And then there are the missing apps. Want a really good, free git GUI client? Sorry, not on Linux. It's git FFS, Linux should have great dev tools. Same with file managers.
I used to be an Amiga user, I'm a C developer and like tinkering. But I also want something that just works for the basics. Sad to say but Windows, for all its faults, does work. Visual Studio does work. And all the open source apps I use like Kicad are on Windows.
I really want to move to Linux, but it's too much work to make it work. These days I have better things to do with my computer.
Since both are Debian derivatives, I imagine that both include synclient(1). No, it's not a GUI — but that's better, because you can just put the right command into your login scripts, and you know that it'll execute, and never get deleted because a desktop environment decided to change its config file format.
> Want a really good, free git GUI client? Sorry, not on Linux.
Magit is awesome.
> Sad to say but Windows, for all its faults, does work.
I have a couple of Windows machines, and I don't feel that they work. Swallowed keystrokes & clicks, ads — no thank you!
You just lost 99% of the userbase.
It happens just rarely enough to make me feel insane, but it never happens on my work windows machine or my mac. Maybe I'm subconsciously sabotaging my copies on linux.
This is the most bizarre thing I encounter, but it's missing the hundred other tiny warts I ignore because I "know what I signed up for" using linux as my daily driver.
GitKraken?
Also, the examples everyone is sure to cite in this thread where a unix is used by the general population is just an example of some megacorp stepping up and owning the last mile.
In the case of web apps, developers get paid to go the last mile - either by an employer or via the market. In the case of Linux server software they also get paid; in this case a Red Hat salary is the most common form. For Linux desktop software, very few get paid. Not nearly enough. OpenOffice/LibreOffice in particular needs and has always needed a ton of work, and almost nobody's paying for it. So it has always been a total tire fire. Random crashes, which then leave a document in a "needs recovery" state permanently no matter how many times it has already been recovered. Formatting and conversion glitches. Features and options that are hard to use even if you can find them among the smoldering dung-pile of other features and options that nobody anywhere has used for years. Staggering memory abuse bogging down the whole system. I'm sure the devs (at least some of them) would love to fix these things, but it's going to be really hard work - often more political than technical in nature - and nobody's paying them enough to go through that misery so they do more rewarding things instead. The result is software that will always lag behind its proprietary competitors in terms of appeal to users - far enough behind that people will actually pay for the difference.
If you want to compete effectively in a market, somebody has to be paid for crossing that last mile, and that means somebody has to do the paying. Nobody is.