I am a sample size of 1. For me, the inconveniences of using linux are far greater than the inconveniences of using windows. This article is targeted at the developer community mostly.
As a programmer, I cannot recall being hindered by file name conventions, un-resizeable dialog boxes, bug trackers etc., as much I have been inconvenienced on linux by poor driver support, and regularly dropping to command line for configuring my system.
As a gamer, well, there is no competition for me, really.
As your average user, I find the user interface on windows nicer and see more compatible programs.
If there is anything I absolutely have to have linux for, I can just use a raspberry pi, a cloud server etc.
As Linux user the article does not resonate with me. The actual points are discarded points
# Linux is more stable and reliable.
I've reinstalled Windows so many times, never reinstalled Linux. System is separate from the user, I can remove all user configurations and it would work like new.
# Linux is more secure and private.
I have so many packages, they are free and safe. I've tried Windows recently, have to install software from the web. It is scary.
No telemetry by default. I send package statistics, have install it myself:
# pacman -S pkgstats
# Linux is faster and less bloated
There are many communities, some run Destkop Environments, I run quite minimal setup, boot to graphical environment takes 100MB RAM. Old netbook is router/NAS, 1GB is plenty.
# Linux is more flexible and customizable.
Primary reason I've switched. So many options, it is awesome! GNOME, KDE, XFCE, OpenBox, wmii, dwm, xmonad. Entire distributions — Ubuntu, Arch, Nix and many more.
# Linux gives you more control over your computer.
There was liberating feeling — my computer is just a hardware. Never felt it with Windows, it always had its own way. You know, some people kick their computers in rage. That has gone.
Linux has a great driver support for supported hardware, it is like complaining about hackintosh. Windows adopting command line and package management tools. Yes, had to stop gaming, that's changing with Proton. I find Windows UI atrocious, my desktop for comparison:
multiple workspaces, no decorations, not even browser scroll bar. I'd like to have universal solution for sticky headers.
And, maybe, the most valuable — Linux is getting better while Windows and macOS getting worse. Telemetry, advertisement, walled garden, executable restrictions, firewall bypass, proprietary hardware — scandal after scandal. While on the Linux side — AMD GPU, Wayland, Flatpak, Steam Proton, web applications, better than ever laptops support.
I have literally not needed to reinstall Windows in close to a decade.
You couldn't pay me to put up with the massively inferior environment of any of the Linux DEs at this point. They are all, in varying ways, completely miserable to use.
Windows 10 is actually a really solid OS, and virtualization makes it so easy to spin up a Linux VM if I really need it.
I've recently reinstalled Windows for brother in law. System become unusable, quite performant after reinstall. Looks like your experience is not universal. And I can not remove user configurations as I can on Linux.
I've tried Windows 10, it is not bad as consumer OS. Tray notifications gone, so good. WSL1 has limitations, should be solved in WSL2. PowerShell, OpenSSH and winget are good improvements.
Windows interface is changing, at least some people should like it. I feel it is getting progressively worse. That's strange — I like macOS Aqua. I didn't like brushed metal, it has gone now. I have no other explanation but blind spot of Windows users.
We Windows users just have no rational choice - the utility is carefully tuned to outweigh the annoyances and anti-features for the majority of users.
So we suck up MS treatment of us as cattle whose data and behaviours to be harvested and the dumbing down of the UI in the interest of getting things done and getting on with our lives.
It's a faustian bargain, but the alternative is worse.
I already work on a computer all week, then and spend a lot of my discretionary time on it for career research, for necessary involvement in modern life and for some leisure.
If I fulfil my desire to use linux for all the various advanced desktop scenarios I demand of my computer I'm giving up the remaining free time in my life!! And for what - to tweak driver configurations and DEs, again, AGAIN, for the hundredth or thousandth time in my life to keep things working. Learning how everything works was fun but constantly canoodling with configuration and setup for the nth time is as pointless as working around MS antifeatures, and seems to take up more time on balance if you are doing a wide variety of advanced scenarios occasionally (in my experience as a 20 year linux tinkerer).
So it's not a blind spot, it's a faustian bargain to have some hours left in my life to exercise, to look after my health, to go outside and enjoy the garden and live a wider life.
And I’m the opposite, always running into annoyances on Windows. It’s that our brains are trained on two different systems not that either is superior. I live in the terminal anyway except for VSCode, Chrome and Steam: so the DE doesn’t really concern me I use the default on Fedora and Ubuntu.
Ahh, my mistake, I misread your initial comment to be about IDE's.
I would encourage you to try Gnome again. I use it everyday on a 7 year old laptop with Ubuntu, and it is impressively stable and smooth and a pleasure to multi-task with vertical windows.
