I am using linux/unix for 25+ years, but the desktop just never works for me. I'd echo its just death by a thousand cuts.

The usual suspects: fonts, video drivers, sounds drivers, various USB devices supports, sleep/wake issues.

And lack of basic apps, like a good multitabbed SSH/RDP terminal.

I honestly can't believe what I'm reading here. Is it still 1999 where you live!?

I started using Linux around '97ish and agree with the parent too. The problem for me wasn't investing the time in tweaking a new installation, but apt-get dist upgrade (whatever it's called these days) would eventually break my system...in very bad ways.

I hear this a lot. And mostly from Ubuntu victims. I have not reinstalled my Fedora XPS 13 laptop for over 4 years. I have clean upgraded 3 times.

Fedora is spectacular and has been spectacular for many years now. The driver support is brilliant. It was one of the first distros to have absolutely seamless integration with RAID mode NVME (which was something the XPS set it to).

I will be very surprised if you have to "tweak" your laptop. Everything that you have in OSX is already there - including nightmode, etc... the works.

And here's the cool part - customizing Fedora is a browser extension away! http://extensions.gnome.org/

Breaking upgrades are not distro-specific, but mostly user specific.

It usually breaks for users, who do not respect package manager and what it does, break their installation with misc convenience scripts and tweaks run as root, and then wonder, what went wrong.

To be totally fair upgrading macOS or Windows can be a minefield too.

I had exactly one issue with a macOS upgrade - when they introduced APFS. The upgrade process has failed in the middle with an FS-related error, but AFAIR it resolved itself after rebooting and retrying. For comparison, Windows 10 and various popular Linux distributions have caused me a lot more after-update trouble: input devices ceasing to work, graphics drivers breaking and falling back to the built-in generic ones (with a 800x600 resolution, on Windows), graphics drivers breaking and not falling back to anything, but just causing X to fail to start (on Linux). Once (a few years back, I admit) upgrading Debian testing brought in a new version of the kernel that turned out to have some ACPI-related bug on my machine and consistently freeze about 30 - 60 seconds after booting. This all is of course just personal experience, but I think I'm not the only person with similar ones.

I agree with the parent. I’ve been using Linux since before 1999, sometimes as my main desktop, but often not.

This comes up somewhat regularly, and probably always will - it’s the nature of the beast.

I’ve found myself very happy using a Mac as my main desktop. It’s not perfect either, but good enough.

For the most part, I think Linux has moved from a thousand cuts to just a hundred or so and those hundred will persist. A Fedora installation covers alot of the hardware out there, but there will always be new machines where support is incomplete (Surface, MacBook, etc.)

It's tempting to compare Linux with MacOS, but also (in my opinion) unfair. Apple appears to be making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines and not simply picking the cheapest components. I think Windows is closer to a fair comparison (they have to try and support everything out there) I have had no more hassle under Linux than I've had with Windows.

It's not unfair. There's nothing preventing, say, RedHat, from offering its own hardware for sale.

EDIT: Rather than downvoting, perhaps those who disagree with me could tell me why other companies aren't capable of "making conscious decisions about what goes in their machines"?

Apple is, after all, far from the only Unix vendor to do so. Whether it's HP-UX or Solaris, it's fairly common for Unix vendors to tightly couple their software to supported hardware. What is preventing Red Hat from offering a fully Red Hat compatible laptop that works near-perfectly out of the box?

There are machines certified for RHEL, Ubuntu or SuSE.

If you do your purchase outside this list and something doesn't work, it was your decision and now your problem. It is not Redhat's or Canonical problem. They are not in hardware business, their partners are, and the information which models were tested and what was the result is publicly available.

Comically enough, I tried not so long ago: Fedora didn't boot. Like, doesn't even reach the login manager.

Everyone has their own stories and use cases, why are people so hell-bent on convincing their use case and solution is The One True Way and-I-can't-understand-why-you-re-using-anything-else?

See other comment here on the Ikea effect. That's part of it anyway. I think the other part is humans can get fetishistic about almost anything. It seems to be part of our nature. Unsurprisingly, it's shaped around computers for HN types. Add into the mix that the organisations which make the alternatives (Apple, Microsoft) really are bloody horrible, so that adds an ethical angle. If there's anything people like more than fondling their fetishes, it's finger-pointing at others for doing wrong.

So yes it's silly, but it's fairly strongly motivated silliness.

I had Fedora 26 or 27 installed on a secondary partition on my tower for a while and wasn’t particularly impressed. All of the things mentioned in my original comment applied to some degree... I could make it work and I’d use it over Windows any day but it wouldn’t be my first choice.

I don't necessarily doubt that Fedora 28 is passable day-to-day platform, but I did think it was a little surprising that you mention Skype as your first example of what should be a list of critical apps that bridge the transition. Would be curious to hear if others do use Skype, but for me it's literally been years. It came up as a joke in conversation recently, as we waxed nostalgic — yes I'm actually using that phrase — about chat apps from days gone by.

I dual boot Win10 and Kubuntu 18.04, plus I run Kubuntu on my laptop. I use Skype in both Windows and Kubuntu. Under Windows, almost unbelievably, it never works right. It either can't find the camera or it can't find the mic, but if it can find the camera it still won't transmit from it. In Linux, I had a little mucking about to get the sound going, but now it just goes.

Here's where I think is the difference between the western world and NBU - The Next Billion Users.

Skype and Whatsapp video are the only two ones that work reasonably well in India with shaky mobile bandwidth. I mentioned Zoom as well.

But here's the thing - have you used Skype Web ? There's no installation needed.

Interesting point. I wouldn't have assumed that, because I've never had a good experience with Skype's handling of unstable connections here in Canada. That said, no I haven't tried Skype for web.

Regarding the rest of the world, WhatsApp definitely comes to mind. For chat, video, and audio.

> And you have the choice to buy spectacular developer focused hardware like XPS or ThinkPad laptops.

I'm using an XPS 15. A recent purchase - I'm an OS X user by choice, but Apple currently makes no laptop hardware I'm interested in buying.

Here's the relevant archwiki page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9560

It would take me days to work through that horror. I'd still end up with an only partially-working machine. Yes, it's the fault of Dell & chipset manufacturers for not supporting Linux, but if I'm going to spend effort apportioning blame for the world's ills, I'll do that on things that matter more (torture, ecosystem collapse, social isolation).

In practical terms, I can spend time setting up & configuring Linux, or I can use Windows today and plant some vegetables, or walk up a hill, read a new volume of history or philosophy, talk to a friend. Windows is kind of nasty, but all the applications I need are available for it, it can launch them, it can give me access to files, and I don't spend any time messing with it. Good enough for me.

(I'm not claiming that Windows is as undemanding as OS X by the way. The impedance mismatch between WSL environments and the rest of the system, and Windows' relative instability, make it more time consuming to set up and maintain. The order for me is OS X < Windows < Linux, with the Windows-Linux gap the larger of the two)