> I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on Linux when I had it as my daily driver for over a decade.

What did you spend that time on? I never need to look at anything; it's a big reason I use Linux: my system today is the same as it was yesterday, and last year. And will be the same tomorrow, and next year. Of course Firefox and the Linux kernel and all these tools get updates, but overall it's pretty stable from my user-visible perspective. I certainly don't have upgrades which completely change the UI like Windows 8/10/11 "forced" on me, and if something does go wrong (which it rarely does), I can usually figure things out – Windows: not so much.

Not who you asked, but here's my answer:

- Webcam on MacBook Pro (some dude reverse engineered it but I packaged it into dkms .deb so I didn't have to compile every time I updated the kernel)

- vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux, and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it working)

- getting the thing to properly sleep, wake and not chew the battery

- fuck Nvidia and Lenovo (different laptop)

I still prefer Linux and use it as my daily driver.

> vpn through company firewall (which didn't support Linux, and wasn't openvpn compatible, took absolutely ages to get it working)

I'm cherry picking here but in this case you're just doing your company's endpoint management job for them.

This was my last job and I have also spent a lot of time packaging and scripting (for autoconfiguration, I don't like presenting the end user with technical questions if we already know the answer to). On entirely supported platforms.

This kind of thing is a full time job in many companies so if you go outside of the supported path and do your own then obviously it's going to take considerable time :)

> I'm cherry picking here but in this case you're just doing your company's X job for them.

This is a recurring theme with Linux, because guess what, many companies want nothing to do with desktop Linux, for better or for worse.

So you'll have to do their job for them, as a side gig.

Well, or you can use the tools they give you to do your job :)

I agree the focus isn't there. I was managing everything "not Windows" as an endpoint architect and it was very difficult to get other teams to consider them. Makes sense because "not Windows" was less than 1% of our userbase. So I had to really push for them to select tools like VPN and antivirus that support Linux and Mac.

However we did manage. What I did see a lot was that R&D users didn't want to use the standard supported distro (which by the way I picked with their input). They complained about all the mandatory antivirus software (which was not my choice, but the security team's mandate). But really there was a very high amount of "I just want to manage everything myself" going on too. You can't have it both ways though. Either you get a managed endpoint and you have to roll with some of the decisions or you do it all yourself (and in some cases are locked out of some critical environments due to security policy)

This is fine (well fine by me, but not by our security team!) but then don't complain about how hard it is to get it set up.

I can see how WSL fits well into this for companies, though I prefer real Linux myself too. A lot of R&D users would be on Mac as it's a "Linuxy enough" OS with much less hurdles in a corporate environment (native MS Office available etc).

Yep. Palo Alto. There is very limited Linux support, but not for the authentication method we used (which did some browser-based auth that I don't quite remember)

I used Linux as my daily for 10 years and every time there was a major update either sound or networking or both broke. I love Linux, I still use it regularly, but my experience was that basic stuff kept getting broken. I was using very standard Thinkpad laptops throughout.

I guess I got fairly lucky when I was using Linux as a daily driver. The only thing that I would need to fix after a major update was my Nvidia drivers, and I ended up writing a Bash script to do it for me since 99% of the time it was just installing the latest version.

Nvidia drivers turned me away from Linux completely.

I dont remember exactly but i think it was Fedora 25 or 26 (or around there) where they removed some symbols because some fucking moron thought "they arent used by anything" so they pushed them to torvalds linux repo. And the changed got accepted.

You know what used them? Nvidia drivers.

So after a couple of hours fixing that, which at one point started involving rebuilding the kernel and other things that a normal user shouldnt have to EVER do, i just said fuck it, and installed Windows. That laptop is still running decently as a browser/media player at my folks

Now im just using a Mac as a day to day pc, and a windows laptop for gaming.

Even if i deal with Linux at work on servers, and with containers and stuff, i'll never go back to linux.

How do you keep your machine up to date across the board? I bet your PDF reader/writer is way out of date.

Windows does not have a proper central packager mechanism so if you let it, your software will get really ... floppy.

They said they used Mac as their daily driver. Anyway pdf viewer is usually built into the web browser now days is it not?

Yet there are millions of us chugging along just fine every day with linux.

I've never used a Thinkpad due to the Linux hostility I regularly read about. I never seem to have problems with HP/E or Dell laptops that I specify nor any old random desktops I grab. I use Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debbie and others. They are all Linux.