My Linux computer uses a tiling-based window manager, and damn, I could never go back. The workspaces concept they use is infinitely superior to alt-tab.
Windows has virtual desktops with Win + Alt + Tab to show the options and then you can switch with Win + Alt + Left/Right arrow. Also you can tile your apps in every corner/side you want or size? I use a 43" Dell 4k monitor and it even comes with software (Dell Display Manager) to manage all these options.
Microsoft has revived the good old PowerToys as well. It now includes a FancyZones utility that allows to define zones that windows can automatically snap into while dragging them (while holding a key). It also has a setting to overwrite the Win+Arrow key functionality to move windows between these "fancy zones" instead.
Well it's better than alt-tab, but if it relies on arrow keys, it's not ideal. Being able to go directly to any workspace with a dedicated key combo is the best option.
> Linux is getting better while Windows and macOS getting worse.
Well, some things are arguably not getting better.
> Flatpak
That's part of what's getting worse: Fracturing/deterioration of the use of distribution package management, instead of improving and expanding it.
> web applications
Another part of what's getting worse: Instead of having compact apps you have to load a behemoth of some web browser/app framework, to do semi-trivial things.
There's also systemd; Gnome having taken application UI in a weird an (IMHO) unfortunate direction, and the fact (?) that the hardware resource requirements have risen significantly.
Everything has positive and negative consequences. These are just tools, they provide choice.
There is a need to package closed source software, to provide dependencies. Some people use outdated distributions, that's root cause. If distribution is switching I'd better search like minded and help with maintaining (or it would be systemd scenario).
At least there is application. Everyone is free to make native. There is Void (Linux), runit [1], at least on Arch Linux there is big choice [2]. Fork Gnome, KDE 3 forked as Trinity Desktop Environment [3]. Boot to xmonad — 100MB RAM, Chromium — several GB RAM.
It is easy to imagine arguments against — Steam builds distribution platform on top of Linux, no packages there, Wayland vs X11, distributions spread resources, maintainers breaks software. I am not Steam user, I am not Ubuntu user, but I benefit from wider community.
> That's part of what's getting worse: Fracturing/deterioration of the use of distribution package management, instead of improving and expanding it.
Indeed, the popularity of docker, flatpak and hobby/fad distributions and language-specific package managers is leading to many security nightmares and harming traditional distributions.
There are reasons for painstakingly vet and package software:
- security
- stability AKA you don't want to force feature upgrades with new bugs on servers and workstations
- legal compliance: people are unaware of the amount of license issues in docker hub, flatpaks and most distributions
I wouldn't include those on the same list. It makes sense for various (source-form) libraries to be maintained and updated and made available independently of the OS and uniformly across operating systems. I don't see this as undermining Linux distributions - as these are used when you're making your own builds anyway.
Otherwise - yes, agreed, and it's also about redundancy and bloat when installing software; and some entities writing software that can only run on their own docker image; etc.
> these are used when you're making your own builds anyway
That's the problem: they encourage building with tons of random stuff pulled from the Internet on the fly, sidestepping OS distributions completely and providing no reproducible building, no vetting, no license review, no long-term security.
Can you link to a description of "the leftpad disaster"?
Also - it's not supposed to be "tons of random stuff", it's supposed to be the libraries you're relying on. Maybe I'm missing something in the point you're making?
> it's supposed to be the libraries you're relying on
When an ecosystem has poor engineering practices and encourages small libraries with many dependencies you get a quadratic explosion of indirect dependencies.
You might not care about having 100 transitive dependencies until a poor soul has to maintain your code in 4 or 10 years from now.
It was unexpected. But could you feel it without experiencing?
I've used open source OS for a decade. It has changed my mind. I've never downloaded software from site. I trust community, not vendors. I use just one non open source application (slack) and I do not trust them, I'd rather run it in a sandbox.
My system comes with a framework to download, build, install any package with just a few commands:
$ yay -G foo
$ cd foo
$ makepkg -sei
I can inspect it and change it, and sometimes I do.
No other ecosystem comes close. Browser extensions and smartphone applications replicate some of it but
* it can be adware/spyware/malware
* it can change overnight, no one checks
* one gallery by popularity or by restriction
Even my closed source software comes from community maintained recipes, Windows finally got it with winget.
Oh, I know! Compare it with programming language package managers — gems, pip, cargo.
This is actually one of the major annoyances for me in Linux. Each distro has its own package manager and set of packages. Yay, yum, apt, pacman, dpkg, portage, the list is near endless and as each package manager needs a reason to exist, each will try to be different. For simple use cases such as installing a package, this is fine. But for example, finding out how to search for available packages can take quite some time on a new distro.
