You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.
I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.
with that said I was blown away by the steamdecks support for AMD's APUs so I was looking for a laptop with the same generation APU to ensure support.
I was looking at framework(too big wants 13-14") dell xps (I don't like the new design)
Then HP released the ZBook Ultra G1a 14" and I brought it on the spot because it lined up before ram went to hell (128GB unified RAM).
They do have an ubuntu image but it's heavily patched, so I was running bleeding edge mesa for a few months and beta kernels for 6 months.
On Gentoo this isn't too bad but it wasn't a turn-key experience.
If you buy a computer from a brand that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, you also know it's going to work.
Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.
And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.
It is so consistent I don’t even question if a new game will work.
Nvidia drivers on the other hand could still use some work. All wired for me, so I can’t speak to your driver troubles.
I have a windows vm for photoshop and the few programs I can not run native.
I personally run Mint and find it very reliable and capable. It has a windows style interface and my only issues are some minor things with taskbar settings and window snapping. For comparison, I could write a few novels on my issues with windows.
If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
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Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.