to fix it, edit some config files.

Months later I run a system update and it's starts asking me about merging the changes I made to various files. What were they for again? Are they still even necessary with the update or are the values I changed no longer used?

Then sometimes, something I installed is no longer supported, or needs a manual update because of how I installed it.
- You can set up something like Timeshift to automatically take a snapshot of your system before updating (and/or before installing new software) every time. The one time my system got a little fucked up after removing the wrong dependencies or whatever, loading up that snapshot worked like a charm.
  
  Just having that as backup has made me far more comfortable with trying new things on my laptop.
Some of those that don't find it intimidating do find it tiring. I grew up using MSDOS and later Windows 3.1 when it came out. Most of what we did was in command line and having everything in a GUI is just a QOL upgrade you don't really want to come back from.
I've been using mint on my laptop for a few months now and it's great, but like you said there's still some things that require command line tinkering and I just don't have the energy for it.
It's the same reason I like console games, they just work. Don't get me wrong, the console modding scene is non-existent and any kind of customization is generally out of the question, but it just works, and it works the first time every time.
- Full agree on tiring. I work as an SRE, my job is administrating Linux machines (containers these days). When I need to use a computer, I just want it to work out of the box and Linux doesn't offer that yet. I don't want to spend time getting it to work
- Tbh for some people there's no going back once you learn it. Navigating a GUI and clicking through several buttons vs having a nice shell with completions and whatnot like Fish and learning piping at some point just becomes faster, same thing as using modal editors.
Thank you! Glad I’m not the only one to mention this or agree with it. Had some twit bitching at me last night to prove it, as if I kept screenshots or something. I just fixed things and moved on.
Agreed. This should be the #1 priority for at least one Linux distribution to make it accessible. The issue is that Linux fanatics will cry blasphemy for it and that’s counter intuitive.
There's still no way to log into Nautilus as root user from Nautilus.

So you can't just double click on an icon to decompress it below the home folder.

And then people will give out this long series of terminal commands....hello, I said FROM NAUTILUS.

I'm actually quite okay with using the terminal, the problem is almost nothing invoked from the CLI actually works properly. If the programmer can't be arsed making a skin, they generally can't be arsed with proper playtesting either.
Yeah. It's come a long way, and if nothing else, Linux is a fertile playground for the philosophy of software design for those who handle the UX/UI stuff.

Windows 7 was beat to the punch by gnome/Ubuntu on the paradigm of representing apps in the taskbar as icons that then expand to become textual lists. Some people hate that idea, and that's ok too, so long as they're given alternatives that are easy to switch between.
- Windows 7 was the best OS. I miss it.
Tinkering in terminal is the thing I like most about Linux. What's holding me back is most of the tools and games I want to use is not yet available on Linux but I think it's getting there soon
- Most of the games? Or just a few? Because my experience recently with Proton has been pretty amazing, and I've yet to run into a game (that my laptop meets the requirements for) that hasn't worked. Even some games that Steam marked as "unsupported" worked just fine for me.
Nkt with GNOME. I only needed to use the Terminal in GNOME to do complex things an ordinary user wouldn't do anyway.

People told me "oh yeah, gaming on Linux is a comparable or even better experience compared with gaming on windows." Well after a whole weekend spent troubleshooting and trying different distros only to get 20fps max and no controller support for a 5 year old pc game I went back to windows and was playing within about 30 minutes including the time to install the OS.

Edit: Before you go giving me tips: yes, I tried that too. You're missing the point if your solution to the above is "more troubleshooting, I guess."

This right here is why the Linux community needs to pick a single desktop that just works for people who are switching over for gaming purposes.

Yeah, having the choice of multiple Distros is great from a technical perspective. But most people forgot what it was like on Windows.

Gamers are not interested in distro hopping on their first time attempt to get Linux to work.

If we're going to say that a benefit of Linux is the multiple distros to a new person, you had better warn them that some distros are not as easy to work with as others. Looking at the cool desktop pictures on the website is not a sign that a distro is easy to work with.
- Situation: there are 10 Linux gaming distros
  
  "This is ridiculous. We need to develop one universal gaming distro for people who are switching over for gaming purpose!"
  
  Situation: there are 11 Linux gaming distros
  
  Joking aside, there are already quite a handful of gaming oriented distros such as Garuda, Nobara, Batocera, Drauger, Lakka, Bazzite, Holo, etc.
- That's where we need HoloOS but (if possible) fully open source, Lead by a major decision maker doing the QA and keeping it in one direction.
  Users could submit their fixes to make it better for everyone.
- Right, but this is why you do the bare minimum research before choosing a distro. Find one that fits your needs. If you're going to use the PC for mostly gaming, and you install a distro that's notoriously bad for gaming, that's kind of on you.
Usually this means you didint install the proprietary graphics driver. Which you also have to do on windows (Geforce Experience )
- And on windows, you can do all of this without touching the keyboard...
I'm sure this was your experience, but I switched last year and my Linux gaming experience has been far better than I ever expected.
30 minutes including installing the os

Having installed windows 11 about a month ago, I know that is a big fat lie.
- I install Windows at work.
  If you don't have a slow ass USB 2.0 stick the install and being ready to start is roundabout 20-30min depending on the hardware.
- Last time I changed the SSD on my computer, it took me about 30 min to make the Windows ready to play Steam games. Win 11 took 15 min to install, the Nvidia driver and Steam took the rest. So it's not a lie at all.
- Linux has never card what I install of on. These days it always seems like have have to do some work in the hidden cmd to get windows on my drives

It's gotten a bit better, but last time I tried switching, the GUI client for my VPN provider was shit, the PC gaming compatibility aspect (non-Steam) wasn't quite good enough for me, Nvidia's drivers said fuck you to my display, and I couldn't quite figure out how to set up Samba. Lol.

I'd definitely recommend checking back in a year or two to see if it's changed. Compatibility is definitely getting better over time even if it is slow.
Nvidia's drivers said fuck you to my display

Easily one of the longest and most headache inducing troubleshooting sessions I ever had on Linux -_-
Ive quite enjoyed the KDE NordVPN plasmoid. Visually integrates it into the taskbar.
- I've been using the CLI app and it's kind of jank... I'll have to look into this.
- Problem with NordVPN is I believe it doesn't have Port Forwarding. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.
  
  (In any case, NordVPN does sit right with me; seeing them advertised by every single YouTuber under the sun just...idk...feels yucky.)

I've used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn't work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).

Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro's name )

About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.

They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.

They broke my desktop.

Again.

I've been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.

UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn't usable.

Why??

Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.

You can't:

Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can't get that to work on it.

They won't add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.

So, if the only machine you've got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.