And having all these different package managers require me to either have blind trust in a lot of different communities, or spend a lot of time comparing CRCs and reading code.
This stance actually annoys me. Should we ditch all but one and only web browser? desktop environment? file manager? database? terminal? language? There it starts and where it ends? And who decides what the true form is?
I do not like apt, dpkg, aptitude — interface is not good, output extremely verbose by default and it was slow. Its existence does not annoy me as I do not use it anymore. I use pacman, but this annoys you, what should I do? Abandon it and fill the web with grieve?
Maybe you have to work with different distributions, it should not be hard to create (or google) wrapper https://github.com/icy/pacapt
Separate communities is Linux power. We do not argue on a true form, we solve our needs.
Maybe I'm kinda skewed because I started with Windows, but I don't feel difference between downloading e.g Firefox on Windows and typing `apt-get install nginx` on Linux.
Maybe because it requires "huge shittons" of effort to try to controle the software, and yet, at the end of the day I still have to trust somebody (OS, Drivers, ISP, Firmware/Hardware, Govt)
I just don't expect every developer to be an expert at packaging their app. There's a thousand things to think of, and they might do an unreasonable hack just to get away with distribution.
If you get your packages from a single source, you mostly have to trust that source (lower attack surface), and can be assured they will meet a minimum quality level.
Example oopses from valve (but really, most vendors have theirs):
I've used Windows for 10 years prior that. Maybe the difference is not touching Windows for 10 years.
Sure, it is about trust. Browser addons and language packages pushed by authors, this results in leftpad, spyware. Distributions dissolves authors power, provides buffer, they pull new versions, walk it through stages, there are many eyes and build is (often) reproducible, stable distributions pull only critical updates. Overall effect would not be as dramatic.
I recently spent 30 minutes figuring out why the Bluetooth pairing process wasn't giving me the pin number I needed to pair my new wireless keyboard. Ugh. Eventually, after searching through forums, I updated the right modules to get it working. I want to use Linux as my daily driver, but I am frustrated by little things that don't work or go wrong.
I find myself using my Android phone a lot more when on Linux... just because I have to practically work around some things, because I don't have all day to debug non-essential tasks.
For instance, I upgraded Fedora from 32 to 33, and Spotify stopped working. Can this be fixed? I'm absolutely sure it can be fixed. Do I have time? No.
I have watched way too many coworkers bomb meetings because of trying to use bluetooth headsets on Linux. Am I trying to cause suffering? No, I will use a headset with the good old headphone jack, because I have something else that I need to do with my actual day.
I have done this too, partially. The problem with bluetooth on windows is that it doesn't work in duplex mode. You can't use speaker and mic together on bluetooth. If you disable the module for mic(don't remember what it's called) then the speaker function works perfectly.
All the support posts that I read told me that bluetooth is the problem, not windows. But I call BS on that as the bluetooth duplexing works perfectly fine on Linux as well as macos.
I've been using Windows for the past couple years for work after mostly using Ubuntu for several years. I felt the same way about Bluetooth but I've found all the Bluetooth problems I thought were "Linux" are just as bad on Windows. But Windows is just a lot more unstable. Every other week there's some new thing that breaks in a confusing way, and it's all closed source shovelware so I can't even figure out what is causing the problem.
Counter example I've been using bluetooth for keyboard, mouse and headphones on my Surface Pro 1 since the Surface Pro 1 was released in I think 2013 or 2014. Never reinstalled Windows, and it works to this day as it did on day 1. I use it 3/4 times a week for maybe 5 hours when I'm not at my PC.
I used to try Linux once a year or so but gave up doing that a few years ago because there is no single place to go to for answers and it's a time sink. The operating system needs to get out of my way so that I can make software. Windows does that.
I'm sure bias has a lot to do with my perception, I'm ok with that.
It might be that the Surface laptops legitimately "just work." I am using a bleeding-edge MSI gaming laptop and its drivers are very bad. Bluetooth is just the easiest problem to identify and point at in a single word.
Windows updates break things all the time. A common headline in my google feed around Feature Upgrade season is "Reminder: disable Windows Update to avoid problems". Microsoft has made updating windows a liability.
I was using windows for years, both in work and at home. It never ever break up that often for me. Serious question: what is breaking up that often for all? I mean, which part of the system, what it does when it breaks?
Bluetooth is a god damn mess regardless of OS. Probably (I have not tried, just assuming) the one exception being Apple hardware with Apple OS. Especially audio and keyboard.
