Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?

After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.

We live in a world where the idea of community has been destroyed by rampant capitalism and the death of third spaces.

While there is indeed a lot to be said for something that "just works," that "just works" demand is borne from a capitalist/consumer process that is literally in the process of going off the rails.

Why do we get so mad at Windows? Because it isn't ours. Microsoft grows it like a weed on our property. Its roots begin sticking out new places all the time ("hey what's that new bullshit on my taskbar?") and has zero respect for your needs as opposed to its needs. Windows only cares for Microsoft's needs, and it makes that readily evident in how you're forced to use it.

Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.

In other words, Linux is better than we think it is.

When I've thought about this is in the past I've concluded that my expectations of Linux are actually higher than Windows or Mac. It's given me the expectation that if something doesn't work the way I want it then it will be possible to make it do that, whereas with other operating systems I have been more inclined to just accept a limitation and move on.

But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the "things that just work".

No, I don't think so. There should be an expected difference between Windows (for example) and Linux as far as "it just works" goes, simply by virtue of the fact that one is actively developed by a company with eleventy-bajillion dollars and the other is developed by lots of hobbyists and a handful of profitable companies.

If Windows doesn't work, it's not unreasonable to expect that it should. If Linux doesn't work, it is unreasonable to expect that it always will.

You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it's interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.

Of course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn't decided you shouldn't want to do, it's a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.

Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it's something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.

I'd clarify that the shear customizability of Linux is optional.

Take a SteamDeck with SteamOS versus a RPi with e.g Debian.

If you "just" play with the SteamDeck and you don't tinker, well, it "just works". In most, even though not all, normal situations, e.g plugging a screen, pairing a BT headphone, mouse, keyboard, etc it is solid. It has no problem even while using a compatibility layer like Proton for games themselves made for Windows. It even enable some tinkering thanks to its immutable OS and let the player switch to desktop mode. Not everything works but my personal experience since it's been out has been pretty much flawless.

Now, take a RPi, with just as stable hardware, with Debian, even stable, and put on it some IoT device, make some weird modifications for it, try a bunch of stuff, remove package, tinker more, chances are it will still work. Tinker more, make stranger modifications to the point it becomes unstable. Is it Linux itself? I'd argue it's not. I'd argue that instead because we CAN tinker we sometimes do then forget that it's not the same context as something expected to run without hiccup because it's been limited to basically the same verified usage.

So... IMHO Linux is even better than it is, we just shouldn't confuse weird (and important) tinkering with how it can be actually used day to day.

As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn't "just work."

I can't begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.

Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc...

New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.

Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.

I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.

All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.

Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn't matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it's so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.

I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two... It's been 4 months and he loves it.

He says it's super fast and easy to use, he doesn't have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.

I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It's great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn't an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I'll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.

Linux absolutely isn't perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.

Generally, when things work on windows, it is the effort of whomever made the device or software. Microsoft generally does not develop drivers. However, when things work on GNU/Linux it is the effort of GNU, Linux, or the community. The manufacturer probably did nothing. This simply explains why we are generally relaxed or "give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”".

So fairly comparing a Linux distro to raw windows, Linux is better. When you install a distro, things just work, when you install windows, most stuff do not work and you need to complete setup. Unless you use tools provided by the manufacturer, but then again, it is same story.

Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?

No, it's better.

Seriously, when something that I paid for it doesn't work is annoying when something that I choose to use doesn't work is somewhat my fault, I think that's the difference.

No, not really. I believe it is because a lot of us linux users have more understanding of our systems, so we know why a certain outcome happened vs "it just works ^tm".

Also I would like to point out something that I have been telling people for years whenever a post like this comes up. Windows and Mac users do the same thing. They constantly overlook bugs, bad design, artificial limitations, and just the overall lack of care when it comes to various details that more community oriented projects cater to. The reason is because of familiarity. Just like many of us will often not see issues with new comers struggles because we have already worked around all of the issues. These users do the same.