( "Haskell Programming From First Principles" requires Stack )

I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux...

can't remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something .. it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby .. so...

the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn't fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND...

Ubuntu wouldn't fix it, because they insisted it was upstream's problem, even-though they wouldn't include a maintained version of Ruby.

Fuck idiocy.

On & on & on.

Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the "religion" of the various Linuxen.

I'm old, & tired of being beaten-on by "friends" and "allies".

Abusers are abusers.

IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,

THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.

Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they've got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.

I'd want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell's correctness & Julia's ruthless-efficiency ).

Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?

Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can't have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps...

This "improvement" forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or .. not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.

War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for .. fashion & class-status??

The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.

It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn't going to bother them.

Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated "strategy" consistently solves the wrong problem.

Same as breaking people's wifi solves the wrong problem.

WTF "loyalty" for a distro can ANYone have,

.. once one has been "punched-in-the-face" by them, enough times??

I've read OpenBSD's statement that "lack of a manpage IS A BUG".

That IS PROPER.

They GET it.

There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:

Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.

Test-1st.

As somebody pointed-out, of all the "agile" methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas .. the rest, like Scrum, don't...

That difference-in-religion, XP's objectivity MATTERS.

Any "improvement" which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don't get the "improvement" in.

Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?

I wouldn't permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.

I wouldn't permit breaking of people's network-access to be an official update's component.

MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.

That needs to be SOME distro's spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done...

I want low-vision people being able to use it.

I want blind-readers working in it.

I want deaf people having full function through it.

I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.

I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi's stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it's wonderful ).

Anyways, you're seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.

I won't willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but .. they're "too big" to make accountable?? etc. )

But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.

Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding", and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one's distro.

DON'T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.

KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays .. wtf??

Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??

That isn't a "feature", that is "fashionable" mental-illness.

And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.

/grouch

just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who's tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.

_ /\ _

I feel like you and Linus Torvalds should be in the same room. Thank you for writing this. My Wi-Fi doesn't work either and Bluetooth is a half assed mess that only seems to work with my mouse and nothing else. I don't have time for that shit.
A lot of recent controversial decisions in Linux desktop environment space made sense if you see who's the driving force behind them, which is the big corps who want to make Linux works better for their use case, but not necessarily YOUR use case.
I thought Debian addresses most of your complaints. And LMDE is a good option for people that want a different flavor of it.

I'm using regular Mint, but plan of switching to LMDE in the future, when it's no longer an experimental option. Their Cinnamon desktop is very polished, accessible and sensible. I was surprised I didn't need to configure and hardware - wifi, Webcam, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and headset... It was all detected and configured properly. I chose Btrfs and the installer set up a subvolume for /home and sensible backup policies.
Holy shit that was a rant and a half. I get it i religiously spend 6 hours every time i update my kernal to fix my fucking display drivers cos evdi is a piece of shit that doesnt want to behave itself. If the error was the same every time it would be fine i write a script i run it done but noooo every single fucking kernal causes a new issue and its a pain in the ass. Wayland needs to include some additional things to make it a viable replacement but i think its still a step in the right direction. Im also very happy about the whole putting everything in a flatpak (fuck snap btw) i think its a great step forward towards program compatability and stability across distros. If we can figure that and drivers then we should be in a far better place.
- Holy shit that was a rant and a half.
  
  That's one abused man right there. Sustained decades of bull dung.
  
  **A proper truth about Linux in this whole thread.
  
  PS: canonical broke my wifi hotspot for wpa3 upgrade (that I know of). Doesn't work till this day. (Despite that wifi works, this thought just.. aaarg!)
  
  Any solution will be highly appreciated :)

20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I've already tried and fuck off.

I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it's got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.

I can totally relate to this. I‘m pretty far into my own linux journey and if I didnt have so much stuff already done and wouldnt know as much, I probably would have a really bad time sometimes.

It’s definitely not the majority (anymore, I guess) but there are some real elitist douchebags out there. The amount of times I got RTFMd is unholy.

By now, I do understand some of it as some users get really frustrated. This is hard to deal with sometimes as using polished windows has made them used to being pampered into helplessness. This does trigger me at times. I have to work hard to not RTFM them in that case.

TL;DR: imo, a lot of folks on both sides get frustrated because M$ and others make shiny, well oiled data collection machines and linux is neither the former nor the latter.
- I'm not sure Windows is particularly polished though. Going back to it on occasion it feels kind of awful to use. I think most people are just fighting decades of muscle memory on how to use a PC
what distro was it back then? some distros religiously dedicated to software freedom don't ship the proprietary linux-firmware blobs which might, among other things, contain your WiFi drivers.
- I honestly don't remember. It was a long time ago. I also tried Mint thinking it might be more intuitive, but I couldn't get WiFi to work with either of them.
(That attitude has completely changed. Maybe give it another try sometime)
- Even today, the Arch community is exactly as previously described.
Lemmy is basically a Linux forum these days. Have you seen that kind of attitude here on Lemmy? You should give Linux another go and post any problem you have here on Lemmy.

Historically, it's been because I didn't just "use it". Instead I tinkered with it, and then broke it beyond my ability to repair.

Basically the story around a lot of OSS software I feel. Made by engineers and tinkerers for engineers and tinkerers. Which is great but is also a double edged sword. Say what you will about corporate for-profit software, there’s probably something of value to having someone whose role it is to talk to engineers about what users actually want and use and do without giving a fuck about the engineering side of things. ~~to. Or give a fuck about the engineering side of things.~~

Performance and reliability when gaming is my only reason for keeping Windows installed.

Steam and everything else have already exceeded my wildest expectations in Linux, however I am somebody who wants to come home from work, fire up a game and have it work perfectly with the best settings and framerates I can manage. I don't have the time nor patience to troubleshoot why some update just broke the game in some way after I've spent the last 10 hours dealing with other people's problems.

Yeah I'm still on Windows for the same reason. I seem to be a Linux gaming bug magnet, but I just keep having issues on basically any Linux PC that I try to game on. It's getting better, but still not reliable enough for me. I have a Steam Deck now, which is super cool. But even there I had my fair share of bugs. I tried installing some software in desktop mode which instantly crashed the store (this was on first boot after a fresh install and update). I've also had my fair share of full Deck crashes during games already, especially after updates. Overall it's very cool that it all works, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I have to debug a game for 30 minutes (or more) instead of just playing the game. And that happens just a bit too often to me.
Man I relate to this so hard.

Linux works well if you need something to function as a tool, be it a NAS, network appliance, server, etc. You can setup it up with the small subset of things you need it to do and trust it’ll just run without further interference.