Haven't had any issues with Microsoft mice on Linux, though. knocks on wood
Funny how these things work. For many years while I was dual booting I had a bluetooth receiver that I used regularly with Linux, where it just worked, but was never able to get it working reliably on Windows.
Many of the multiplayer games I play won't work on linux, typically due to the anticheat software they use. Also, there's typically a few hoops to jump through for popular games.
Just for balance, I use KDE Plasma with an AMD graphics card but almost no games work, even those with a "gold" rating on ProtonDB.
I haven't had time to Google how to debug the problem, but only about 1 in 10 games "just work"
Update: OK, instead of surfing HN I googled the problem. I think it may be that my games are installed on an NTFS drive. I will try moving the installs to a new drive and see if I have more success!
>As a gamer, well, there is no competition for me, really.
In 2018 I switched to Arch Linux at home because I heard "Linux has less games". Before that I used Linux exclusively at work. To test it out I installed it on a 32GB flash drive so that I don't have the urge to install games when I'm space limited. It worked for the first 3 months. Then I got a new SSD and installed it there. A few days later proton came out and I ended up clocking in 600 hours in Warframe. The idea that linux has "no games" is an urban myth. I got scammed by Windows users.
Have you ever tried to disable something that windows insists you use? Like all the telemetry? Just try to stay on top of that. Impossible because you're not in charge of your machine, Microsoft is. You change it, they just change it back. Frustrating.
On Linux? Its yours. Change anything you want.
All arguments of convenience go out the window when you are not in control.
Recently had enough with windows and gave linux a try. Love it.It’s really good for SW development especially for experimenting and exploring languages. For work I still use windows but as soon as work is over i reboot into linux.
But Im no tipical user, I don’t play games and don’t consume a lot of modern media or crazy new hardware, but do watch some youtube, listen to podcasts and read a lot and linux offers more than what I need. Linux got to a point that installing it is way frictionless. I had some attempts to install linux 15 and then maybe 10 years ago and gave up quickly. Nowadays not only that it runs live off a usb stick, it also installs easily on an existing windows system with a choice of partition of any convenient size.
Also playing with python, racket, chicken scheme plays a whole lot nicer under Linux. I am really thrilled to be on Linux.
That is something I do not care about it enough to dissuade me from the rest of the windows experience. Even accounting for it, the windows experience is still superior to linux for me. I suspect this applies to a big chunk of the population as well who don't care about open source/telemetry etc. If it comes down to it, I can add some rules in the hosts file or run some powershell scripts.
>If it comes down to it, I can add some rules in the hosts file or run some powershell scripts.
Beware of this though, if you really want to remove all the telemetry. Seems like telemetry is deeply ingrained in the OS. Last time I used Windows tried to enable every option in O&O ShutUp10, got a BSOD.
"sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell
people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog."
I have a secondary Win10 OS and, throughout months, after each update it kept losing more and more of the preferences which I initially set -> too frustrating -> I gave up trying to have it be set the way I want.
The same can happen of course as well on Linux, but it happens definitely less frequently.
Telemetry is disgusting but can’t stop wondering if it’s pervert invasion or consensus building if it’s not done the way it’s done now. “popcon” has been around for long.
>regularly dropping to command line for configuring my system
I've really never understood this complaint. "oh why do I have to use a standardized set of abstractions for configuration instead of bizarre bespoke GUIs that are different for every piece of software."
Its pretty simple: GUI is more intuitive. I do not find them bizarre. Their diversity or bespokeness doesn't register as a hindrance to me. The options are visible all at once, or are a couple of clicks away. Contrast this with the command line where I more or less have to memorize each application's interface or look online or browse the manual for answers.
GUI lets me use keyboard + mouse. CLI is keyboard only.
Regardless of any rationale, my experience is what it is. No amount of counterpoints are going to change what I've felt using CLIs.
I would completely disagree here, they're more aesthetic but not more intuitive or discoverable.
Compare tar with apple's camera app on the iphone for example: tar --help will tell you how to do everything in the app. Is there something equivalent that tells how to do manual focus in the camera app? (yes, it's supported that for years and no one knows how to do it because it won't tell you.)
This is ok. I don’t know why everyone should only use one OS for everything. Or one language, or one text editor. It has never been easier to use multiples, in parallel.
I personally use Linux and iOS. My main pain point isn’t Linux but apple lacking proper API to access iCloud services from Linux, or anything than Apple OSes really.
I try not to spend too much time "expecting".
WSL2 has lots of benefits over a typical VM. It's a lot faster than your average type 2 VM (e.g. VirtualBox), it cold boots quickly, and you can run servers on localhost out of the box and access them through a regular Windows browser. I enjoy using it for Jupyter notebooks.