Exactly. I give more credits to linux, and it deserves this. I like your garden metaphor, yes my linux pc is like my garden and linux behaves to be, unlike windows.

I'm annoyed when things don't work. I'm even more annoyed when something can't be made to work.

I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.

Thing is, a well configured Linux system will just work, and continue to work for the foreseeable future. You have zero guarantee of this with Windows.

After being in tech for like 30 years, i'd say that every OS sucks, but the way they suck and the intensity of said sucking is very much not the same across them. Linux VERY MUCH has issues, yes, but most of the time they're in your power to diagnose and fix, in Windows the main troubleshooting advice has remained mostly the same across decades, the 3 R's, Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat, because many times you just don't know and CANNOT know what went wrong.

growing it like a garden is a perfect phrase imo

because on windows or Mac it may have just worked. ..until it doesn't, or leaves your windows scaled wrong or placed on monitors that don't exist or some other failure condition. at which point you reboot and hope for the best.

when it doesn't work on Linux I'd check logs, actual configuration, and even the source if I need to.and then I'd hopefully improve things and make it work the way I want it to.

Windows will continue to get more and more user-hostile as time goes on, and they want everyone to have a subscription to Microsoft's cloud services, so they can be in total control of what they deliver to the user and how the user is using their services/apps, and they also will be able to increase pricing regularly of course once the users are dependent enough ("got all my work-related data there, can't just leave").

The next big step that will follow after the whole M365 and Azure will be that businesses can only deploy their Windows clients by using MS Intune, which means MS will deploy your organization's Windows clients, not your organization. So they're always shifting more and more control away from you and into MS' hands. Privacy is always an obvious issue, at the very least since Nadella is CEO, but unfortunately the privacy-conscious people have kind of lost that war, because the common user (private AND business sector) doesn't care at all, so we will have to wait and see how those things will turn out in the future, they will start caring once they are being billed more due to their openly known behavior (driving, health, eating/drinking, psychology, ...) or once they are being legally threatened more (e.g. your vehicle automatically reports by itself when you've driven too fast, or some AI has concluded based on your gathered data that you're likely to cause some kind of problem), or once they are rejected at or before job interviews because of leaked health data or just some (maybe wrong) AI-created prognosis of your health. So I think there will be a point when the common user will start caring, we just haven't reached that point yet because while current data collection and profile building is problematic because it's the stepping stone to more dystopian follow-ups, it alone is still too abstract of an issue for most people to care about it. Media is also partly to blame here when they do reviews or news about new devices and then just go like "great camera and display, MUST BUY" and never mention the absurd amount of telemetry data the device sends home. MS is also partnering with Palantir and OpenAI which will probably give them even more opportunities to automatically surveil every single one of their business and private sector users. I think M365 also already gives good analytics tools to business owners to monitor what their employees are doing, how much time they spend in each application, how "efficient" they are, things like that. Plus they have this whole person and object recognition stuff going on using "smart" cameras and some Azure service which analyzes the video material constantly. Where the employees (mostly workers in that case) are constantly surveilled and if anything abnormal happens then an automatic alert is sent, and things like that. Probably a lot of businesses will love that, and no one cares enough about the common worker's rights. It can be sold as a security plus so it will be sold. So I think MS is heavily going into the direction of employee surveillance, since they are well-integrated into the business world anyway (especially small and medium businesses) and with Windows in particular I think they will move everything sloooowly into the cloud, maybe in 10-15 years you won't have a "personal" computer anymore, you're using Microsoft's hardware and software directly from Microsoft's servers and they will gain full, unlimited, 100% surveillance and control of every little detail you're doing on your computer, because once you hand away that control, they can do literally anything behind your back and also never tell you about it. Most of the surveillance stuff going on all the time already is heavily shrouded in secrecy and as long as that's the case there will be no justice system in the world being able to save you from it, because they'd first need concrete evidence. Guess why the western law enforcement and secret services hunted Snowden and Assange so heavily? Because they shone some light into what is otherwise a massive, constant cover-up that is also probably highly illegal in most countries. So it needs to be kept a secret. So the MS (and Apple, ...) route stands for total dependence and total loss of control. They just have to move slowly enough for the common user not to notice. Boil the frog slowly. Make sure businesses can adapt. Make sure commercial software vendors can adapt. Then slowly direct the train into cloud-only territory where MS rules over and can log everything you do on the computer.

