The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
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.
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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.
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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.
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Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.
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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
I don’t like Apple because of the close ecosystem and they choose what they believe its best for you. I like to own my devices , and install whatever I want do whatever I want on them.
Fair enough. I like their ecosystem, even if it’s closed. It just works and that’s all I need. I still don’t understand what you mean by „I like to own my devices”. You bought the phone right?
Oh no I mean phones are so difficult to modify and install another OS. I used to own a Oneplus 3 and I was changing the ROM almost every week , I was so excited to have a different feeling for my phone every time I install a new ROM and even if I brick my phone it was my fault and I wouldn’t complain. I like to change the ram , change the hard drive , change the OS my hardware. I don’t like being stuck on the same ecosystem and having to relied on a company.
Found a distrohopper haha Kidding, good for you! Personally, I need at least one thing I don’t tinker with, it’s enough I’m on Linux (arch btw lmao)
I am a distrohopper and I don’t like companies telling me what I can or can’t do with the devices I bought. Lol I don’t use arch just Fedora for now but I have the freedom to change to whatever if I had a Mac what else do I have? Asahi Linux?
Give me a rundown on your setup and what you do.
Apple products are generally fine, its their ethos that sucks. Closed, expensive, proprietary.
Its far too limiting IMO. Open MacOS and it would be quite a compelling option
Theyre expensive as any other flagships tho
The hardware is rarely ever comparable. You show me a like for like hardware comparison, and Mac will always be more expensive with fewer upgrade paths.
Alternatively, you can look at a price for price comparison and get some absolutely hilarious discrepancies. For instance, at the price of a full specs Mac pro, you can build a top end pc running dual 4090s. With some cash to spare.
Well yeah, it’s probably more expensive, but hardware is not all you’re paying for though
Which also goes to my oldness argument. Their software is locked, proprietary, and too ingrained Intl the System.
What specifically do you mean when you say “Open MacOS”? Open to what? You can already install anything you want on it. It’s unix based, so your terminal works mostly the same as in Linux. You’ve even got a package manager (homebrew), so you won’t miss apt or whatever else you use. iOS is another discussion, but imho, OSX is “open” enough.
Alterable Desktop Environments, alternative stores, removing integrated packages such as the app store, installable on non Apple hardware, whether arm or x86.
Open air drop as a standard would help too
IMO even windows is too closed for my taste.
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.
I’m not really sure the demographic that cares enough to find an alternative to Windows or Mac is the same demographic that would be ok in a walled garden.
My understanding is that one of the selling points for products by System76 and other similar brands is the modularity and ability to upgrade the hardware.
It doesn’t have to be a walled garden, it could just be a system where they only do first-party development of products they product and leave it to the community to expand to others.
I would honestly love to see that even if it used a de like gnome (I’m a kde guy myself) because it could show what Linux is truly capable of.
Superb write-up, well done! Echoes my experience completely.
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.
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.
Ooh. Sweet! Thank you!
They’re on the research list.I almost bought into the Ubiquity ecosystem when I looked last time, but folks complained that the company seemed to be shifting focus a bit, and the first glimmers of them requiring user accounts started to appear. I wound up deferring until it unexpectedly became an emergency issue with a rushed replacement from a big box store.
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.
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.
Meeehhh… Kinda. It was great, for windows, don’t get me wrong.
But personally I think windows 2000 was the most rock steady and speedy of all of em. But it also had less legacy stuff to support, didn’t have XP’s compatibility layer etc etc etc.
So it’s easy for me to love win2k, it was less complex, thus less likely to have serious bugs (after the 4th service pack lol).
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.
I’ll definitely give that a go. Thanks.
Nkt with GNOME. I only needed to use the Terminal in GNOME to do complex things an ordinary user wouldn’t do anyway.
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.
Ive quite enjoyed the KDE NordVPN plasmoid. Visually integrates it into the taskbar.
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 been using the CLI app and it’s kind of jank… I’ll have to look into this.
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 -_-
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.
