I've used Linux on the desktop since 1994. In all that time I recall one breaking update on Debian affecting the wireless network driver. I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and never had any issues like you describe. That is across multiple machine types from Dell, Lenovo and HP. The same is true for my wife who is non-technical and has no issues using Linux (Ubuntu).
As another case in addition to the multiple I mentioned already, I'd vouch for the majority of Android phones running fine without issues caused by new updates, I mention Android since there are people who use their phone exclusively for computing, and oddly.
Summary, use Ubuntu on the desktop, pick a decent manufacturer like Dell, HP or Lenovo (I prefer Dell and/or Alienware from Dell or Lenovo) and maybe pick one that sells with Linux or made for Linux to further enhance your success. I've heard System 76 makes good systems too.
There is a learning curve to do everything and i do occasionally switch to windows for some games. I am a senior engineer as well.
I think the biggest thing holding linux desktops back is not technical really it's a human element, like the services to talk on a forum, having things setup ahead of time for the user etc...
Windows has a learning curve which people went through if you want to switch to Linux you need to learn. Just as if you start on Linux and wanted to switch to windows you'd have a learning curve.
Some will trot out their anecdotes that they've never experienced even one issue in decades and others will have showstopping issues at the installer. Both will be right. Anything that doesn't ship with Linux preinstalled is a total crapshoot in my experience of 25 years of using Linux on desktops and laptops. Chromebooks and Android and SteamDecks prove it can be reliable, but it takes coordinated manufacturer effort. Anything else is always a gamble of current support or future updates breaking something that previously was working.
Linux issues aren't necessarily harder to solve than Windows issues, but since software compatibility still remains the motivation for average users to switch still remains minimal, and if you recommend the switch you instantly become that person's IT support.
The LTT videos where they try to game on Linux and experience a range of interesting issues that require semi-advanced Linux-fu to fix is also a good illustration of this.
I've only ever tried Ubuntu based distros (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, KDE Neon), so maybe that's the problem, but I doubt it, seeing as everyone always recommends Ubuntu based distros for beginners. Or maybe it's cause I have an Nvidia GPU, which might've been the cause for the worst problems, but Nvidia is really popular, so it's not like other people wouldn't experience those issues.
Also, you say "Linus Tech Tips is a jack ass channel" in reference to their Linux videos, are you saying that those videos are wrong or misleading? Because the videos showed you all the issues they ran into (and I found that their experience was almost identical to mine, having to spend days troubleshooting various issues, until finally getting it working properly). Are you suggesting that they lied about the issues that they came across? Cause to me it just seemed like a video showing their experience, it didn't seem biased or anything to me at all.
Whenever someone says that they've never had major issues with Linux, I wonder whether we're even talking about the same thing. Did I accidentally download the wrong thing or something? Cause I can't imagine how someone would be able to use Linux and just happen to never come across them.
I wonder why launching a terminal to fix something on Linux is seen as esoteric, but editing registry entries in Windows isn't.
Listen, if you're using Linux and you've never spent hours trying to find out how to install something or fix a problem deep in some obscure configuration file somewhere, are you even on Linux? Don't lie to yourself: you use Linux exactly because you enjoy doing that and pretending like everything works and you never have to fiddle with anything is just dishonest.
This is different from parent's statement that "things stop working".
I definitely spent countless hours with tweaks and fixes (although the pattern is radically different between desktop and laptop systems), but I've essentially never experienced that any component "stopped working".
There is only a single exception - an ethernet card that required a 3rd party package, and an update was buggy (later, the driver got upstreamed).
Based on my old desktop experience with Windows, it was actually inherently more unstable than Linux, as installers could do whatever they wanted - in Linux, package managers track the changes in the file system instead (to a large extent but not fully, although in worst case, excluding packaging bugs, the leftovers are just data).
- Going from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 broke Xorg (maybe a problem with the AMD drivers, I lacked knowledge at that time to look into fixing it).
- I have occasionally gotten kernel panics under OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, I seem to recall a time when watching videos on YouTube via Firefox would reliably cause it to happen, I don't remember at all how I fixed it at the time; maybe an update or running from a snapshot... or was it under Arch and I installed the LTS kernel?
- And a problem of my own making: around the time when the KDE project started transitioning to Plasma 5 I was going back and forth between Arch and OpenSUSE TW and wound up trying Plasma 5 before it was really ready for use and I had a difficult time for a week or two.
I also wound up wrecking an Intel NUC the day I got it by putting it to sleep when it had an issue that suspending to RAM would wreck the thing, but that's more of an Intel failure than a GNU/Linux failure.
