you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say.

I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come.

To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me.

Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead.

The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.

People are acting like Linus Sebastian and that other guy didn't JUST RECENTLY demonstrate Linux to still be a tough sell to non-linux gurus for daily driving.

He deliberately shitcanned his system to generate clicks. What are people going to say if an uppity linux fanboy youtuber shows himself deleting system32 and then crying about Windows is unusable for non-Windows gurus for daily driving? They're going to say he's an idiot and move on.

When I instruct my package manager to uninstall your desktop environment, and the package manager says, "You are about to delete critical system components. Are you sure? (yes/no)" and I type in "yes" I expect my package manager to uninstall the desktop environment. That is the correct thing for it to do. Anything else is the wrong thing to do.

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." -Douglas Adams

Let's not forget, that while he did kind of shrug and agree to remove everything... that was a problem in the packaging spec.

The package (Steam, if memory serves?) should not have had the other packages referenced as they were. The dependency/requirement resolution was faulty...

Then he didn't truly take in the message and this is the result we get.

There's plenty of "probably say no if you don't know what this means" in what he ignored. Fault is all over.

    - His distribution of choice [or] the repository supporting it
    - him for not reading and acting accordingly
    - sheer chance

Had he chosen another distribution at random, there's little chance that would have happened.

If he repeated it on the same one now, it wouldn't happen. When you choose a niche distribution, you get niche problems.

My entire family manages fine on 'bleeding edge' Fedora, yet it doesn't market itself this way. Packaging is specifically in their domain of expertise

This isn't to say Linux is for everyone, but I really wish for a more fair representation.

As the reporters they should have dug in a bit more. They become part of the problem, in a sense, by not clarifying where there truly be dragons.

> There's plenty of "probably say no if you don't know what this means" in what he ignored.

Users will pretty much always click what they think will make the goal they're trying to accomplish work. Usually "yes" or whatever the default is.

Indeed, and a tool that does what it's told is a good tool

The packaging snafu was unfortunate, but beyond preventing him from having the ability, I don't know how it could have improved

The spec shouldn't have been so egregiously incorrect. Pretending it didn't happen... how is something both powerful and safe?

I don't know how anything could be made to take arbitrary input and sort it out to meaningful work

It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it. And it's still a miserable experience. On the other hand, if I just install a batteries included Linux distro I get something I'm not necessarily thrilled about, but I can go pretty much straight to work. And if I spend a few days, I can set up a system that's exactly tailored the way I want it to be, eats an order of magnitude less RAM than Windows, and doesn't regularly break itself by forcing updates on me, changing settings from under me, etc.

MacOS is somewhat better than Windows(less garbage to hose off), but it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware it runs on.

> It takes me days to make Windows usable for myself by hosing all the garbage off it.

I guess it's what you're used to. I don't find Windows decrapification to be that much more effort than Linux configuration.

> it's not worth the money of buying the overpriced unrepairable and unupgradeable hardware

For your use case, presumably not.

The ship seems to have sailed for upgradable Apple hardware (and I expect Apple did their homework and discovered 90% of Mac Pro systems were never upgraded anyway) but I still appreciate the advantages of hardware-software integration, nice form factor and battery life, unified CPU/GPU memory, etc.

>I guess it's what you're used to.

Exactly. All these exchanges of experiences boil down to people rationalising their own preferences, which are really just about familiarity. I do it too. I'm really just more familiar with Linux systems because I used it since I was 10-12, and as a main OS since I was about 14(I'm 30 now).

My view is that Windows being more user friendly is really just a myth. Most non-technical people use their Windows PCs or macs for the same 4 different tasks they always have. Ask them to do something new or do some troubleshooting and they'll struggle with it and get nowhere. Whether they're staring at a terminal window with no idea what to type or a "troubleshooting wizard" that offers no useful advice and links to an MSDN article with no useful information, is really irrelevant. They'll still need help from a technical person.

And technical people like us all just prefer what we're more familiar with too.

Wow, that is surprising. It takes me like 20 minutes at best. Then again I have quite a bit of experience with the platform.