When it comes to a consumer device, it fails the “just works” criteria much harder the OSX or Windows. Software tends to be maintained by an army of unpaid volunteers passionate about their specific use case with a lot of infighting around how things get done. Such functionality is often developed by people with such a warped idea of usability that they consider VIM to be the ideal, modern, text editor. This is a piece of software that started life in the mainframe days, where input lag was measured in seconds rather the milliseconds, in order to minimize number of keystrokes, no matter how convoluted. This leads to multitudes of forks of functionality with subtly differing functionality often with terrible UI and UX catered to the developer’s specific workflow.

Whenever a lay persons asks how to get started with Linux, they get sent down a rabbit hole of dozens of distros, majority of which are just some variant of Ubuntu, with no clear indication of what’s different as they all just describe themselves as the ultimate beginner distro. With the paralysis of choice, they can pick one at random and hope it’ll work with their hardware without issue, spend hours figuring out the nitty-gritty differences and compatibility issues, or just give up and keep using what they already know.

My take is that:
Linux is a utility OS. Just doing what you told it to.
Windows/Mac are a general purpose OS. They try to assist and help you where possible. But thwy allow for some kind of deeper tinkering if needed.

Linux trys to become Win/Mac but failing because of the fighting you mentioned. Also because that OS aint being checked by QA for general folks.
Windows Server/Mac Server are trying to be a Linux OS but being way too bloated and trying to do things they arent meant to do.

I've used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:

I'd encounter a hardware driver issue I didn't know how to fix (Nvidia...)
I'd dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment's control panel didn't support, and I'd have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn't understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn't know how to fix.

The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren't a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.

It's the only one I've used so far, but KDE Plasma has worked pretty well for me. I use EndeavourOS as my distro, which apparently is like Arch with training wheels, but it's worked really well for me. It's definitely solved your last issue as you can easily access the Arch User Repository.
- Yeah I think for the typical user non-rolling distros introduce more problems than they solve. It makes sense in a server environment, but it was so frustrating to look up a severe bug, find its bug report, and see that it had already been fixed upstream 6 months previous. Glad that there are better options now for users of different skill levels.
  
  That hardware issue I encountered was actually because the Nvidia drivers bundled by Ubuntu were old and didn't support my card, not because Nvidia's latest drivers had issues. Crazy that Ubuntu was okay with having their latest release just not work on a mid-range GPU (Nouveau also didn't support the card yet).

I haven't used it since Valve made Proton what it is today, but:

The troubleshooting was a nightmare. Heaven forbid the trouble be with graphics drivers. I love the command terminal and all but when you try 10 different solutions from Stack Exchange and Reddit and all of them give you errors or do nothing at all.... At some point I just had to accept that it wasn't worth the amount of time I had to invest in it.

I hate Windows as much as the next guy but I had to admit that troubleshooting, for whatever reason, took significantly less time when problems came up on Windows.

Perhaps you are used to the windows ways? It enrages me a little Everytime windows does stupid things, which I know can't be fixed (or fixing it would require astronomical efforts). That usually does not happen on Linux, but of course Linux has a lot of things to be fixed too. Then again, fixing Linux machines has kind of become a hobby, im a selfhosted now and work in it.

I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.

this is actually my case lol, no way I'm writing thesis in libreoffice or onlyoffice if I didn't have much experience of using it
- Why aren't you using LaTeX to write your thesis though?
- If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
  
  That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.

Weird edge cases. You would think that edge cases are a minority, but a setup without any edge case is the real minority.

From screens that decide to not power up (Nvidia !!!) to programs not wanting to start (Minecraft flatpak who doesn't run from desktop but okay from command line), sometimes when you want it to just work it's exhausting.

On my side I've totally given up on windows and happily run a full AMD household, it's fine, but still.

It’s “hard”.

I’m an os slut. I use whatever… daily driver is Mac, most of my work is RDP to windows servers

I’ve always got a Linux flavor or two running

We are not most people… not even close. “Most people “ love that their computer runs chrome - and that’s good enough.
It lets them facebook and do taxes.

Asking even the most basic lift. Install Firefox; try an ad blocker. Care about your privacy.

Nope. Make Netflix work is about as far as it gets.

I want to get Asahi running when I have some time to spare. I’ve only don’t run it as a daily driver because what I have works. And that’s fine.

Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.

A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don't think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.

Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that's required is insane to the average user, and most people won't want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.

That's the thing about Linux though, is it really depends on the user. The average user doesn't need any more than a web browser and maybe some Office suite. Chrome OS has shown this. Linux is actually great for these users.

It's the semi-power user, the one that has to do a lot of work, but doesn't know much about computers that Linux seems to trip up.

It's like that wojack bell curve meme.
You perfectly describe Linux from 10-20 years ago but a lot has changed and improved

Last time I installed Linux, it took me about 30 minutes. I had a perfectly fine system that I then improved to my personal likings because I can, not because I must.

I also (about a month or so ago) installed windows 11 and it was a shit show. Getting the ISO installed on a USB stick already took hours and more attempts than I wish to remember to get something that actually worked.

Then the installation, It took literally hours, loads of "I want to sell you shit you don't need!" screens, I needed to download gigabyte sized files for drivers with bloat shit, it managed to freeze within minutes.

People pay money for that shit and it will spy on you.

Meanwhile in Linux land, you can have it as simple or as complex as you wish

Don't come up with the "but inevitably something will break and then you need a command line she'll" because have you ever had the fun of needing to dig around in undocumented windows registry bullshit, or the windows "power" shelll?
- I too am using Linux, but finding an "automatic" linux is difficult since most distros are about performance. It's like trying to find an Italian Sports Car with an automatic.
  
  And for the general user, they don't install their OS. It's preinstalled on a Laptop, or an all-in-one, think-dell office PC that their company provides them. Sign in like you do with everything today and you are good to go. Even Macs do this.
  
  Linux has improved, but the desktop os's need to be more stable (in 1 year I broke 2 manjaro installs and my BTFS file system died in my Fedora install), packages need to be more up to date, and there needs to be gui's for any setting that a user needs to access like restarting a systemd process. A general user will not touch a terminal. Let alone download a git repo, just to update the latest build of Mangohud since the Ubuntu version is so out of date that the GOverlay GUI Utility that's on Ubuntu doesn't work with it.

It's more of a hobby than a daily driver for someone that games on PC games ranging from the early 90s to modern games. Too much hassle when I just wanna install and play.