Anyway, I used Windows from version 3.1.1 until I wrecked my 7 install in 2012 so I've seen plenty of blue screens in my life, and I remember the iMac I used Yosemite on hard rebooting every time I started a Xubuntu VM in VirtualBox, so I have no issue just using GNU/Linux even if I do encounter some warts every now and again.
no, on other OSes you just cannot fix it. e.g. for instance on my computer I have a win32 install and for some reason on it the ethernet network speed seems locked to 100mbit-ish while on linux I get my gigabit ethernet performance. what can I do to debug this on windows when i tried the usual install / remove drivers, etc etc ? absolutely nothing, I just learn to live with the issue like most people on that OS.
If they’re running Linux, they can’t even do those things.
If they can't login or the screen breaks they run to geek squad. Under no condition will they claim manufacture warranty on an internal part without a techie recommending this and removing the card/part for them
But the reason I'm on windows in the first place is that I left Linux several years ago when I bought a second monitor and Linux would sometimes work great but sometimes fail to display anything on either of them at startup. That just was not useable. I tried again about a year after and same issue - I would like to go back to Linux but I don't have time to roll the dice on being able to start work in the morning or have to ssh in from another device to figure out what happened to my display.
I know some use cases are different than mine so I wouldn’t know them, but I always wonder when I see people complaining about things like battery life (I consistently have at least double or more for Linux than on Windows for the same workloads across laptops, both 32 (aka old) and 64 bit), missing or broken drivers (I don’t use gpus locally) etc.
My non tech acquaintances have issues with Windows all the time but they just ignore them. Seems when installing Linux people suddenly want perfection?
I got an espresso machine last year. I was looking for a grinder. A huge chunk of online coffee folks suggested buying a weird grinder from China and swapping out burr sets and and and and ... and all I wanted was a turnkey grinder. I just wanted coffee. I didn't need to make a hobby of the equipment itself.
This also exists with motorcycles. I just want to ride a motorcycle. I don't have any interest in the endless mod culture of motorcycles.
And so Linux on the desktop. Linux on the desktop is great if you enjoy having to actively sysadmin your work environment, but it's shit if you just want to get some work done. The people who run it full time are people, mostly, who like the hacking part of the hobby in addition to the using part of the hobby. And I don't see that changing.
There was definitely a window in the late 90s when this could've been different, but then Apple moved to OS X, and I think that window closed forever.
My wife who is non-technical uses it to get stuff done, all that she ever did on Windows, no issues after years of use. I know of other non-technical users who use it without issue. They probably know many who use it without issue. So your case seems to be isolated and unusual.
If you never use WiFi or two screens then maybe you shouldn't dismiss other people's issues with Linux as being unusual.
I actually laughed. "It's fine! Just don't do things that most people do all the time! In fact I think those things are dumb!"
Whoops! How stupid of me. This is Linux, I'm holding it wrong. Unplugging a screen from a sleeping Linux computer is not reasonable user behavior, so an unresponsive black screen it is.
Yeah, I probably could have restarted the UI service manually by hopping over to another shell but it's flat out faster to hard reboot. Linux is still a 3rd tier desktop experience.
Im using pop which is a Ubuntu flavor. I’ve had one problem upgrading (some package was ahead of where it needed to be..). It got resolved with a few terminal commands. (I think because I installed steam..) it’s not perfect, the software installer could be better, but man it’s pretty great. Window managers are fantastic.
Honestly after some adjustment I’m staying here. I’m not dependent on any one company and I feel the OS is respectful unlike the commercial offerings.
I donno what work you want to get done but I've been getting work done on Linux for over 15 years without any issues unless they were my own creation by messing about/tinkering with what was provided out of the box by the distro - for those cases, I knew I was into risky waters and was willing to accept the risks (as it happened, I was always able to overcome those and never lost any data etc).
If you do a fresh install and do things like, use web based apps, manage documents/worksheets (say using Libreoffice) and maybe run your business application, I don't know why things would go to shit. Keep your base software changes to security fixes and don't upgrade unless you have to - things should basically chug along.
My current laptop is an HP Envy from Costco and I was kind of shocked that everything just worked, even the fingerprint reader.
And then it happened - one day my brightness keys quit working. Why? I have no idea and haven't spent time to find out. You are correct, it still happens, but it has been rare for me where it used to be common.
This isn't to say that your complaints aren't valid or that you're misrepresenting your own experience, but it doesn't further the discussion and depending on the context with which you are raising it can be seen as a disingenuous way of trying to discredit or undermine Linux as a viable option.
That is to say, in isolation your comment is fine. If a thread on a topic that is related to the Linux desktop only features people citing their unspecific list of issues with desktop Linux then it stop being a reasonable good faith discussion and starts becoming ideological Linux bashing.
- Fedora Silverblue wants to reduce software reliance on the OS as a runtime. Relying on Flatpaks allows you to freeze most dependencies in-place and have a fully reproducible (if a bit redundant) runtime environment.
- NixOS wants to eliminate software reliance on the OS by removing the OS altogether. A default NixOS install only has a symlink to sh in the /bin folder, everything else needs to be dynamically loaded by the package manager through the Nix Store (big nuclear soup folder with hashed/labelled package tarballs).