Sure, attempting to make Windows into Linux by “decrapifying” it is harder, but if you use Windows as intended and upload all your documents to Microsoft’s cloud it is easier for the vast vast majority of users.

Windows breaking itself with updates is less a symptom of Windows and more of a side-effect of “decrapification”. I’ve seen a pretty damn large sample size of windows users undergoing windows updates and Windows Update does really not break computers other than by annoyingly changing your defaults to Microsoft stuff “woops, by accident” but if you do stuff like use Edge as your default browser it stops breaking.

Apple forces you to use their defaults, Microsoft theirs, and Google theirs. When you accept these companies operating system is not Linux, and stop acting like they are Linux, and stop acting like you own your windows PC, they do become pretty simple to use.

If you want a PC you can own, you use Linux. Linux is great. My grandmother uses Microsoft Windows in S mode with edge as her browser. Her photos get backed up. She only uses Edge at 175% DPI scaling and maybe looks up a few family photos. It is easier for her than using Linux because she’s familiar with it and because nobody has taught her that unless she is using Windows for education without a decrapify script she is doing things all wrong.

You're absolutely correct

meanwhile, .bashrc, .bash_login, .bash-profile, .profile, /etc/profile, and /etc/environment all still exist, are poorly documented, and if you want a GUI for them, you have to build it yourself.

> are poorly documented

There are many things you can criticize Linux for, but this is not one of them.

.bashrc, .bash_login, .bash_profile: bash(1) manpage

.profile, /etc/profile is a mechanism from the bourne shell, so you would go sh(1) as long as its not bash again. Otherwise mksh(1) or dash(1).

/etc/environment is pam_env(8)

As I said, poorly documented. In fact, there is no defensible reason why they all need to exist.

And I didn't understand anything you said after and including bourne shell. I don't know if Windows has any documentation for its environment variables program, but I have never needed documentation for it because it's not brain dead. It's a GUI. An interface which is self-documenting.

> An interface which is self-documenting.

I wanna see you find the right dialogue windows in the control panel.

Would you know how to enable/disable IPv6 from your head?

I have a GUI which has a checkbox for IPv4 and a checkbox for IPv6. Checkboxes are self-explanatory. And if I hover over them they say something like "Use servers reachable over IPv6 (do not enable if you don't have IPv6 connectivity)". And yes I didn't have to look up how to do that. It's staring me in the face every time I open the program.

There are plenty of GUIs for them, e.g. emacs, vim, nano, pico, joe, jed, etc.

LOL. notepad.exe too. now that you mention it, the command line allows you to select text with the mouse. so technically cmd.exe is a GUI

Patently incorrect.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Bash-Star...

These files are all shell scripts and largely empty before distribution-specific customizations, there isn't much to document there. They are commands that you want to run in startup.

As opposed to the amazing Windows Registry? Those who throw stones ...

Nevertheless, your criticisms are fair. However, unlike on Windows, Linux is actually working on that. Distributions like NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are starting to take the whole "put everything under control" very seriously.

I see no comparable efforts on Windows.

I've never had to set an environment variable in the windows registry. I'm talking about simply adding a directory to the Path or setting JAVA_HOME. Windows GUI needs tons of work but it's at least 20 years ahead of linux. It gets one year more ahead of linux every year.

AD, gpos and mdm csps go very far. this is windows business bread and butter

> By comparison, setting up the environment on Windows or MacOS takes no more than a fem minutes.

My wife is constantly taking her laptop into her IT staff.

The main difference between Windows and Linux is that corporate IT staff are willing to futz with Windows but not Linux.

The main difference between macOS and Linux is that macOS users will spend money to futz with macOS but not Linux.

This is because corporate IT staff are largely responsible for Windows not working. Their endless and senseless configuration changes make Windows not work.

To be fair, fractional scaling on Windows is kind of garbage, at least if you don't have the same scaling set on every display. If I have one screen at 100% and one at 125%, any application will look okay only on the display it was started on, and blurry on any others. I don't think the situation is any better on Linux, but I'm pretty sure that as long as you're using Wayland (only), it's not any worse.