I spend way more time doing stuff on Linux than I ever did with Windows. Windows software comes from so many sources and it takes ages to find it and update.

My experience with ThinkPads is the opposite. I found them one of the more practical Linux brands.

Yep, and thing is, if you run RHEL or Fedora or really anything from Red Hat, they have a close collaboration with Lenovo and upstream, so everything Just Works™ out of the box.

I had a Lenovo Thinkpad that was certified for RHEL and used Fedora.

- Battery life was terrible compared to Windows (usually 3-4 hours, compared to 8 on Windows).

- The trackpad/trackpoint would often not come back after resume.

- The fingerprint scanner usually worked 20% of the time (while it always worked on Windows) and when it failed, you had to wait for a long timeout, because there is an issue where when IIRC PAM is performing authentication with one module (fingerprint), it cannot support simultaneous authentication through another method (e.g. password authentication).

- I had a Lenovo USB-C Gen 2 Dock, which worked great on Windows. On Linux, the lanes were misconfigured and HBR3 was not enabled, so it was not possible to use an external 4k screen with 60Hz.

It was the full Linux laptop experience as I remembered it. I decided to buy a Thinkpad after using Macs on the desktop for ~14 years. I had really good experiences with Linux on my Ryzen workstation as a desktop, so I thought it might be time to switch on the laptop again. Now I am fully back in Mac territory and probably won't try Linux on a laptop for at least another 5-10 years.

I could have kept the laptop since Windows worked very well. But my brain is just wired for Unix, so no dice.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used a slogan that is usually associated with Apple to ThinkPads running Linux. FWIW, I was a huge fan of the IBM ThinkPads when they still had the great keyboards. So what happened to me is that I was excited when I heard about the close collaboration RedHat and Lenovo were doing on the P53 series ThinkPads. And if you have a P53 the experience is pretty good. Not sure about other models.

I've installed various Linux distros on many laptops, and even though I could usually get everything working, the deal breaker for me was often battery life. I wonder what kind of battery life the people with RHEL on a P53 are getting.

I didn't use redhat but arch and ubuntu with my T480 and both of these had terrible battery life and heat management. Throttling was a real issue. Probably a fault of intels but still it was annoying to have to fix.

I never really got battery life anywhere close to windows or macos and my T480 has an extended battery which weighs a tonne.

I use both Linux and Windows at home.

Every time I do an update on the Linux PC it always breaks a bunch of things and I typically have to spend 4-12 hours to fix everything.

But the good thing is that I can usually fix everything, and after it's fixed it will stay that way and work reliably for as long as I want until I choose to do another update.

I still love Linux, the only reason I'm using Windows at all is for certain software that doesn't work on Linux (Ableton and games, also no HDR support in Linux).

What kind of stuff breaks? (not nit picking). I used to have that issue on old laptops. But I run linux on a PC now and it's been pretty much issue free. Maybe something with a major release update. But always curious about others experiences. I will say Windows updates break things as well, no experience with MacOS however.

I have an Ubuntu PC that runs both Mythtv and Kodi that I use as a HTPC.

Recently did an update from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, which completely broke lirc which is the program that runs the IR remote.

So my unhappy partner was unable to use the remote in kodi until I finally worked out how to fix it (and every aspect of how they broke it).

Looks like they just changed the way it works for no useful reason. I had to manually set up every IR button again because the remote name had changed from "mce" to "devinput-32". Why??

MythTV didn't work at all because for some reason the mysql bind address had changed so it couldn't access its own database.

Once I got that working, I discovered that the remote didn't work in mythtv either. They had changed the name of the ?file? they use to send button names. I had to make a symbolic link to the new name so the remote would work in MythTV. "sudo ln -s /run/lirc/lircd /dev/lircd". Why??

Also I had a button set up on the IR remote to shutdown kodi. That stopped working and took me more time to fix.

Kodi was also throwing some python errors, fixed by doing "sudo apt install python-backports.functools-lru-cache"

The Kodi database also got corrupted somehow, so some files weren't showing up until I deleted the database, which meant I lost the resume times on videos we were watching. I spent a fair bit of time googling and trying to fix the database but in the end, no matter what I did those files would not show if the database was active on my movies folder.

Also the Nvidia drivers needed to be reinstalled, but I expected that because that breaks with every single update.

So yeah, that was about a week of evenings to get it working back the way it was.