Both OSes have some rough edges that make them hard to recommend, but it does suggest a silver lining for Linux packaging in the future. It's definitely a problem, just more of a distro-specific one rather than a Linux-specific one.
Like I said in another reply: do you have details on what happens when things break. I have never seen it myself and maybe the community can prevent it if they would know.
To be fair, these laptops were quite old and I installed windows on another identical laptop, but Windows had totally broken Bluetooth and you couldn’t change the display brightness, which was way more annoying than the relatively minor Ubuntu issue with RAM. I never managed to fix those issues on Windows, so I’m not bashing on Linux here.
Eventually I bought her an M1 MacBook Air. She hasn’t complained once.
The worst part is that when they do stop working, I have forgotten the horrible kludge of steps I had to go through to get something working the first time around. Of course the answers are out there, but finding the one answer that worked on the distro I used? Needle, meet haystack. I feel this is due to a reliance on CLI to do almost everything. CLI wouldn't be so problematic if those steps worked on every distro. This is the reason that fragmentation is holding LoD back IMO.
And over 25 years of Windows updates, I've had breakages too. And I've had disastrous upgrades from XP->7, and 8->10. I'd say I get one bad driver update with Windows every couple of years or so. Windows just seems to not break the main things like the desktop.
On the other hand, I've run a linux desktop for quite a few years: Arch/sway for 2yrs, Ubuntu/kde for 4yrs, and Fedora/gnome for a year. I had zero problems with Arch, a few problems with Ubuntu, and zero with Fedora.
The year of the linux desktop is now largely irrelevant because so many people are using other devices. Still, developers are now using it as their primary driver, as you can develop for the web or for Android on it.
I did the same thing, it wasn't until I used Arch Linux that I really started to understand Linux. It turned I wasn't looking for a wannabe-MacOS distro, I just really liked a minimalist Gnome 3.12+ (when Gnome hit the sweet spot) or i3 based Linux that had zero background processes, installed programs, or anything that I didn't opt-in to. If you want MacOS just use MacOS.
On Arch I could run `top` and know what everything is which had amazing performance and battery benefits.
Also learning Linux deeply (ie, the directory structures and meaning of /usr /etc, logging, managing services with SystemD, managing diskspace size, proper bash scripting w/ all of the unix tools, etc) really helped me at my job as a programmer ssh'ing into servers.
MacOS is generally very stable, of course, because they also control the hardware, but I have experienced unexpected reboots on MacBooks.
I find windows pretty frustrating and opaque, I certainly don’t know how anyone could work on it effectively. Having to find and install third party software packages just to get hardware going is a right nightmare. Recently my windows 11 (I knew it around for gaming) was complaining that it couldn’t activate a safety feature, memory consistency checking or something, due to outdated drivers, and listed stuff for hardware I no longer owned. I ended up on a multi-hour trip down the google rabbit hole to try to fix that because there were no updates and the official line is people should never uninstall any drivers!
All I’m saying is YMMV, maybe you just grok windows but not Linux. It’s not universal though.
Yep, exactly this. A portion of the Linux Desktop community is so high on its own farts that it can't tolerate the idea that people might have legitimate reasons for not using Linux as their desktop. If you have a problematic use case, their suggestion is to get a different use case.
If you want to chastise me for echoing parent's sentiment then that's fine. I'm used to getting grief literally any time I complain about anything in Linux. Remarkably, the same is not true when I complain about Windows. Funny that.
In 2023, you should not try as many distros as possible. They are all similar enough. You should try hardware designed for Linux, instead of one forcing Linux developers to reverse-engineer WiFi and suspend to make it work. Ideally, try it preinstalled. I am happy with my Librem 15, no tinkering is ever required.
It's funny because this is, in fact, my reason for dumping Windows and macOS.
The only difference is that I can't open the hood if I'm on Windows or macOS. So, if something breaks there, I'm simply screwed.
Between forced upgrades on macOS (sure, you can keep your OS back, but things like XCode, for example, will do their damndest to force you to upgrade) and random "Windows Update" stupidity ("Nope, no work for you! I must spend 30 minutes upgrading. Oh, by the way, do you want to upgrade to Windows 11 and we put the GTFO button in 6 point italic on your other monitor and we'll harass you again tomorrow.) I finally decamped for Linux permanently and haven't regretted it one iota.
I've tried linux 3 or so times over the years, always the "friendly" distros.
I've dropped it each time because while yes, things do work, they tend to STOP working. Drivers, updates, compatibility lag, whatever it is, linux often has me "under the hood" trying to fix stuff that is literally never an issue on another OS.
And i say this as someone who wants linux to be a thing. It's unquestionably healthy for linux to be a real option, ESPECIALLY given windows penchant for trying to sneak in more and more tracking and ads, but even as someone decently techy, I have frequently found linux to feel like gambling, with a question of "will it work today, or am I about to go on a 10 min to multihour rabbit hole hunt to fix something"