I use Ubuntu on an officially supported Dell enterprisey machine (E7400) and the experience is noticeably worse than on my Mac.

There are no multitouch gestures, there's screen tearing, 4K video playback on a 4K screen is choppy, sleep and wake up both take a long time, deep sleep doesn't work properly and I HAD TO DOWNGRADE MY KERNEL because of the stupid "Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0" bug that would freeze the machine for five solid seconds every minute.

I use Fedora.

I work on dotnet. I've not been able to run my azure functions on Linux at all. Even on windows, I have to start the azure storage emulator directly and then start func (using the full path). On Linux, azurite is not the same thing as azure storage emulator.

So I must use windows for dotnet development. Even after four years of dot net core. That being said, Linux isn't the problem. Gnome 3 isn't the problem either. Flatpak works great.

There are a few regressions once in a while though. For example, I'm unable to use my lenovo flex 14 (and ryzen 3500U) built in mic since I upgraded to Fedora 33. Looks the issue well be fixed in kernel 5.9 but for the moment I'm on 5.8. But it has been great mostly. If I could use it for work, that'd be great.

> Have you really used a desktop Linux desktop recently?

Someone has to say this literally any time someone mentions problems with Linux Desktop, along with "it works for me", "my grandma uses it!", "you just have to buy the right hardware", and "you're using the wrong distro". It is incredibly tiring.

It's a reply to the tiring cognitive dissonance of posts like GP that basically broadcast that 'oh, I would simply love to support open software and general-purpose computing instead of locked-down proprietary platforms, but alas, Linux is simply unusable you see, so I have no choice!'

Yet rather than take at their word that Linux is unsuitable for their use case or seek to remedy those problems, people insist that it must be because of one or more of the reasons I listed above. Alternatively, they attempt to change the user's use case to one that fits Linux better.

It's extremely tiring to watch this happen for as long as I have been watching it happen.

They didn't say Linux is unsuitable for a particular use case or give any meaningful criticism or definition of a use case, they just said that it 'just doesn't work'. Is it any wonder people call out that tripe.

'just doesn't work' and 'doesn't just work' are two very different statements. You said the former, but I've only spotted people saying the latter in here.

Also if you have to argue with someone that linux does work for them, you've missed the point.

Ah yes you're right, I did misread that.

Are you actually seriously of the belief that Linux ‘just works’ for most use cases or people, and there is a small minority for whom it doesn’t?

The implication being that it doesn't just work for them. They know that, that's why they asked if they'd personally tried Linux lately. Nobody cares if it "just works" for your grandma or whatever, because that doesn't help them at all.

Linux is hardly unusable, it's just a worse experience, and for something I spend 10 hours a day on and earn my living with, I want the best experience.

For macOS, you also have to buy the right hardware. You cannot throw it at random $300 Acer garbage either.

You probably could if they'd let you heh, it's really well optimized, and works great on 5 year old Apple hardware with much worse specs than a $300 modern Acer. This is especially true as low-end cheap devices tend to be much more "standard" -- no exotic hardware.

You would either not even boot due to buggy UEFI implementation, or it was cheaping out on some hardware that there is not driver for anything except the OS release it came with.

In some aspects, the hardware on high-end-insh laptops have moved nowhere in the last few years. Yeah, they've got slightly better GPUs to handle 4k, Vulkan/SPIRV and new media codecs, and faster SSDs once they've got rid of SATA, but the CPU performance moved just in percents and it comes with the same memory. My wife still uses 2012 i7 Thinkpad (T430s) with 16 GB RAM, and there are not many cheap machines that could be objectively called better. Certainly not in the $300 range. Heck, until Ice Lake, you couldn't purchase a laptop with more RAM unless you went into luggable workstation segment, so it is no wonder that MacOS works relatively OK on 5yo machines. They are still way better than $300 Acer, despite that Acer having possibly some better paper specs.

How good the specs are doesn't matter for most driver bugs. Instead, it's important which components you use. And even if cheaper devices use "standard" hardware, they still use a much larger variety than the few models that Apple releases.

I use Fedora on a Thinkpad on a daily basis and it sucks compared to macOS IMHO.

I use both, and they both have their strong and weak points. Purely system-UI-wise, I prefer Gnome Shell to Finder. Upgrading to Big Sur was a shock, the aesthetic went downhill.