Linux, on the other hand, stands for independence. It means you can pick and choose what components you want, run them whereever and however you want, build your own cloud, and so on. You can build your own distro or find one that fits your use case the most. You're in a lot of control as the user or administrator and this will not change considering the nature of open source / free software. If the project turns to sh!t, you're not forced to stick with it. You can fork it, develop an alternative. Or wait until someone else does. Or just write a patch that fixes the problematic behavior. This alone makes open source / free software inherently better than closed source where the users have no control over the project and always have to either use it as it is or stop using it altogether. There's no middle ground, no fixes possible, no alternatives that can be made from the same code base because the code base is the developer's secret. Also, open source software can be audited at will all the time. That alone makes it much more trustworthy. On the basis of trustworthiness and security alone, you should only use open source software. Linux on its own is "just" the kernel but it's a very good kernel powering a ton of highly diverse array of systems out there, from embedded to supercomputer. I think the Linux kernel can't be beaten and will become (or is already) the objective best operating system kernel there is out there. Now, as a desktop user, you don't care that much about the kernel you just expect it to work in the background, and it does. What you care more is UI/UX, consistency and application/game compatibility. We can say the Linux desktop ecosystem is still lacking in that regard, always behind super polished and user-friendly coherent UIs coming from especially Apple in that regard (maybe also a little bit by Microsoft but coherent and beautiful UIs aren't Microsoft's strong point either, I think that crown goes to Apple). That said, Apple is very much alike Microsoft in that they have a fully locked-down ecosystem, so it's similar to MS, maybe slightly less bad smelling still but it will probably also go in the same direction as MS does, just more slowly and with details being different. Apple's products also appeal to a different kind of audience and businesses than MS' products do. Apple is kind of smart in their marketing and general behavior that they always manage to kind of fly under the radar and dodge most of the shitstorms. Like they also violate the privacy of their users, but they do it slightly less than MS or Google do, so they're less of a target and they even use that to claim they're the privacy guys (in comparison), but they also aren't. You still shouldn't use Apple products/services. "Less bad than utterly terrible" doesn't equal "good". There's a lot of room between that. Still, back to Linux. It's also obviously a matter of quality code/projects and resources. Big projects like the Linux kernel itself or the major desktop environments or super important components like systemd or Mesa are well funded, have quality developers behind them and produce high quality output. Then you also have a lot of applications and components where just single community developers, not well funded at all, are hacking away in their free time, often delivering something usable but maybe less polished or less userfriendly or less good looking or maybe slightly more annoying to use but overall usable. Those applications/projects could use some help. Especially if they matter a lot on the desktop because there's little to no alternative available. On the server side, Linux is well established, software for that scenario is plentiful and powerful. Compared to the desktop, it's no wonder why it's successful on servers. Yes, having corporations fund developers and in turn open source projects is important and the more that do it, the more successful those projects become. It's no wonder that gaming for example took off so hugely after Valve poured resources and developers into every component related to it. Without that big push, it would have happened very slowly, if at all. So even the biggest corpo haters have to acknowledge that in capitalism, things can move very fast if enough money is being thrown at the problem, and very slowly if it isn't. But the great thing about the Linux ecosystem is that almost everything is open source, so when you fund open source projects, you accelerate their growth and quality but these projects still can't screw you over as a user, because once they do that, they can be forked and fixed. Proprietary closed-source software can always screw over the user, no one can prevent that, and it also has a tendency to do just that. In the open source software world, there are very few black sheep with anti-user features, invasive telemetry, things like that. In the corporate software world, it's often the other way around.