For me protonlaunch game.exe worked for >90% of the games that didn't provide native releases. so glad steam deck came out.
- Yeah steam deck is awesome I have one as well and it got me to dabble with installing Linux on my laptop but there was just too many things that had to be done to get it running how I wanted. You're selling it massively short by saying one command rules all. For instance, my laptop has an igpu and a desktop 2070 in it and Linux wanted to constantly use the igpu by default in games and it wasn't that easy for someone that doesn't use Linux that often to find a fix for that. I have a kid and a fulltime job I dont feel like configuring crap when I get home to have less time to play ya know?
I've honestly had better luck with retro games on Linux than windows. Half the time lutris can auto install the game with minimal input, and patch the games etc - and even with abandonware titles I just pointed proton at them after installation and no issues.

If you're on older integrated graphics however, I will admit it can be a lot more problematic.
- You didn't read what I wrote if you think I'm on older igpu. ..
My recent experience with gaming on Linux (just switched from Windows for the first time last year) has been nothing short of amazing. I never expected everything to work as well as it has. It's kind of crazy actually.

And that includes old dos games and emulators.

Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.

Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user

For me was when Mint suddenly broke my Bluetooth driver and I had to dig deep about how to fix that wasting my entire day on it, this was 2016 I think.

I just wanted to play some games.

I feel your pain

Because it refuses to work well without constant tinkering.

I picked up a raspberry pi 5 to use as my desktop at home, and tried pi OS, Ubuntu, KDE Plasma, all of which could connect to my home wifi network, but none of which would provide reliable upload or download speeds. Ongoing issues with connection quality to my Bluetooth speaker. Trying to find fixes online is challenging.

I wound up installing android, and everything just works.

So... You're aware that all the things listed are Linux at their core, right? Android runs on the Linux kernel.

Constant tinkering really means understanding how the system works; not to mention a system (be it Mac/win/lin) which needs no modification is one unused. The only way construction in NYC would stop being a 'problem' is if the city were dead.
- Android is Google/Linux not GNU/Linux tho. You can't even create a damn symlink.

There are two parts of my story.

For those with limited time, I gave up Linux once because it was so “strange” from Windows I felt uneasy to use one, and other time because I simply had no use case for it. For those with time, kindly read on.

I had always been an MS-DOS/Windows user who tried Linux and failed several times because I didn’t “get” it, until sometimes between 2006 and 2007 when Mac started its transition into Intel CPU. It was interesting enough (as it was the beginning point for Mac to become mainstream in my country). I decided that my first laptop was going to be a Mac (my house used to see that building own PC was the way to go). It was the first lightbulb moment when I tinkered with a few options in the terminal. This helped me in the future when I tried Linux again. Count it as a transferable skill of sort.

Then around as late as 2021 (because of various life circumstances), I decided to become a cyber security professional—a long time passion of mine. In order for the journey to be pleasant, Linux must be learnt. I enrolled in a course from one authoritative source for SysAdmin, and that was the first time I got to study the innards of the system. After that, along with myself landing a cyber security job, I became more fluent with Linux. Today, I work closely with clients who use Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and sometimes Solaris, so there is no dull moment (except for troubleshooting Windows from time to time). Linux becomes part of my professional life, as the main use case.

Linux learning curve does feel steep, but choosing a right distro for others help a lot. I never have my peers giving up on Zorin so far, for instance.

Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don't know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don't speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.

If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I'll give desktop Linux another shot.

This said, I've self-hosted on a Debian box for years.

I recently switched for the first time, and have been using EndeavorOS with KDE on a couple year old laptop, and my experience has been the complete opposite. It's fantastic. I feel like this is what using a PC is supposed to be like. Before Microsoft fucked it all up.
Similar, I've been running a jellyfin server on mint on a spare laptop, and some other networking tests for other projects. It's a good low-risk way to learn, I think. But my income depends on the daily driver being reliable, and I'm just not comfortable enough in Linux to switch right now
honestly, I have experienced the opposite lately. These days, anything I'm looking to do in Linux has already been done and someone has written instructions for it. If it requires digging in to any nitty-gritty, there's usually decent documentation as well. Windows has so many opaque and propriety processes, and opens so many network connections that I am not entirely sure what the OS is doing most of the time.

Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.

These often require workarounds via the terminal -- if we're lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it's terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that's why I'm typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won't ever quite decouple from Linux.

But it's important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That's the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can't do. It's what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn't have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they've moved to servers too anyway.

Honestly I spend more time fighting weird bugs, performance issues and crashes with xcode than I do with any IDE under arch, including when I mained hyprland for like 6 months. And in this case, there usually was a way to actually fix or work around the issue.
- Most dev tools under Linux are falling under the category I mentioned above where corporations actually maintain them and fix bugs. But the same luxury is not afforded for DEs and their apps. Additionally, Xcode is known to be a piece of s. But the Mac UI works well.

This is a weird reason, but there is a logic to it.

I use Linux at work, and I associate Linux with writing software.

Once I'm done working for the day, I want to relax and do something fun. For me, that is Windows. While I don't particularly care for any OS, I associate one with work and one with play.

The opposite was true when I used to work with .NET on Windows 7. I hated using Windows on my home laptop, and Fedora became my "fun time OS".

This is absolutely me as well, only the other way.

I use Macs at work.

But I game on Windows, and code on Linux.

Originally my workplace was using Fedora servers, which acted too similar to my Linux laptop, and I had to switch it to Ubuntu. That mental separation
consider running two linux distros...?
- It's not just the UI. It's the difference in fonts, it's even weird stuff like using Powershell over the Terminal, or the file system structure.
  
  I get the same with OSX. I use a MBP, and that's also "work mode" to me. It all puts me on edge, whereas with Windows I can relax.
  
  With that being said, I'll switch to OSX or Fedora if I'm in an interview doing code challenges, even if I'm using a browser-based code editor.

I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.

Many of them did not work with my 3840x2400 screen, with unreadably tiny UI
The sound did not always work
When the sound did work, I either couldn't change the volume, or figure out how to disable the speakers when I plug in headphones
Sometimes screen brightness could not be changed

In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux... but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn't, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.

Display scaling has gotten better on Wayland and will be better on the next version of GNOME!
- That may be true, and I'm glad that improvements are being made, but it's not the display. It's not the sound. It's not my keyboard backlight (which got locked on maximum brightness). It's that with Linux, getting anything working requires hours of troubleshooting. Probably if I understood the system better it would only take minutes of troubleshooting, but developing those skills would take months to years. I don't want to invest that sort of effort just to write papers, check my email, take notes, do CAD, and play games.

Nothing works without extended fiddling. While fiddling, nothing works the way the manual says it should. Googling for solutions gets results that are terminal commands than don't do what the poster says they should.

Microsoft sucks, but Windows programs work as expected 95% of the time. Linux programs don't work at all 75% of the time, even after extensive reading and extended periods of time wasted fucking around with fixes proposed by the internet.