They all try to share patches and ideas too, if there’s competition - it’s friendly.
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.
As an experienced Linux user, yes, but as someone who has only used Windows, that wisdom is not in place.
By the time they get burned out by trying two random Distros, they are going to be pissed and if you say “You should have checked” they will remain on Windows out of spite, even after Windows goes under.
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…
You don’t have to type in the website?
On-screen keyboard
Nice try Linus 😂
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.
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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
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.
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
I switched pretty recently (maybe 6 months) and while the muscle memory is true, windows has a severely dumbed down and simplified everything imo. Even gnomes very limited customizability (without using cli) is a lot more than most windows users regularly need. Just from what I have seen over the years, not objective fact.
(That attitude has completely changed. Maybe give it another try sometime)
Even today, the Arch community is exactly as previously described.
I know people meme around about it but have you actually experienced it yourself? As an Arch user myself, can’t confirm.
Yes.
My last experience was around 2 months ago with a driver issue. In the forums, someone linked a solution, and a lot of comments were in the lines of “Seriously? This was already in the newsletter, why are people not reading/subscribed to it. It’s their problem then”. Funnily enough, an actually helpful comment noted that the newsletter solution had a typo that made the solution not work as expected.
I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it’s got me eyeing Linux again
You can always downgrade to windows 10
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.
what distro was it back then? some distros religiously dedicated to software freedom don’t ship the proprietary
linux-firmwareblobs 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.
virtually any built in card works these days. with 3rd party cards… well you’re better of looking up it’s chipset and how well it is supported by linux before you buy one, for example some cheap realtek dongles had no WPA3 support and worse throughput. Iirc Broadcom has for a long time been hostile towards linux.
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.
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.This. A huge problem I’ve found in the FOSS community is that people are often somewhat hostile to making things user friendly. It’s a sort of elitism, really. There’s a middle ground to be had between apple’s walled garden, and there being no barriers against something running rm -rf / and fucking you entirely. Like yeah, it’s a bit annoying when the .exe from someone you absolutely trust throws a “this file might be harmful” in windows, but the alternative is your grandma who doesn’t understand shit about computers getting ass fucked by every random piece of malware.
Yea, and for me there’s a clear engineering virtue to be aimed for here … where your systems have smooth and easily accessed grades of increasing complexity and control within a coherent system.
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.
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?
Collaborative?
There are few online options, also you could just sync it to a common folder so it could work that way… But rarely thesis are drafted concurrently -
The main advantage of LaTeX is the easy type setting for journal articles/thesis etc and ease of changing the style.
Because I haven’t heard that app at the time, and none of my colleagues use it
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.
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’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).
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.
The best way I’ve seen it put is as such “why would I bother with a list of workarounds and janky, barely supported tools, just to get on par with out of the box windows”. Because like it or not, windows is a piss easy OS to get running on, and Microsoft puts a huge amount of work into making compatability a non-issue. If it was made for windows, it probably still works so long as your hardware hasn’t broken it, regardless of how old. Linux just can’t match the sheer amount of stuff that works on windows. And Linux subsystem means you don’t even need a dedicated Linux boot for things.
So all in all, Linux just doesn’t stack up that well as a daily driver. Sure, I have various systems that run it, and they work great, but that’s because I don’t ever use them beyond narrow purposes.
Honestly, my experience was the opposite. When I had issues with windows, which I had a lot. Reinstalling was often the last and only solution. On Linux, when I had an issue, it was a little learning experience and running 1 command. I guess reinstalling is easier… So maybe not the opposite.
I’ve never personally run into an issue that required a reinstall that wasn’t related to drive corruption. Basically everything has been just a quick restart and the problem vanishes
I’ve not had to redo windows since 10. 7 was the last time I had an issue that caused a redo which in turn made me go to Linux for a year or two before I had to go back to windows for Visual Studio for work. Been on windows since from 10-11 and I’ve never needed a redo anymore.
Interesting… I think I quit windows shortly after skipping 8 to go 10. So I might haven’t given windows 10 a fair chance
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.
