When I was younger, I wanted to work in places that had a passion for these types of things.
Older me realized that was a bad idea. It inevitably seeps into things unrelated to doing the actual work (even performance reviews via 360 feedback). People are paid to do a job, and I've found that whether they love computing or not is mostly orthogonal. Sure, there are some that are wiz's because of it, but they're usually neutralized by those who become ideological and inflexible because of it.
Tangentially related: I'm a Linux guy - it's been my primary OS for almost 20 years now. However, at my current company, I prefer roles that don't involve Linux. The reason is they typically will not give me my own machine - I'll merely get an account on some server, with a poor window manager, and missing a lot of the nicer tools I use on my home machine, and no superuser privileges. In the last job I had, their provided Emacs was a little too old for some of the features I used, and I had to compile my own Emacs from scratch (along with tens of other dependent packages). This was time wasted for me and the company. At least on my Windows machine at work, I have Admin privileges and can make things nicer.
Paradoxically, it is because I'm a "hard core" Linux user that I prefer Windows for work. I've optimized my Linux workflow, and if my work cannot provide me my preferred tools/window managers, I might as well just use Windows.
I don't even use WSL. I use xonsh, which works fairly well on Windows. I have multiple desktops on Windows. And most importantly, I live in Emacs which for the most part works just as it would in Linux :-)
(And no, using/installing Emacs on Windows is not a pain, despite what you often hear - the last time I did it some months ago, it was literally "Download and unzip into directory and you're good to go.")
`(setq directory-free-space-program nil)`
0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26128693/emacs-dired-slo...
There are certain Emacs features that may require some UNIX tools like find or grep. Often I've found ways to configure it to use ripgrep and fd instead (both are trivial installs in Windows, and generally faster than grep and find anyway).
See https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Microsoft-Windows-Performance....
- The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me. I'd take either over Gnome.
- The Linux desktop environment is laggy. This is difficult to measure objectively, but nothing moves smoothly and responsiveness is through the floor. I'm using a 144Hz screen; why can I see windows jerk from position to position when I drag them?
The Zen kernel helps with some of that, bringing it about to the same responsiveness as Windows -- which is still well below OSX. No desktop environment provides it by default, and in most it's difficult to install. On NixOS it's just "boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_zen;", but it's still not the default.
- nVidia's drivers are poor, and there are a lot of sharp edges. I'm using one of their GPUs. No, I can't switch to AMD; I need it for CUDA, and anyway GPUs aren't exactly cheap.
- AMD's drivers are of inconsistent quality, and I couldn't buy a 6800XT even if I'm willing to sell my first-born. Ok, that's also true for nVidia's newest GPUs, and Zen 3, and... different rant entirely.
- HDR basically doesn't work.
- Mixed-DPI screens basically don't work.
- HiDPI in general is glitchy.
- kanjiTomo doesn't work on Wayland, because there's no solid story for the screen capture protocol.
- Bluetooth audio basically doesn't work.
...
Windows isn't perfect, but for me the Linux desktop died to a thousand paper cuts. Every two or three months I make another attempt at getting it up to the same standard I get from Windows, and every two or three months I fail.
Does the above sound kind of entitled? It's not. I'm not demanding that anyone should make this work for free; I've never paid for the Linux desktop. The fact is, however, that it isn't good enough to use without unpleasant consequences, and I've spent far too much of my life fiddling with it already. At this stage I just want something that doesn't eat my evenings.
Your problem with Wayland I could not have seen, because I have not attempted to use Wayland yet, but most of the others seem to be Gnome related.
I have never used Gnome, as I have never liked what I have briefly seen in the Linux distributions that default to Gnome.
Perhaps that is the reason why I did not have your problems.
(While KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows was at that time, I have been hugely disappointed by the unbelievable regressions in KDE 4, so I have also abandoned KDE at that time and I am using XFCE since then. XFCE imposes very little restrictions on the desktop applications, allowing the free mixing of graphical applications that were designed for either Gnome or KDE, so I can choose whichever works better.)
Linux is much more diverse than other operating systems and there are a lot of alternatives for most components.
Almost all complaints that I have seen about Linux, were in fact not applicable to Linux in general, but only to certain specific configurations that I would not attempt to use, because I agree that they are bad.
Unfortunately, choosing a Linux configuration good for a certain purpose and for certain hardware frequently requires either a lot of experience or the wasting of much time with trying various variants.