What apps did you struggle to get working as expected?

I do grant that unfortunately due to the distro and window manager differences there can be issues with graphical inconsistencies and integration into the system (file associations for example)

Last time I tried diving headfirst into Linux, I got frustrated by having a problem and all the suggested solutions are all wildly different (from an outside perspective) series of editing settings or unusual terminal commands. I already knew how Windows worked well enough to do most things I wanted, but didn't have almost any understanding of how Linux operated so all of the opaque solutions offered without explanation of why or how it should fix the problem just added to my confusion. Couple that with having to sort through one or two dozen suggestions to find one that actually works, not knowing if even attempting any solutions would cause other issues later.

If you ever want to try again I'd suggest pulling up chatgpt to ask questions. It's not failsafe, but it helped me a ton and I come from a predominantly windows background. (Edited to add: I ended up sticking with Pop_OS! And I LOVE it. I game a ton and have very little issues with proton on steam)

Linux would have to manifest a physical fist that punched me in the face every so often in order for me to quit using it. (I'm just shy of 20 years since abandoning Windows)

My reasons:

So far there hasn't been something I've wanted to do on Linux that wasn't doable - and most of the time (especially these days) it's easier.
Everything MS has done in the consumer space post Win-2K
Everything Apple has done.

In 1999 I heard linux mentioned now and then, without knowing nothing about it, other than it being a non-microsoft OS. The problem for me was that I had no method of obtaining it while living in rural scandinavia, but I was chatting with someone on IRC who suggested I give FreeBSD, and gave me a link to where I could buy the discs (FreeBSD is, as the name implies, free to download and use, but you can pay for the convenience of having the official disks, which was reasonable for me as I was on dialup). So, that was my first experience in the unix-ish world; FreeBSD 3.3.

I did tinker with it for a while, and found it absolutely fascinating. Coincidence would have it that I was also looking into perl at the time because I needed to write some CGI stuff, and FreeBSD was pretty practical for that. However, more or less nothing worked out of the box - I could never get my fairly standard Soundblaster Live to work, and it became apparent that while FreeBSD was a good server OS, it did not do as well as a desktop OS. So I reinstalled Win98, and continued to use that as my primary desktop OS. I kept fBSD on a hobby-server at home, though, which allowed me to continue tinker with it.

A couple of years later I thought it was finally time to check out linux as a desktop OS. I don't remember trying them all, but in particular I remember Slackware and Mandrake linux. Slackware had some of the same problems as FreeBSD, where it wasn't mature enough as a desktop OS, but worked well on servers. Mandrake, on the other hand, was somewhat better at this. But still not good enough for me to switch. However, I continued to tinker with both linux and FreeBSD on the side, and on a few occasions I did primarily use FreeBSD when windows was giving me grief. I tested out Gentoo during this time as well, and liked how well its portage system felt familiar to me being used to the ports-system from FreeBSD. Come to think about it, during that time I was doing a lot of music production, for which I absolutely needed windows, that's probably one of the things that held me back.

In 2007 I landed a job where my pearlier tinkering came in very handy, and while I at that point still considered myself primarily a BSD person, it became more and more apparent that Linux was probably a better choice for me, as the community was a lot larger, so I gradually migrated more and more over to linux. I did check out ubuntu, but I didn't like it. I started running Debian on a server I was responsible for.

2013 rolls around, and I decided for reasons I cannot remember that it was time to try the desktop install again. I decided to try Mint. The more I used it, the less it resembled the unpolished distros I'd been trying earlier - Everything worked out of the box. I haven't moved back since.

Come 2023 and my kids are old enough that they don't kill themselves if left unattended for 10 seconds, and I actually can hear myself think in the evening, and I start to look around for music software again. I first found Ardour, but I find it lacking a few of the things that I've always taken for granted in a DAW, so I was seriously considering having a dedicated windows install for music-work, but luckily I stumbled across Bitwig which is exactly what I need. It took a while for the software ecosystem to catch up to what I wanted to do on linux, but it finally got there.

Employers requiring that I use Windows on a computer they provide has been a thing, once or twice. It's their computer, so no argument from me.

Nowadays that would be pretty weird thing to do though. I mean, I'll gladly do it if you're paying me by the hour, I guess.

I'm actually looking at rolling Linux exclusively at some clients. The employees are working through a web app. All the ads, interruptions, and poorly tested updates in Windows waste time, but not enough to be a problem worth solving on their own. It's managing software licenses that's just too much of a pain when we need to suddenly bring on more staff (it's a small business so no dedicated IT department). Easier to just have a standard Linux image that I show up and spam onto a dozen hard drives. I'm available for maintenance, but it's never actually been required.

I've heard that immutable/declarative distros are great for that sort of application. I've only used NixOS and Kinoite for a very short time but they seem interesting.

I tried it during the start of quarantine just to see what all the fuss was about but it clashed way too much with how i use computers. I have no background in compsci and my occupation doesn't involve computers at all, so every problem I experienced was completely new and the solutions were never intuitive. For someone like me who spends maybe 8hrs a week at a desktop (and that's being generous) there's no incentive whatsoever to make the switch.

My cousin gave up Linux because he struggled to find answers to problems. He was really into trying to build a home server and followed YouTube videos. He used to video call with me for tech support, which was kinda exhausting like teaching a kid how to use a computer.

After a few months, he gave up on it and gave me his server filled with weird ass directories and software constantly giving errors because it's not configured correctly. It was easier to wipe and restart.

In my experience, video tutorials for it stuff are never worth it, besides theoretical fundamentals and stuff you have to know for exams. Besides that, first hand documentation and third party articles.

When did they give up? Lemmy is literally crawling with people that won't shut up about linux.

Lemmy is a very very small sample of inherently technically savvy people. All this thread is gonna be is “blah blah windows bad Linux is great except for these 9 paragraphs about everything I couldn’t get working and had to spent hours diagnosing”
But is it Arch?

Learning curve, however slight it may or may not be.

Historically updates could break your system somewhat regularly. Packaging and the underlying mechanisms have gotten very good, it is less common today. Can still happen though.

Because over time I realized Linux wastes a lot of my time on unimportant shit. Then I was given a Mac and eventually I realized that macOS has most of the upsides of Linux while being much more stable, less buggy and more pleasant to use. It just works®™

I don't regret ever using Linux tho, it's a great for learning new stuff and acquiring different kind of thinking. Everyone who's a programmer or in some adjacent field should use Linux at least for a while. It's easy to notice when someone never used it.