So by using Linux and (mostly) open source products, you as the user/admin remain in control, and it's rare that you get screwed over. If you use proprietary software from big tech (doesn't even matter which country) you lose control over your computing, it's highly likely that you get screwed over in various ways (with much more to come in the future) and you're also trusting those companies by running their software and they're not even showing the world what they put in their software.

It's an operating system. It's not supposed to be noticed as good or bad. It should stay out of your way. If you ever notice it, it's doing something wrong.

Linux is clean and nicer looking than Windows and that is enough for me to switch to Linux

Depends what you want in an OS. The increasingly invasive ads and loss of control in Windows is overwhelmingly a good enough reason for me. But it is not the case for everyone.

Linux has its quirks, and it's a different approach to an OS in general, so it can be intimidating if you only want an office machine.

I think about this a lot, and my take is that Linux is waaayyy better if you have perfect or close-to-perfect knowledge of how the operating system works and what software is available. Similarly, I think an argument can be made for Linux being better if all you need is a web browser and you're not using really unusual hardware.

Where things fall apart is for people who have very specific needs that are complex, even if they only need it 1% of the time, and they don't have the technical knowledge to solve it with the power-user tools available. Microsoft has spent decades paying developers to handle these edge cases and ensuring GUI settings discoverability.

At the same time, schools and workplaces have taught people the design language of Windows, and the network effect of having so much of the world's end-user PCs running on Windows means that there are vast resources available targeted at people without technical knowledge. At this point, for better or worse, Microsoft's design language is the global default for non-technical people.

If a person never has to touch a setting because all they need is a browser, they don't hit any friction and they are happy. If they need to do even one thing that requires them to dig into settings or touch the terminal, the difference from Microsoft's design language is enough for that one frustrating experience to give them a bad taste in their mouth about Linux as a whole.

" “things that just work”.

That certainly not how I will describe the Linux desktop experience.

It depends on what you're using it for. Elaborate multi monitor setups? Starting a web server? Controlling a robot? A car's ECU?

Linux isn't a specific platform. Linux the kernel is a generic kernel that can be used and tuned for virtually any hardware. GNU/Linux the OS is also a generic OS that can be customized to work for variety of use cases. The most popular desktop Linux OSes are still very generic. Most of them aren't built to be power efficient on laptops for example. Yet we know Linux can be very power efficient on variety of purpose-built mobile hardware.

Windows on the other hand was built from the start to be a desktop OS. The desktop and later laptop use cases have always been primary. To the point of making other use cases more difficult. The same is true for macOS. So when you see them performing well in some desktop-related use cases where Linux might struggle a bit, it's no surprise. If enough of us wanted it to be better at that, we could make it happen. If enough of us wanted macOS or Windows to do something Apple or MS didn't, tough luck. So it's just a matter of priorities and resources.

Like anything else, can be, depending on your needs.

Linux is as good as Linux is, just as Windows is as good as Windows is and MacOS is as good as it is.

All operating systems have their place, purpose, and use cases, so the question is subjective. Different OS's are good or bad for different people, and different scenario's which is why they all have a part of the market share.

MacOS has ease of use and excellent intercompatibility with other Apple products, and Windows has boatloads of compatible software and compatibility with Microsoft's Active Directory domains in businesses.

What Linux has is cost effectiveness and true ownership and control.

At the moment most people prefer ease of use for home computing, but on a long enough timeline Linux will obtain this as well, just look at what Valve did with SteamOS and the steam deck when it comes to that. Making it easy to use there is, I suspect, one of the major reasons the steam deck as a device is so well reviewed, and partly why we have seen such an increase in market share recently I suspect.

So right now, most people probably prefer another OS because of ease of use, but at some point in the future, Linux will probably be holding all the cards. It just seems that those who develop the distributions are often tied up with other goals apart from ease of use for the common user in the contemporary, but eventually they will begin to tackle this goal as well.