This is why I stay with windows for my dev machines and either use WSL or ssh to a linux box. All my machines at home have WSL2 installed and I use it as my default shell, I never open powershell/cmd, they may as well not be on my machine, for all my development needs and use all the linux tools that I would be using if I was on a native linux desktop.
I can be up and running on a windows dev machine in the time it takes me to download VScode and open it, or I can spend weeks trying to get a linux environment to the same place. With my setup I still have all my linux toolset that I would use on a linux desktop, but I don't have to contend with all the issues of getting a linux desktop environment running.
I have run into all the same problems as the parent of this and more, I have tried different desktop environments including Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnaman, and XFCE. I have moved between xorg and wayland more times then I care to count, each ended up giving a different set of problems.
At the end of the day, I want to spend my time being productive and getting work done, not fighting with my OS to get the basics running. I love linux but it's just not ready to replace windows on the desktop.
- nVidia's drivers are poor, and there are a lot of sharp edges. I'm using one of their GPUs. No, I can't switch to AMD; I need it for CUDA, and anyway GPUs aren't exactly cheap.
- AMD's drivers are of inconsistent quality, and I couldn't buy a 6800XT even if I'm willing to sell my first-born. Ok, that's also true for nVidia's newest GPUs, and Zen 3, and... different rant entirely.
- HDR basically doesn't work.
- Mixed-DPI screens basically don't work.
- HiDPI in general is glitchy.
For a couple of years I subscribed to Linux Journal, faithfully reading every issue, became a Stallman missionary, trying to spread the gospel, even though most of our university assignments were to be done from Windows (W95/WFW 3.11 back then).
Eventually I got tired of choosing configurations and taking care OS distribution bonsai trees, and nowadays just use Mac/Windows/Android (where the Linux kernel use is an implementation detail), leaving Linux for the server room.
> The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer
> than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also
> genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me.
Truthfully, if you need HDR or specific AMD/nVidia features, you're right you're probably gonna have a rough time. (Bluetooth has worked just fine for me, though.)
It's definitely not all roses over in Desktop Linux land. I miss having real third-party app support -- sometimes you just need After Effects or actual Word/Excel -- and MacOS' consistency in keystrokes (Cmd+, as the "preferences" hotkey in every app is just so good) but for 90% of what I do it fits me really well.
On the flip side, my job uses Office and Teams quite extensively, and the browser experience is subpar. OneDrive sync is also spotty (InSync works ok, but it's not "set and forget" at least for my use-case). Everything works, but it's less easy than on macOS or Windows, so you have the added cognitive load. I ended up having a VM with Windows when I really need it. It got ridiculous when I needed to join Teams on my phone and my laptop to get sound and share my screen.
On top of that, Linux works very well for the fun work. I don't especially like doing PowerPoint decks or blazing through emails, but because the tools are less friendly, I end up spending more time doing stuff I don't enjoy doing. It means that my productivity gets lower. I miss i3, the familiar command line, all the goodies I got to discover and enjoy on my "play" machine, but the 60% remaining got more tedious.
I ended up moving back to a macbook air (which is less powerful than my Dell) because of the "lack of configuration" to get it to somewhere where I feel "peak productive". Some stuff at work I just want to get "done", and ultimately Linux (or the lack of good Linux compatibility with some of the tools my workplace mandates) went in the way.
I used WSL1 a little while back. It was nice, but it was another thing to get setup which I am not familiar with. I'll get windows back on the XPS and try, maybe it'll strike the right balance.
A bummer, really.
Or, there's always Xfce or KDE, of course.
AMD drivers are now open source and finally working well. Nvidia is not, granted.
Bluetooth audio works well, even on rando cheap noname devices I've tried. My primary speakers are some Logitech bluetooth pair.
Don't use wayland. Run gnome in xorg mode.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say I'm blown away by how much -just- works on Linux. My printer is autodetected on the network and print. My wireless mouse works. My monitor runs at 1440p.
If you're open to it, I always suggest using a modern distro that stays up to date because you get better hardware support(if using new hardware, that is). Typically, that means something Arch based, but there are distros around making that simple.
On windows, there's no choice. On mac osx, there's no choice (unless you try to mod it yourself after the fact).
It turns out I can't install it, because the installer bundles an old version of the nouveau driver, the nouveau driver crashes on my hardware, they've deleted the nvidia driver package for the version of Solus that's on the ISO (along with every other package), and there's no terminal-mode installer or any other workaround.