Not the poster you're replying to, but I've had a few issues occasionally. Biggest one was an Xorg update that was done incorrectly by the maintainers. The X server itself was updated, but GLX components weren't, which led to some incompatibility between the two. Net result being that the screen was blank after boot. I've also had issues where the Ubuntu's apt repos would somehow get themselves into a locked up state where it errored out and refused to work; I don't remember what was the exact error, something to do with the upstream repos and the local cache, I just remember it was very difficult to recover; I think it might've required a reinstall of Ubuntu and I do remember it happening more then once.

Most of the other issues IIRC were annoyances more then anything else.

i sure wish all the popular distros would offer snapshot/rollback integration out of box, and thus if it happened you could just boot back into the working one, and move on until it gets fixed.

Do you mean upgrades between major versions of your distribution? Updating packages has (practically) never broken things for me, and I use Debian Testing. Before I started using a rolling release distribution, I found it easier to keep the system and my data separated on disk and just install a new distribution afresh whenever I want to install a new version.

Yes, major upgrade of Ubuntu version.

What distro(s) do you use?

Ubuntu. To be clear it's a major upgrade, ie 16.04 to 18.04. I've never had anything break with the usual upgrades.

I use Linux on a self built desktop using parts I know are well supported. I can see if you use it on a laptop which may not have the best hardware support could be frustating.

This is really the way to do it. No one ever complains about Mac OS being unstable because an update breaks their install on a no-name generic laptop. Instead, they run it on hardware that Mac OS supports. Same should be the case for Linux.

For example Lenovo maintains a list of support laptop versions, and which Linux distros are certified on them. I believe Dell and HP have something similar. Just stick to the supported hardware/distro combos (well, you can typically run whatever distro but at least you have a good baseline), then you should be fine.

I bought the newest Dell XPS 15 model last year and everything was supported out of the gate, including HDR and touchscreen. The biggest problems I had were platforms (few commercial streaming sites support >1080p, let alone 4K and none that I know of support HDR on Linux), games (my steam library is still ~30% of Windows’) and random finicky ness with audio bluetooth (alsa and bluez problems).

None of that was enough to push me away from it, but those problems would also exist on a custom built desktop with fully supported hardware.

If I don't tinker with things, it stays somewhat stable until the next update. It could be anything from a -dev package distro update conflicts with but I need for something else to needing to install a package from source or out of repo that in turn needs more conflicting deps which I somehow manage to get working until something else goes crazy because I hurt its feelings by using a foreign repo or built from source.

It was a passionate love/hate relationship.

Interesting, because my experience has always been the exact opposite: stuff kept breaking on Windows, but Linux (and FreeBSD before that) has proven to be quite stable and reliable for me. I hear so many conflicting accounts on this (in this thread, and before) that I wonder what the cause of that is.

To be clear: I consider your (and other people's similar) experiences completely valid; I just wonder where the differences are. You see something similar with people reporting experiences with Debian/Ubuntu vs. Arch/Void etc, where some say one worked horribly for them and kept breaking and the other was very stable, and others report exactly the opposite!

The only serious issue I can recall was on my very budget HP laptop I got in a bind where the WiFi didn't work as Realtek didn't upstream the drivers for that when I got it (they did after a while), so I had to manually compile and load them: not something I would expect someone without Linux experience being able to do. Other than that, everything (Bluetooth, webcam, WiFi, sound) has worked fine on two Dell XPS's, that HP, and four ThinkPads for about 15 years now (although there were undoubtedly issues that I have forgotten about, none of these machines stood out as "problematic on Linux").

I honestly think it has to do with how much time people have. In all fairness my experience is similar to others in that after the 8-10h fighting with it I probably spent all my time outside of my day job using it without any problem. But I basically had no life outside of this at the time. Others either use Linux for a living or somehow can manage their time really well.

When you feel like you have all the time it isn't an issue but after I barely got away from a very busy and very long work and all I want to do is rest for 2h and watch some entertainment or edit some document/form or even keep up with a hobby project and Linux eats away my evening/weekend, that's a different experience.

But I still like Linux a lot, the community makes it worth the fight.

I used to have issues with conflicting library versions.

But this was to do with Software I was working on requiring legacy versions. I found that docker got rid of this.

Every now and again something would happen and I'd have to fix something after an update but it was very stable. I'm finding administering a Windows network is much the same. Microsoft just released an update that nuked my SMBv1 shares. So I had to fall back to SFTP. I probably should have been using that all along as it allows for a much more secure network.

