"There is valuable knowledge worth learning in the technology" != "this is strictly better software on every axis and you should switch to it for your daily work"

As someone that learned to program on BSD and shortly thereafter, Mac OS X and Linux....

I honestly don't know how people use Windows machines as a dev environment 24/7. It would drive me mad. Everything's so wonky and weird. Everything from symlinks to file permissions is just backwards and fucky.

Back in the day it was alright because Microsoft gave you a fairly good dev environment in the form of Visual Studio, with the focus of it being squarely on desktop application development instead of tinkering with the system or running web services. It didn't stop people from doing it anyways but it's part of the reason why everything is so janky. Then the web took over and Microsoft tried for ages to make .net and Windows Server work until they realised they can't tune an OS that was never meant for backend development and just put all their focus on WSL. In the year 2024 there is almost no reason to be doing any non-desktop dev in a Windows environment unless it's on WSL. And you get the benefit of having an actually sane window management system and external display handling unlike MacOS, not to mention how nice PowerToys is.

I mean this in the nicest possible way: 5 years is likely not long enough for the “just work, stupid” desire to really, really, really set in. Nor is a couple of months enough time for the potential rough edges of desktop Linux to set in.

Given that I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop since I was 11, I'm not worried.

The reason I switched was because Windows didn't work. Win11's desktop makes early-2010s KDE look like a smooth, bug-free experience. My laptop (a 10th gen X1 thinkpad) was plagued with driver problems. At least twice a month, I'd have to reboot when I joined a meeting and discovered my mic wouldn't un-mute. Switching to Ububtu solved both of these problems, and I don't have to deal with an awkwardly bifurcated environment where a couple of my CLI tools run in WSL while everything else is native. Oh, and my Zephyr build times are a good 25% faster now.

I’ve been using Windows throughout my childhood and start of my CS career - now I use Windows for specific software (audio/music) and Linux for developing (about 8 years I guess). I had a 1-year stint with macOS because I was developing an iOS app, and have been the troubleshooter for people with macs at my previous job, so I consider myself somewhat ‘multilingual’ when it concerns OSs.

As a power user, Linux is just so much nicer. I constantly get frustrated, especially with macOS, about stuff that I can’t easily. In Linux my stuff works and if it doesn’t it can be made to work (usually). In Windows/Mac it’ll often take considerable effort to make the system work the way I want, or it’s just not possible.

I think with proprietary software ‘it just works’ is only a thing if you’re happy with the basic experience that is tuned to the average person. If you have more complex needs, you should be using Linux (and if you know your stuff or use the right distro, things will likely also ‘just work’).

After 17 years of using Linux I realized that I was tired of tinkering with shit, so I caved and bought a macbook air. Not even two years later I was back on Linux, because I realized that the amount of tinkering I do on Linux is actually very small; the experience I already paid my time for means that Linux is simply easy for me to use, while MacOS is a pain in the ass in innumerable small unexpected ways. The path of least resistance, for me, is to continue with Linux.

I work in IT, so I’m paid for my time to solve all kinds of issues with Windows. At home, such issues are unpaid work. Linux has the advantage of having issues be mostly of my own choosing. Stick to the golden path and you’ll hardly ever have them. And the easy configuration and recovery options allow you to jump into a new install with minimal hassle.

Everyone will have the same headaches with Windows as Microsoft’s choices are required these days. Millions of people have quite lucrative jobs solving them. I’d rather not bring work home so I run Linux.

FYI, Ubuntu is a heavily advertised distro. Its pretty bottom barrel for quality.

If you want a modern linux distro, try Fedora Cinnamon or something that isnt on Debian branch.

It is not surprising that you posted this flame bait from a throwaway account.

What is wrong with Debian?

Buddy, Debian is a server distro that is outdated AF. It should never be used as a desktop distro because it doesnt have modern hardware drivers or software codecs.

Use a desktop-based distro.

If you ever want to know why people think Linux Desktop sucks, just ask them what their experience was. It will be 100% debian-family.

Debian Sid makes a better desktop distro than Ubuntu. The drivers are up to date, the instability is greatly exaggerated and installing nonfree codecs is easy (so easy with virtually any distro that it shouldn't even enter into the equation...)

This said, I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is rolling release yet more stable than Sid. Rolling release + extensive testing + automatic snapshotting gets you the best of all worlds.

Bruh. I use Debian and Arch interchangeably, barely notice the difference.

Yeah, that’s why when I update my Arch MacBook Air once a year or two it works well, but Debian dies and needs to reinstall for some unknown reason. Before that, I believed Debian is so very stable. My experience shows the opposite.

It is _stable_, not outdated. You are practically guaranteed that if you’re running Debian Stable, and live only within the official apt ecosystem, you will not have software-based instability.

Grandma doesn't care about this. They just want their screen to work.