If you want to install Solus, and the year-old installer doesn't work in GUI mode, then you're SOL.
Interestingly, for me, I only see some of the issues the GP mention when using xorg instead of wayland.
Only for those using modern cards, my old APU is stuck in GL 3.3, whereas the fxgl supported 4.1.
At least I can use it for GL ES 3.0 coding.
I'm using both, Linux for 8 hours at work and then Windows for my personal computing needs.
I live mostly in the browser. Both OSes basically work. I can move my windows around lag free, entirely, always.
Bluetooth audio works. This 4k screen I'm using now for the first time on Linux just worked.
Chromium works ok, but I don’t like using chromium.
Do you only have the one 4K display? I guess it depends on the apps you use, but I’ve had to set special scaling settings for individual apps, and that breaks down with multiple mixed-DPI displays.
Yes Bluetooth audio works, but at least on ubunutu I get a long list of MAC addresses and not device names, which has poor usability IMO.
I’ve also noticed Ubuntu with gnome in particular is slow to start apps, and doesn’t give any indication of whether the app is just slow to start or has failed.
Regarding mixed-DPI displays and scaling, I have not had issues with GNOME on Wayland.
Bluetooth Audio also works quite well for me, and it shows device names rather than addresses.
I will agree that GNOME tends to be slow to start apps after a while, although it is very quick on fresh installs. I am not sure why that is.
ps: If you are using an Nvidia card, you can't, unfortunately, use Wayland.
why should I have to install an os, then change my desktop environment, then spend weeks learning keyboard shortcuts for said new environment, to get basic functionality working.
I totally get why people prefer Mac and Windows outside of software development. But as a working developer it’s really worth the effort, if given the option, to invest in learning Linux and developing on it.
Interns doing the whole WSL thing makes me cringe. Not great for your career IMO unless you plan on making a quick exit from the dev side of things.
This might be a controversial take, but I feel like A “worse” developer with a solid workflow in Linux will appear more productive than a somewhat more skilled developer getting dragged down by WSLisms.
What pains did you have? Docker support was a big one for me, but otherwise I haven’t encountered anything too bad.
I would probably benefit from a reinstall of Big Sur: this machine has gone through 3 OS upgrades.
What I really appreciate on Linux tho is workspace ordering and switching. Which I don’t think you can customize to the degree you can on Linux anymore in Big Sur.
For my part, I use emacs on Linux because I believe the power of computers is in crafting a personalised productivity enhancer. Free software which can be customised down to a very low level is part of that.
Yep they are probably too busy doing their job: creating value for customers. Instead of having fun fiddling with their OS.
Which Linux?
With Windows you can use the Home edition and still have a decent workhorse of a computer.
> A non-WSL2 Windows person doesn't get the benefits of Nix
You greatly overestimate the benefits of Nix to any person. Nix is a fringe on the margins on the footnotes of the world. Even among developers it's barely a curiosity.
> I work in this industry because I love computing. But these Windows jockeys
First thing you have to do is stop being dismissive of people for their choices.
If you're building software targeted at most of the world it makes sense to use Windows.
For most Windows SW, the answer is no. So the analogy with Android doesn't make much sense.
The only classes using UNIX were the ones specific about UNIX content.
A the end of the 5 years, the DG/UX server had been replaced by a Red-Hat one and most terminals, were dual booting between the university own distribution and Win95/95 OSR, some of us also had access to the freshly released Windows NT.
The large majority of students was still only booting into GNU/Linux for the UNIX related labs.
Anything related to graphics programming, Smalltalk, databases, AI, engineering tools (UML, Boochs, CASE), digital circuits, was done on Windows/Mac OS (System).
I suspect that it is still common to be forced to use Windows at $BIGCO.
It's just a good desktop and dev environment that stays out of my way, has sensible defaults, and doesn't require endless twiddling to be productive in.
A non-WSL2 Windows person doesn't get the benefits of Nix, usually doesn't live life on the shell (since every Windows program is gui first), doesn't do dotfiles management (you can but paths for the git Atlassian method are non-obvious), ssh password protected keys are a PITA...good God I could go on ad nauseum.
I work in this industry because I love computing. But these Windows jockeys I dunno I get the feeling they don't necessarily love computing? Or in the way that it's this mundane tool for the production of money-points that they can then exchange for money. I also am receiving the money-points and it is good. But lemme crack open your head and pour in the magic y'know?