As a person with a full time job, a significant other, and several hobbies, I just don't have time to invest in learning a new operating system. I grew up with windows (95, 98, xp, 7, 10), so that's what I'm familiar with. I recently switched to linux (mint), and it's fine. Just getting started though is something that was rather involved, and I would never expect a normie to be able to figure out. If microsoft wasn't insisting on making win11 a dumpster fire, I wouldn't have bothered. Now that things are running smoothly, there's some minor annoyances that I'd really like to change, and the prevailing sentiment from the linux community is "that's just how linux is" or sometimes "here's a hacky workaround that barely works in only certain controlled cases". It's better than it was 10 years ago, so there is that.

Just this morning I tried to make Outlook on my work laptop to open on startup. I have to find and add a shortcut of Outlook, buried somewhere in the machine, to the startup folder, buried somewhere else in the machine. The startup apps settings menu was just an eclectic list of programs and is of no use at all.

With Mint on my home machine I just go to startup programs settings menu and I can add whatever I want just by pointing it to the right program. It just works.

Linux is obviously very good, but you are right, we give Linux a pass sometimes because we 'build' it. We tend to overlook its flaws because we want it to be better than the competition.

I've recently had an upgrade fail to the point of a reinstall, a folder that I can't share between two users on the same laptop, and shutdown buttons on two computers that disappeared. If those problems happened on Windows, I'd be really annoyed, but because they happened on Linux, I just fixed them and carried on.

I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn't switch inputs immediately, and I thought "Linux would have done that". But would it?

Nope. My laptop for example doesn't automatically use an output when plugged in, but that doesn't bother me because I know other DEs would do that, and it's my choice of having a minimal window manager that causes that.

And this goes into your next point, because I know that this comes from decisions I made, I'm okay with that. I also know I could probably fix it somehow, even if just by running a script in the background that checks if an output is plugged and tries to use it.

And for me that's the big difference. As a general rule when things break or don't work are not the fault of Linux as a general, but of a specific piece of the stack, and more often than not it's because that piece was backwards engineered without any help from the manufacturers of the hardware it's meant to be controlling, so I can be very tolerant of these errors since the bad guys here are the third-party who's refusing to make their things work on Linux. But even things that don't work as I want to, I can make them do so, and that's a huge change in viewpoint.

In other words, on Windows I used to be of the thought of things you can do, and things you can't, with time I noticed that in Linux this thought shifted, to the point that the only question I ever ask myself is: "HOW do I do this?". This implies that there are no impossible things in Linux, which is obviously false, but I would argue that the correct way to think about this is "things that are impossible on Linux, for now", and that's a huge difference, because Linux is always evolving and getting better and better, things you thought are impossible now might be trivial in a few months or years whenever someone with the knowledge to fix it gets bothered with it.

As a newbie in this space, I had interactions with a few distros over the years and lately switched (hopefully) permanently.

My first experience was with Mint 10 years ago. Installing it would cause some GPU driver defect (AMD card) and would turn the whole login screen into an epileptic checkerboard pattern with no way of doing anything. It took me a few reinstalls and a ungodly amount of googling to find a solution which involved opening the terminal at boot process. You can only imagine how frustating that can be for a newcomer.

Later in time I had Ubuntu on my laptop which had a bug that wouldn't spin up the CPU fan and it would simply overheat and shutdown. I had to take it to a technician to find out what was causing the random shutdowns.

A year ago I decided to try Debian on my desktop PC as many have praized it for it's rock-wolid stability. It didn't want to work on my PC. No internet connection and some weird bugs. Took me two-three days to get ti to work and I still don't know what exactly fixed it as I have applied every possible solition I came across.

Much later, aka now, I decided to go with Bazzite on my desktop as many have claimed excelent support. I wanted to install the mimalloc because I play Factorio a lot and a few reddit posts claimed 20% UPS improvement over the stock scheduler. After downloading the source code and following the 4 very easy steps, cmake would throw some random eerors at me claiming some critical files were missing, although they were right there in the usr directory. Turns us Bazzite some some issue and Fedora 40 compiled the code in seconds without any issues.

Conclusion: Linux users, which are very tech savvy or work in that space, know what to do when things don't work out, while the rest of us keeps googling and crying over error messages for things that seem trivial. You never seem to know if it's you, the system or your hardware.

