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is that in the cases there is a guide or a Stackoverflow question regarding my exact problem, the solution is 6 years out of date and may be non-functional or less than ideal, while on Windows, that solution would still work.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