Linux is far better for gaming than Mac these days. Proton is amazing, and I have yet to find a game (that my laptop meets the minimum requirements for) that hasn't worked. The most I've had to do is switch from regular Proton to GE-Proton.
- Yeah, Mac is pretty meh for gaming, but when I want to game I just use GeForce NOW. It makes gaming on Mac a non-problem and actually turns out much cheaper for me than buying a gaming rig.
Linux in the server, macOS on the desktop, Windows in the trash.
- Pretty much

I've always loved using Linux, but sometimes I just need things to work; so that whatever I'm doing is quick/painless. But as much as I've switched back and forth, I keep getting pulled more into Linux, the more I learn about my (personal) technical problems

Sure, I can fix it on windows... but the more I delve into Linux, the more I begin to understand the underlying principles of all of it. And for a lot of things; the more I learn about Linux, the more I'm able to navigate across multiple OS's. Learning a little Linux has taught me a metric shit-ton about how computers "speak", and that knowledge has crossed over to a lot of different applications.

I still don't use Linux full-time. But I'm definitely starting to prefer it the more I learn. I hate fighting against locked-out bullshit on windows, when I "just need things to work". But I still like being spoon-fed sometimes, when I don't have time/patience... but I now much prefer taking the time to make my computer work for me. I've learned a shit ton about computers because of Linux

People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.

I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.

The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.

As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.

If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.

To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).

Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.

Pop OS uses archaic software packages. For me Alpine has a good balance between stability and new stuff (no graphical installer though), on the same note my gaming daily driver, Artix, which is based on Arch never broke but that might be due to the fact I installed a lot of my software using nix, cargo and flatpak.
- Yeah idk. I was more interested in trying to stick with an Ubuntu-based (or at the very least a Debian-based) OS just because it's easier to search for an issue and have those related distros be the top result.
  
  I remember years back when I first discovered Mint it seemed like the perfect end user focused Linux distro. It worked so much better out of the box than even Ubuntu (which is already very user friendly), with very minimal configuring needed...installing a lot of things out of the box that even Ubuntu didn't do at the time. I was deciding between Mint and Pop OS to try out on my laptop, and ultimately went with Pop OS because of GNOME and because I heard they have a bit better hardware support (altho I don't have an NVIDIA card so that might be moot).
  
  I get that you can install other desktop environments on your system, but if your distro is built with something in mind it seems better to try that first. I also didn't want to necessarily want to jump back into Ubuntu after all these years, because I hear it doesn't run as well as other distros with these new Snaps things. The point would be to make my laptop run better than it is, not worse.
  
  I don't mind a bit of tinkering here and there, but I have no interest in 3l337 h@X0r level distros. The more user friendly and "it just works", the better. I'm not a programmer, nor do I work in IT or anything of the sort. I prefer GUI based programs, not terminal based ones.
- POP!_OS does not use archaic packages for system components. It ships with the latest stable kernel, mesa and pipewire (and Steam + Nvidia)
  
  The distribution is just on a feature hiatus until the summer when COSMIC is realeased.

Hardware support. My laptop speakers and fingerprint reader don't work in Linux.

On my gaming PC: I had a lot of random boots to black screen. (Vega 56 GPU)

USB ports did not function at all with USB drives.

TF2 had terrible performance compared to windows.

There was no way to configure my sound card settings.

I still run Ubuntu + kodi on my HTPC, have done for about 10 years. Updating versions of either can often lead to time spent in the terminal. Usually nvidia gpu related. So far the issues have been overcome.

Why people gave up adulting?

Consumerism and shiny buttons. Both reduce attention spans.
Because it's hard and im sick of paying bills and working and I just wanna eat Chex mix and watch Saturday morning cartoons.

My daily driver is a Mac, so use Unix, mostly because I like the ecosystem and, as a designer, I’m tied to the adobe apps. This is what keeps me on the Mac side of things.

I do have a Linux server I use as a media server and other library storage running pop_os, which I really like. I also like how smoothly it interoperates with my Mac. I will say, though, a couple of decades of using Linux on my servers have taught me a lot about using UNIX on my Macs.

I've been using Linux on my laptop for years; I use i3wm that makes using it way easier than anything Windows can provide; but on my desktop pc I have too many stuff installed that I can't be bothered to migrate all to Linux.

I really only want Linux for software dev work(docker mostly). Windows has wsl which has worked beautifully for me besides memory leaks a couple times a year. The issues I face with wal pale in comparison to my experience dealing with Nvidia drivers and gaming on Linux.

besides memory leaks

Have you tried auto memory reclaim yet?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-subsystem-for-linux-september-2023-update/#:~:text=Automatic memory reclaim&text=When this is set to,you're not using it!
- I'll give this a try, thanks!
Yeah same. I got enough Linux for when I need it, and overall sitting on Windows is just... easier. Gaming compatibility, app compatibility, less fiddling with the system. Plus I can more readily help friends and family because my OS looks the same as what they have.

I was on Linux before, but the lack of hardware compatibility at the time (this was nearly 20 years ago) turned me off back then. I tried again on my gaming PC about 2 years ago, and quickly realized gaming on Linux is far better than it used to be. It's still pretty dire. But I kinda knew that in advance and this was more to dabble with it briefly and see how much actually works.

command line interface

I’m fine with it, but it’s cryptic and a deal breaker for many.

is one on windows
- Yes, but most people don’t ever have to use it for anything. The average Windows user doesn’t know what you mean when you say “open a command prompt.”
  
  I literally only use it on Windows to compile some source code or run python scripts.

I don't know that I fully qualify as "gave up using Linux", but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I'm definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it's not all doom and gloom.

For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).

I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn't work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren't exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.

Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there's much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I'm sticking with what works (even if it's FAR from perfect).

I haven’t given up on Linux. I have at least 5 Linux machines in the other room, including tablets, laptops, and servers.

There’s a few Mac’s in the mix too, but those are workstations.

Though I can sympathize with the complaints here in these comments. I brought a ryzen laptop home and installed a distribution on it. Sleep didn’t work. Tried 2 more distros, sleep still didn’t work. Now that laptop just sits there. My Chromebook gets more use than it. Having to shut it down and boot it back up every time wasn’t worth using it anymore when my pinebook pro does have the support you’d expect for functions you’d expect from a laptop.

I had the same problem with sleep when I switched last year.

Try using hibernate instead. Takes a few seconds longer to start back up, but it saves your session and works just fine for me.

Edit: just saw you're using PopOS. Still worth trying, but I'm on EndeavourOS (with KDE Plasma) which, from what I understand, is basically Arch with training wheels. So that could be the difference.
- Funny enough, it dawned on me I've used Arch ARM for years but haven't tried it on that laptop yet. Think I'm going to give it a shot when I get bored. But first my mission is hunting down a bug in fedora with my pinebooks wifi. I use it a lot more than my other laptops and tablets
  
  Edit: I installed arch and everything is working correctly from what I can tell so far 😂 idk what was up with pop, fedora, and Manjaro...
Check in your BIOS, there might be a setting for sleep compatibility for windows or linux.