One incredibly annoying thing on desktop Linux is losing sound every time I unplug my headphones and plug them back in.

On the other hand, the annoyances from Windows (general sluggishness, pop up advertising, Explorer never remembering how I want things viewed, etc) are now really starting to outweigh the annoyances on Linux, so ultimately I don’t think it matters.

You SOUND reasonable... But... Try to write a script on windows that takes in a URL with an "=" character and replace that with a "-"

Try to write a 100 line script in CMD. Oops, actually it needs to be in powershell. Convert the CMD script to Powershell.

Program has an update? Time to reinstall the entire program. How could we possibly remember your settings? No... You need to do that all over again in this UI that changes to a new size on every page.

Oh, admin access wasn't available or we didn't bother to ask? Don't worry, I already know what to do. You wanted this on the C drive in %appdata%. What? You have a small SSD C drive only for the OS but your programs are installed on massive HDDs? Well that sounds like a YOU problem for not using our OS correctly.

Backing up a game data? We got you. That's why we created %USERPROFILE%/Games to replace %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Games. Oh you're a developer but your game might not be unique? That's fine, just use %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Games/Games. Oh you want admin access because you're installing a root kit... I mean anti cheat program? That's fine, I give you permission to use %appdata% or %userdata% to bypass the user having to have admin access. That would just be inconvenient. Also we duplicately installed the data to every previously mentioned folder just incase some program needs it. However, we are only reading from 1 source... Per line. Ish. We need all of them, to be clear, but most of the changes are read directly from only one of these duplicated install locations. The others are critical dependencies that corrupt the OS if you delete them, so don't do that.

We installed your game to C:\Game. Oh, you wanted to put it where literally every other game is? Well we uninstalled part of it and then re-installed most of it in C:\Program Files(x86)\Game\Game. Oh you didn't want it in the games dir? Fine. Specify a custom path. C:\Program Files(x86)\Game? Fine. We put it in C:\Program Files(x86)\Game\Game. Oh still not ok? Well literally too bad because the registry files are hard coded to where we installed it.

Also, we created C:\Program Files\Game as a second install just for fun. Also, it's installed in %appdata% for no real reason. IDK. Game dev hard you're not allowed to criticize me. Also, here's a shortcut on your desktop, and start menu, and again in the start menu, and we created a new folder in the start menu with a shortcut to the program but it actually links to the uninstaller instead.

Inspired! Still grinning, thank you.

> All I am saying is every platform exists for a reason and has issues.

Hardly an inspiring sales pitch for Windows.

The reality is that Microsoft allowed a lot of things to stagnate in Windows that it shouldn't have:

  - the C runtime
  - the terminal and shell
  - UTF-8 support (lol)
  - package installation
  - CLI admin tooling

To their credit, they've been doing a ton of catch-up work on all of those things lately. Yes, PowerShell is nice. Yes there's a lot of very nice APIs and protocols. Active Directory is good enough (though I think Microsoft may be resting on its laurels with AD).

Impressions made 20 years ago continue to be true-ish now, though, again, Microsoft is finally making progress towards remediating those, but inertia counts for a lot. Eventually, maybe, just maybe, Windows might recover a lot of the mind-share it lost to Linux.

This is a business where mind-share is kind. It's interesting to see a number of companies that benefited enormously from mind-share they built then fail to keep it up. Mind-share is the biggest lock-in.

> The very things that make Linux powerful and controllable like shared library all over the place, package managers, and more make it more fragile and time consuming to administer.

How is

    apt update
    apt upgrade

to make ones whole system is up-to-date fragile or cumbersome?

Upgrading to a whole new major version means basically the same, just change repository sources and use apt full-upgrade, one can even continue to work while that's happening - try that on windows..

> did feel like I was in control up until distro maintainers decide things for me and my only choice is to beg and plead and be told to fork it if I disagreed.

Assuming that begging and pleading actually happened for a legitimate reason (sometimes some maintainers can indeed be a bit of an arse, iow., humans are humans); how does that compare to Windows/Microsoft where you cannot even get close to anybody of the team to voice your needs or complaints, at least if you're not friend with one by accident (and seemingly even working there may not even give you the chance)?

IMO that complaint really reads like "it's not 100% perfect, so it's way worse than on the other side, where I cannot even do the same, nor have _any_ power over my system, at all". I'm still just baffled about the different standards that Windows and Linux is held up against.