I've used DOS, 3.11 to all the way to 11. Switched to Linux as main driver around 2009. Used MacOS at work for over a year now. I occasionally boot into windows for rare game that uses some anti cheat that doesn't play well with wine.

I'm old enough that I just want things to work. I don't care for any fanboyism. These are my opinions:

• Windows is a mess. It has different UI from different decades, depending on what and where. NT kernel is ancient. The registry is a horror show. The only edge it has, is third party software, like propriatery drivers. that's it. And that's isn't a merit of windows, but rather market share.

• MacOS is inconsistent at every turn. It's frustrating to use, and riddled with UX bugs, and seemingly deliberate lack of functionality. The core tooling, like the file manager, is absolute garbage. The only good thing it has going it, is that the Unix core is solid. In that year, I've experienced a soft brick once, that almost was a hard brick, and the reason was having set the display refresh rate from 120 to 60 Hz. Something I changed BTW, because certain animation transitions in MacOS took twice as long on 120 Hz... Yeah, top notch QA there Apple.

• Linux. It has its own flaws. For sure. But as for "just works", it happens so often, that it's exactly why Windows and MacOS feels so frustrating. I'd have my grandmother use Linux.

And, I'm not just saying this. When I upgraded components on windows, I spent 2 hours debugging problems. One of the problems was also that it reverted a GPU driver, where every single version information was unmistakably older. It also made it not work.

I've also experienced that the WiFi network adapter also doesn't work until I download some proprietary software over ethernet cable.

On Linux? I didn't need to do a single thing in either case. It for sure didn't use to be this way. In 2009 I was hunting WiFi drivers for fedora over ethernet. But in the last, say 5 years, on Arch, it's been amazing. Did I mention that I use arch?

Ps: The last 4 times I've had problems on Linux have been:

• 1. A Windows update fucks up grub.
• 2. Reboot from windows doesn't release hardware claim on WiFi adapter, so it doesn't work on Linux.
• 3. The system clock is wrong, which was easy to notice because of 2. leading to a lack of remote sync. This is due to Windows storing system time as local time, and not UTC. If you do software development, you'd know how dumb the former is.
• 4. Raid partition destroyed because a windows 7 install decided to, unprompted, write a boot partition on a disk with "unknown" file system.

For me the main difference is Linux only does something when I ask it to.

Windows does whatever Microsoft wants it to do.

Both have major usability issues. But Linux gets a higher tolerance level, because of higher trust levels.

We've been having this discussion in the group I game/ play TTRPGs with. Like 7 of us total all windows, me and another switched to Linux, a third is a computational scientist who is forced to work with redhat frequently, and a fourth member was thinking of switching. After me and member 2 switched, member 4 saw that we had problems (entirely discord for me, all games have honestly worked so far) and changed his mind about switching because he doesn't want to deal with stuff not working OOTB.

I can't fault people who want that, hell I do, Linux is well worth it to me but I will begrudgingly admit there are draw backs to Linux.

For me it's I can make Linux do this when I see another system perform well, in contrast with they took my vertical taskbar in windows 11 and I have to gut the system to get it back

I do have to remind myself that I'm still used to living in a world where Linux enjoyed immunity to most "consumer" malware just because it wasn't a popular desktop. Ultimately Linux is not more secure than any other system unless someone put in the work to make it that way.

I use mint btw

My experience is generally it doesn't just work straight away unless it's something I've hammered out myself

I am also using one of the more DIY distros and window managers though, so I wouldn't expect it to without some attention from me to get it hammered out first

That said, once it's hammered out it continues to work exactly the way I want it to, it doesn't spy on me, it doesn't shove ads down my throat every 5 minutes

Would be an interesting experiment to see how non techy windows/mac users would get on if you just put stock mint/pantheon on their systems but I get the feeling it would not be as smooth as if they just had the thing everyone knows all the flaws of already

I'm inclined to give Linux more benefit of the doubt than, say, Windows. That's because of the motives behind it.