I had the same issue with my Lenovo L14, until I've read a forum post explaining that there is different kind of sleep settings and they differ between windows and linux.
- Unfortunately I found out that it’s due to a bug in the kernel that hasn’t been fixed yet. I was thinking of giving it another change up and replacing popos with arch. If worst comes to worst I’ll do a brunch install and give it to someone who needs it. I’ll still get my Linux fix from my pinebook, tab, and various servers.

I want to use SolidWorks. My kids want to play Fortnite and Valorant.

It's due to lack of support by mainstream developers. I can only hope the Steam deck takes off and continues to sell; once a critical mass of people are on the platform it'll only gain momentum. We're not there yet but this is the closest we've been in 30 years.

I understand SolidWorks. But out of the myriad of games that exist why does anyone want to play those two craps.... :-D
- I know it might be hard to imagine, but your tastes aren't objective or universal; other people find things enjoyable that you detest and vice-versa.

Hardware compatibility and, unrelated to the this, Adobe sw are the main reasons for me

Put me in the crowd that would jump to Linux rather than Windows 11 but my sw (Affinity Apps) don’t work on it.

Most of the other apps needed work on it. I just don’t need all the BS Microsoft push for my work machine.

Edit: Use Linux desktop on other machines.

The affinity thing especially annoys me. They have real potential to steal a niche from Adobe. Does even need to be native, they just need to work with wine.

Too much of a hassle. I don't wanna risk having my setup break when... Never, really. I want to use my machine and that's it.

I loved Linux at work when I had a sysadmin. Shit worked great. At home I started using Linux and despite some driver issues, it was mostly good. Then I started working for myself (so no more sysadmin). Some Linux update totally screwed up my computer and I lost a lot of work. It also became too much work to try and configure the apps that I needed to use for work. Switched to windows and it's been pretty smooth sailing. Still boot up Linux now and again for this or that, but I don't trust it enough as a daily driver for my needs.

The first time I gave up was basically just too much back and forth with Windows. Wine was still not there yet and Proton wasn't even a thing yet though.

I've used it a lot on laptops still, but haven't gone to a desktop mainly because friends still like to bounce between games that I have to worry if my system will even support (for anti-cheat reasons not for normal compatibility reasons)

Currently using on steam deck and it's great, am planning for next PC because it feels like too much work to do on a current one when everything is already working the way I want it to.

The Steam Deck is a great example of consumer Linux done right. You don’t even know it’s Linux. The team who developed it did a fantastic job at focusing on the full end-to-end experience.

My guess is also choosing the wrong distro and/or the stress of having to reconfigure your digital life.

Most people are coming from being on a PC/Mac for +10 years and so it feels inefficient for the first month or so until you get the hang of things. I legit had a checklist of +20 tweaks to make to my env to make it more to my liking. The joys and frustrations of choosing KDE as my intro DE almost drowned me but I made it to the other side.

Tried years and years ago and gave up. Was lazy, used to work on Windows servers at work and I was an Admin and didn't want to relearn a bunch of similar but different stuff. That was my mistake.

Tried again and some Distros broke stuff for me. Issue was that I did have to pick up another learning curve, so I just got to it.

Learned lots and then picked different Distros for different needs and computers. Daily drivers, I pick only solid, yet lean Distros, little tinkering and they have worked almost flawlessly for years on end. On some other machines, I dump stuff to tinker and learn some more, might break something but nothing is lost. If I break something on those, don't care. Now I run a server for fun with tons Apps for partner and I and all machines are on Linux. My TV runs off a small PC, too. No Google, or Apple, no ads on anything and server costs are dirt cheap. It would cost me hundreds upon hundreds a year to pay for 3rd party services for the same.

There are no shortcuts and in a way I wished I had stuck with it back then. But, I am happy where I am now.

I love Linux. But I got so exasperated with system updates breaking X-Windows and dropping me into the console with no clue what to do, for some time I intentionally deferred the updates.

I wanted a stable daily driver, so in 2015 I switched from Linux to ChromeOS. Now I'm back to Linux with the Crostini container of ChromeOS and Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi 400.

That's never happened to me in at least ten years (and that's with nVidia gpus). What kind of exotic setup did you run?
- I see posts like this all the time, I've had it happen once when I was running PopOS years ago and it was an Nvidia issue. Usually it's older Nvidia cards, I've never had an issue with newer cards
- Although it did have an nVidia card, my PC was an otherwise ordinary machine running Ubuntu, not a gaming rig or something custom built.

for me it was Wifi glitch. No matter what I try, reinstall the drivers, but I was unable to use Wifi on my Laptop.

In my case it was a distro's fault and my laziness to fix it. So, wifi's firmware is proprietary and some distro that are lightweight just didn't provide the firmware.

Remember when debian provided both regular iso and non free iso? yea my laptop couldn't connect to wifi if I were using the original iso.

Tbh most of the time I’m using my Wintendo, but Linux is better imo for dev. PyCharm is a nice IDE, and all the Linux tools I love like vim are there and fully functional.

I gave up because sound stopped working every time I rebooted.

I work for a MS shop. I tolerate it because they provide the machine (as they damn well should in any case!)

In my personal world, I’m Linux across the board - couldn’t pay me enough to a) own securing RDP on a win box or b) use IIS.

Is Linux perfect? Nope. Never suggested otherwise. But in the areas that matter to me, it’s far superior.

Definitely haven’t given up, and my main personal machine would have been in the trash heap ages ago if I was still trying to force windows on it.

For me, a few things keep me from sticking with it. The community used to be a problem but it's not as bad as it used to be. Seeking help online regarding anything related to network services are still rife with the "git gooder" useless fucks. Two months ago I was told, "you shouldn't be doing this if you need a guide." I was trying to deploy a Lemmy instance... Using the guide provided by Lemmy devs... That they recommended for beginners... FML with a curling iron...

Another big one for me is access to solutions. I have never encountered a problem with windows that I couldn't find a solution or at least an explanation for. But I frequently find issues with linux that I am apparently the first to ever experience.

And lastly, it seems like not using a terminal at all to do completely normal things is even remotely possible. Powershell allows all kinds of things that would be otherwise burdensome or impossible, but none of those are required for use. On the flip side, it feels like everything I want to do in Linux tends to require me to copypasta a terminal command, open the terminal, and run. Why? Why is there no "control panel" style settings tools? Why is every setting scattered to the .conf fucking wind? My kingdom for a distro that I don't have to nano my fucking way through.