Plus WSL2 has way better tooling integration than most VMs - Windows Terminal, VSCode, etc. work well. I've found the experience compelling enough that I don't see much reason to dual boot Linux outside of CUDA applications (which are also supported now on Insiders.)
Linux got virtio-fs[1] capabilities as of Linux 5.4, and a driver for Windows guests was released recently. Along with VFIO passthrough, you can have accelerated and nearly native speed Windows guests on Linux if WSL2 isn't working out.
When was the last time you gave it a serious try? I've been Linux only for several years now and things have stabilized a lot in past years.
Ubuntu's kind of lost its way recently though (snaps/apt mess, went a tad bit early with pushing Wayland as default). The derivatives like Mint, Manjaro, PopOS and Zorin seem to be the way to go for the average user.
The one thing that might trip you up is (these days rare) hardware incompatibilities. Dell and Lenovo (the only personal experience I have) are great when it comes to laptops. For integrated GPU, Intel Just Works; nVidia and AMD can occasionally require a bit of hassle depending on chipset and kernel. Discrete GPUs I don't have any recent experience but the word on the street seems to be that if you're fine with proprietary drivers both nVidia and AMD/ATI works flawlessly while FOSS drivers can be hit or miss.
On the discrete GPU front, most AMD users will be using FOSS drivers that are built into the kernel, plus the standard open source Mesa.
In fact, AMD actively recommend you use the open source ones. I think the community radv vulkan driver also outperforms anything proprietary they offer.
Nvidia still requires proprietary out-of-tree drivers and causes breakage every so often, but AMD is just like Intel integrated graphics now. Never tried it with an AMD APU, but I would hope it would be the same with the open source amdgpu driver.
I did have some issues with getting proper utilization of a 3000-series APU on Debian stable. Eventually got it working but it did requires mesa > 20.1 and some specific version/params in kernel (can't recall exactly what did it).
If you try anything remotely exotic, it's a no go on Linux.
E.g. I remember nVidia drivers always being crap. Even the blob ones.
Latest example for me is Swiftpoint Z mouse. Doesn't work on Linux.
From what I understand, either drivers are in the Kernel and thus open source. Or the drivers are outside of Kernel and thus break on every kernel update.
I assume the nVidia experience is not recent? They’ve ramped up Linux efforts significantly. Even if despite officially embracing nouveau they’re still a bit toxic, in practice it should be expected to work fine (though see below, and apparently there were some issues with 5.9 specifically).
As for Kickstarter projects with proprietary drivers targeting only Windows and/or OS X, well, yeah...
You’re right that with proprietary closed-sourced drivers one has to be prepared to be a bit cautious or conservative when upgrading the kernel. Though unlike Windows there’s no real reason to always be on the most recent version (critical kernel security issues are rare).
Please expand on this gem. Bear in mind that all drivers in Linux are delivered by the kernel. I'll grant you that not everything is golden in Linux land but the sheer pain of finding and updating drivers in Windows is an order of magnitude worse than in Linux.
You get them out of the box in Linux, in Windows you don't.
What sort of Window Manager are you having problems with? Why not try another one?
Back when I was using linux 2010s or so, it had serious issues with drivers and overheating. Config files would break unexpectedly and I found myself spending a lot of time in IRC channels trying to fix stuff.
At uni they were pushing us to use Linux and I think that made a lot of sense. People would learn bash effectively and learn some lower level bare stuff as well.
A lot of time "linux is free if your time has no value" made a lot of sense.
Nowadays, I hear some good news about Linux though I would never switch to it as a main OS.
> Doesn't add up. You're a programmer, write a script if it bothers you?
It does add up. "I'm a programmer" doesn't mean "I want to program every little thing in my life". I want to be not a programmer for a significant portion of my life.
You don't expect a surgeon to perform surgeries all the time, do you?
No but it's a lot like saying "I'm a mechanic but it's too much of a burden for me to change my own oil or tires." I probably wouldn't use your services.
It sounds stupid because that analogy doesn’t work. A surgeon can’t properly do most kinds of surgery on themselves, some are down right impossible. There’s nothing a mechanic can’t do to their car that they can’t do for their costumers.
As a programmer, I cannot recall being hindered by file name conventions, un-resizeable dialog boxes, bug trackers etc., as much I have been inconvenienced on linux by poor driver support, and regularly dropping to command line for configuring my system.
As a gamer, well, there is no competition for me, really.
As your average user, I find the user interface on windows nicer and see more compatible programs.
If there is anything I absolutely have to have linux for, I can just use a raspberry pi, a cloud server etc.