Microsoft have a very long history of making design choices in their software that users don't like, and quite often that's because it suits their interests more than their customers. They are a commercial business that exists to benefit itself, after all. Same with Apple. Money spoils everything pure, after all. You mention privacy, but that's just one more example of someone wanting to benefit financially from you - it's just in a less transparent and more open-ended way than paying them some cash.

Linux, because that monetary incentive is far less, is usually designed simply "to be better". The developers are often primary users of the software. Sure - sometimes developers make choices that confuses users, but that over-arching driving business interest just isn't there.

Who is "we", my friend? This all depends on your research and expectations. IMO Linux works great, but you should consider it before you buy a machine. Make sure your graphics card and other hardware is going to work. When in doubt, buy from a reliable shop that preinstalls Linux for you.

I find that the default settings and programs of Debian (or whatever major distro) do 95% of what I expect and want, and maybe 5% involve some customization. In other words, it's much simpler than getting Windows or Apple and then purchasing or downloading all the extra programs. But this depends on what you wanna do.

At this point, Linux or even any given distro isn't the problem. The problem is the software library.

I call it GIMP syndrome. There's a lot of capable and powerful apps in the FOSS ecosystem and most of them have some kind of critical functionality gap or the UX of an Oregon Trail era disease. A lot of them, with the notable exception of GIMP, are actually working on it now.

I had this exact same thought but than I booted Windows. I get less frustrated because if use Linux I feel like I’m working with it and it is acceptable if there are mistakes. If I use Windows I feel like I’m working against it, and a big part of that is that a lot of issue aren’t there because they are bugs (of which there are probably as many as on Linux) but rather just bad/anti user design

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS's are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

The Linux kernel is wild and has more features and support than I have seen anywhere else. Everything from namespaces (containers) and virtualization to support for strange serial devices.

I think most of us have a good idea of the benefits and drawbacks of Linux/Windows/Apple.

I have a Windows machine for media production, because Linux doesn't support all the software I need for media production. I use Linux for absolutely everything else, because it's better for literally everything else. In truth, a MacBook Pro would be better for media production but they're too expensive.

Well, I don't use a DE so your scenario of the new display not switching over right away is basically my life every time autorandr decides not to run on startup.

Unix is definitely a less headache than Windows at this point.

Linux isn't the best for every usecase, but its good enough for mine. Plus, the community around Linux is actually nice outside of the strange elitism here and there

When I first transitioned away from Windows. Linux was admittedly a little less stable and reliable but unlike windows, there was a well documented solution pathway to almost every Linux problem I encountered, whereas Windows solutions always amounted to recommending uninstalling/reinstalling hardware in the Device Manager and rebooting the computer. I remember a few times that windows updates completely crashed my install and I had to roll-back to an earlier version or even do a repair/reinstall from disc -The documented Windows solutions (aside from the reinstall) rarely worked. Now it's 20 years later and I rarely have reliability issues with Linux aside from my one hardware failure -but that's not a Linux-specific issue.

It depends on who you ask. If you ask this to a M$ refugee, they will praise it. If you ask a *BSD user, they will bitch about it.

Recent Linux convert here. Had some small background with it due to use at work (through WSL, unfortunately 😅). When Windows became too overbearing and intrusive for my own taste, decided to take a plunge and created a dual-boot setup with Bazzite (of course on my private machine). It was honestly refreshing to see stuff run with the same (or sometimes even better) performance.

This short anecdote now leads me to the conclusion; is it as good as we think it is?

Imo: hell fuckin' yeah. It gets the job done and respects me as an end-user (with the trade-off of "some manual work might be required").

Also, as a side-note: I live in the EU; I grew tired with an overbearing, salesman/rapist-like mentality of MS (and Windows, by extension) while reaping benefits of some modicum of privacy regulations. I cannot even begin to fathom how fucked the situation is where ppl don't have these protections to rely on.

Switched to linux with ububtu, had good experience until snap Firefox became default.