I also need to pile on:

"I spent at least 8-10 hours a week getting things to work on Linux"

This is ridiculous. I've used Linux exclusively for 10+ years. You're either not telling the whole truth of your use case, or you're in the bottom 5% of tech literacy, or you're obsessive.

Those to me sound like the words of a user with incompatible hardware, or maybe a user that installed LFS or Gentoo. Hell, I'm a seasoned linux user but installing an Archlinux from scratch with full disk encryption is still a full day's work on fully compatible hardware. Let's not cast the first stone just yet.

"A full day's work" is still one 8-10 hours. If you go a single week without needing to tinker with your installation significantly, you're still spending less time on administration than the OP claimed to be.

A Gentoo install does not take 8-10 hours a week to maintain. Even installing either of Gentoo or Arch Linux is only a full day's of work if you go off script from the default install instructions.

What were you doing to it for 8-10 hours? A week?

This is mind boggling to me. I’ve run Debian as my main workstation OS for years now, and I’m not doing 8-10 hours a year maintenance, if you don’t count the actual time running aptitude updates/upgrades (and that’s not a lot either). I’m not even running “stable”.

Yeah this is strange to me. Besides periodically telling it to update, I haven’t had to tinker, tweak or fix anything on my Dell XPS 13 laptop since I installed Linux on it shortly after buying it almost two years ago.

> I can see where OP is coming from but it sounds like he hasn't allowed him/herself to learn to do things the windows way.

I think that's an unkind way of phrasing it although I get what you probably mean. I know more people like me who started with Windows and had used it for years and suddenly... on Linux (or a Mac, to a degree) everything made sense and what was annoying and tedious was suddenly easy and intuitive.

You can absolutely know the Windows way and hate it. And the author of this post was just critical, whereas I actually hate it. Working on Windows feels like working with my hands tied behind my back and I don't think that will ever change.

Working on Linux is also hands tied behind my back because distro maintainers are basically dictators you have no influence over because you don't pay them in any way, in fact they donate their valuable time to you.

But I get your sentiment, linux feels better than windows but I am surprised you didn't try to do things outside of the strict documented ways of your distro initially like most people.

The author isn't just being critical, their criticism is wrong because they are comparing Linux things without mentioning the tools you use in windows to do similar things. The difference is, while windows has powershell, wmi, and tons of other tools and features, you can do so much with it's equivalent of the DE that it is easy to think that is all there is to it.

> Working on Linux is also hands tied behind my back because distro maintainers are basically dictators you have no influence over because you don't pay them in any way, in fact they donate their valuable time to you.

What you think MS cares more about your concenrs because the couple of bucks you throw them? This is not the reality we live in.

Meanwhile Linux distros have public bug trackers an the devs are infinitely easier to reach than Windows devs. And unlike Windows you do have the source and build scripts to all components if you want something that the devs don't care for.

No.. with windows I never have to care about MS because I don't use a package repo, all the apps I use (many open source) , are supported directly by the dev without a middle man.

8 to 10 hours? Not my experience at all and I am pretty esoteric in my approach - I use xmonad among other things.

I've switched various OSes in my life, adapting to them and adapting them to my needs as possible NOT trying to bring the old one paradigm in the new OS. PowerShell IMVHO might be more powerful than shell scripts BUT is so horrid just in mere language terms that I doubt more than very few Windows users would learn it.

Consider a thing: usability matter.

A second one: my OS is mine, not one that decide on my back, surprise with silent upgrades that lock shutdown or bootup, that show ads inside something bought to work with etc. All this characteristics makes Windows a crappy system no matter any paradigm. In Windows the user is not at the center, is just a data cow to be milked giving back crumbs in exchange.

GNU/Linux is still crappy for many reasons, but at least have a certain usability and stability, witch make it far less crappy than Windows.

In Enterprise terms Windows have done far more work than GNU/Linux witch formally makes Windows admin a far easier job in an enterprise, however I see Windows admins always stressed and without much free time to evolve the infra they manage, while GNU/Linux ones sometimes are stressed but not for most of the time and those who want can spare time to improve...

Windows is a product made to munge money, nothing wrong with that but that's means that's an anti-user product. And that's matter MUCH.

I use linux exclusively for ~15 years on all my computers. Last year i bought a Ryzen5 PC with an RTX3070 after only using laptops for around 10 years. I absolutely expected difficulties with the GPU but it was all smooth sailing from the beginning. I through the newest Ubuntu on there and checked install non-free during the installation. I haven't had to deal with drivers at all for years now.