Software compatibility??? That is a problem I would love to have when it comes to trying to switch OSs. That would mean that everything else is already working and only MS products are acting up. Also... who switches to Linux but still requires MS Office??? Why does this person exist? Lol

Anyway. Haven't tried the switch in a few years and it seems like things have changed a lot in that time comparatively to the preceding years, so I may be a bit out of touch. But that's why I quit last time. I would love to not need windows ever again. But my worst windows day is still better than my best Linux day.

I understand your points and agree with them. For me the experience with support has been quite opposite though... I can always find a solution (or at least an explanation) with Linux (I can go all the way down the rabbit hole to the source code if I would be so inclined) but with Windows it's always been just black magic rituals or random software from the internets that either work or tough luck.
- Yeah, I've started to feel a bit of that on windows. At least with MS deprecating things that people used, or constantly changing your settings with every update. I guess a terminal script is no different than a magic black box in the same way that a program or driver is. Hmm. Good point.

LibreOffice is an an amazing replacement for the MS-Office suite.

About 23 years ago I couldn’t make it boot when I plugged in a USB hub.
And since, my life just became too invested in Microsoft/Adobe products to be able to use something else as a daily driver.

But I “use” Linux every day - whether it’s the PiHole, the NAS, the server that runs my 3D printer, or WSL in Windows PowerShell. I’m about to spin up my own OPNSense router, too.
Weird trajectory on WSL - I learned Unix commands using MacOS terminal for a previous job, but I generally abhor windows command line (it just doesn’t work with my brain). So now when I use commend line in windows, I default to *nix.

It sort of works out that I use Macs for personal use, Windows for work, and Linux to run the systems of my life.

I hadn't learned enough about how to use it back then.

Because it's not Windows and it's not MacOS. Yes, it's an operating system, but what people are comparing against are their expectations. I dont expect a program that's not written or designed for my particular distribution or operating system to work. Now, in some cases it turns out that it does and sometimes it works better then under Microsoft, but that shouldn't be your expectation. The software that is made for it runs as expected.

Working hardware is usually step one. If your hardware isn't supported then of course you're in for a rough ride.

I've been having this weird issue with wifi where it will just switch itself off (shown in NetworkManager as "no available connections") and not allow me to restart the OS normally. It's like the driver is crashing or something. Hardware isn't the issue, otherwise it would have happened on Windows. Drivers can be an issue, as NVIDIA users know too well. Games can be a bit choppy on Linux if you use ray-tracing, probably due to drivers as well as the intermediary processes for getting games to work like DXVK. This was my experience with Cyberpunk 2077. Game modding can be an issue due to .NET not being fully there yet, especially if you have games that are glitchy and require stability mods for a good experience. (e.g. any Bethesda game that exists.)

The only thing keeping me from full-timing Windows is the fact that Windows 11 just plain sucks. I feel like I have to use it, rather than want to use it. Compared to even a bog-standard KDE setup, the Windows experience is miserable. As for Mac, I have a Hackintosh but Apple really loves to render everything on the GPU side and it's chugging my ol' GPU. Maybe I need to go get an M-series MacBook this year.

there were some kernel issues with numerous WiFi cards prior to linux 6.6.6 (hehe), make sure to update
- I'm on 6.6.10 😩 but I do need to update anyway haha, thanks for the reminder

I got tired of the graphics breaking every update.

i use all OS so i didn’t give linux up but i don’t use it in a lot of cases that i think it should be better.

i got frustrated at snapd and the whole container by default approach most distros are going.

selinux already does what people want jails to be doing. app armor worked well enough.

I have a spare nvme SSD and recently took a weekend to play with various Linux desktop distributions. EndeavorOS and Pop! OS were my favorite. But I have an RTX 3080 and can't afford to replace it with an AMD GPU. It didn't work well enough with my games. I'm really attached to HDR which seems to be coming but is not generally available for most games yet. I feel like the writing is on the wall and Windows will not be a suitable option for me in the near future, but right now I have the least issues with Windows 11.

I use Linux all the time for hosting various services at work, but never with a GUI.

I started out on Red Hat over 20 years ago, then went to Gentoo for a few years. I got a new job after the me I was at crashed and burned and switched or the Fedora, but the rest of the folks at the shop were running fancy new MacBooks as was the style at the time. As a tech lead I didn’t like the idea of being the odd one out when it came to what we were running so I just bit the bullet when my linux laptop died and got a MacBook and I’ve just stuck with that ever since, at least for professional dev work. It’s still a UNIX under the hood and I get most of what I want and basically all of my tooling is OSS and free software, and I don’t have to mess with fiddly settings anymore. I still run Linux server-side and keep a few Linux laptops around, but I just run macOS now for dev work and I’m fine with that.

I did my time with compiling the entire thing from scratch in my Gentoo days, did all sorts of tweaking on compiler switches for KDE and X, debugged kernel drivers on racks of Dell PowerEdge blades when the network stack would inexplicably start dropping packets seemingly randomly, all that stuff. I still run Linux but it just ain’t my daily driver anymore.

And I have a Steam Deck too, so there’s that.

I wanted a new laptop and the I/O on them were ridiculous. I switched to USB-C for most of my stuffs and the available Laptops in my country had one or two USB-C port. They need to step up on this field.

I still use Linux for a NAS, but had to switch for my Laptop. :(

I have incompatible hardware.

I felt this with one of the laptops I put KDE Neon on. It had all manner of issues that never got a resolution.

I am dual booting because I bought a nice OLED monitor with HDR and Linux doesn't support it yet. For certain games with nicer graphics, HDR is really beautiful.

The moment Linux support HDR, I nuke windows for good.

KDE Plasma 6 supports HDR now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/hdr-support-for-kde-plasma-6-seems-to-be-shaping-up-nicely/
- I am aware that this is coming, but it's still not fully completed. But I'm about to ditch windows any cause I just plain prefer linux

.

That really sucks. I hope one day Linux support meets your needs.

I came to linux and havnt left. I do still use a windows vm though because as u said some foftware doesnt like linux. If autodesk had releases for linux id finaly be happy.

About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.

So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I'd shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.

For servers, I use FreeBSD, it's dumb to run Linux there, too.

Nothing's improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.

Linux is bad at audio therefore it's bad at everything? Interesting. Fair point about audio though, if you're doing anything to do with that then stay clear of Linux. Raspberry pi audio is bad even by Linux standards, lol
- Audio is typical of every other problem on Linux, that's just the straw that broke my camel's back.
  
  It's just half-assed or less at anything, and never gets better.