Using Windows after 15 years on Linux

Re:Using Windows after 15 years on Linux by badrabbit on Thursday April 07, 2022 @06:39PM (#30951161)

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.

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Re:Using Windows after 15 years on Linux by Beltalowda on Thursday April 07, 2022 @06:59PM (#30951334)

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").

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Re:Using Windows after 15 years on Linux by badrabbit on Thursday April 07, 2022 @11:02PM (#30952896)

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.

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Re:Using Windows after 15 years on Linux by xupybd on Thursday April 07, 2022 @07:34PM (#30951604)

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.

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