Switched to arch linux with i3 wm through some random installer. Struggled a lot and couldn't understand anything. Watched a few videos on manual installation and got basic idea like systemd, compositors, etc. Followed wiki and youtube videos to manually install again and never looked back.

Currently using arch linux with hyprland and quite happy with my setup. I don't think I can use any other distro as a user cause aur is so good.

I really struggled with learning about how to learn linux things. Like nvidia drivers, kernels, etc. Once there are enough people documenting their experience I think linux will be very easy. Endeavor, mint, kde plasma, now upcoming cosmic should be user friendly.

Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they'll say, "Yes, it's the best," but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it's not a lack in the OS, it's a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!

I've used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as "sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove". And there's a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.

Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they're scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question "Is Linux as good as we think it is?" then you may have your answer.

Win 7 was cool to tinker with but buggy as hell to the point Ubuntu was just as much work as the time but with even more possibility.

8 was so bad it was worth skipping.

10 was the peak of it just works for windows. Gone were the days of troubleshooting triple AAA games on my PC, they worked or needed patched by the devs.

That said if I NEEDED something to work choosing windows 10 or server was an exercise is maschocism. Need this container? Unsupported. Need this service configured like this? Gfl finding where that is set. Need HA? Just Ha. Certain network configs beyond basic client? The guys with decades of Windows admin exp still have no idea.

I had to troubleshoot both but windows gives you the nice feeling of being able to say "this sucks they should fix that" because I know ain't. Its not built for me to fix it either. Linux however begs you too. Its all there, you can do anything, even you might not really want to.

All operating systems suck ass. There are problems and issues with all of them. It's the same argument for programming languages. Now it's the same argument when it comes to what brand of vehicle Ford or Chevy.

Don't get hyper focused on a brand, on a label. Simply use what's best for you and your needs.

if it didnt work, why would it be running the majority of the internet.. among other things?

linux is prolly better than we give it credit for

Nah, still has a lot of bugs, it simply don't have the same money that Microsoft has to fix quirks in certain hardware, and it's too fragmented, Microsoft knows what kernel that interface gonna run, KDE don't so they always need to fix for different kernels

In general, I think genuinely that Linux requires a more hands on approach. But the best thing is, I solve a problem ONCE. Then I store the script to git and forget about it. The problem is done, it no longer exists.

I also use Linux & Ungoogled Android on everything--and it is the best we got now that doesn’t involve a significant time sink or expertise to get things working. I would love to see alternative platforms be popular & with general hardware compatibility & either Nix or Guix support as well, I would consider giving it a run in the future since I like being open if something better is on offer. I like to keep light tabs on the Haikus, BSDs, OpenIndianas, & such of the world just in case… particularly if we ever got a memory-safe kernel with some proofs behind its logic (Rust doesn’t go hard enough, sorry fanboys). That said, generally, Linux is still good.

Send diff to their lists.

No, not even close.

I've used Unix systems for years at work, and have dual-booted windows with various flavors of Linux at home for just as long. When I just need something to work, particularly something new or after a stressful day at work, I just use windows.

Why? Because it will just work. Maybe it won't work precisely how I want it to, maybe it will send all my data to Bill's push notifications, but it will run. In the rare case it doesn't, a quick google will fix it.

Compare that to Linux, where most things will work most of the time. And when they don't, you get to hunt through GitHub issues off-the-clock like a peasant, wading through comments from people with entirely different configurations and 'dunno it works for me'.

Linux is for tinkerers, and for people who want a Unix shell and can't afford a Mac, it has a long way to go to be more than that.

For privacy and security? Yes. For usability? Noooo.

No. It really isn't.

Windows with the proper license and configuration is more stable, more productive, and that configuration takes less than an hour once for the life of the machine.

In 2024 if you're still bashing Windows for BSODs, stability, updates, etc, you're doing it wrong. You can bash all day long for privacy violations and corporate greed but both of those are fixed with the proper version like Windows Enterprise. Costs more, but you are less of the product.