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I stopped using Linux as my primary desktop OS around 2012. Until then I was an Arch user with my own desktop environment built on StumpWM and a hodge-podge of

I stopped using Linux as my primary desktop OS around 2012. Until then I was an Arch user with my own desktop environment built on StumpWM and a hodge-podge of hand-selected tools. There was no Gnome or KDE in my setup. I liked it quite a bit. I used Ubuntu on my laptops since I wanted to spend less time administering drivers and arcane configuration formats. This is a good list. I just got tired of the configuration formats, crappy drivers, inconsistencies, dependencies... I was irritated at how easy it was for Apple users to plug in a projector and have it just work. I was irritated by every update to some random library that would cause a sub-system to stop working. I hated having to spend any amount of time administering my desktop environment. To me it should just work and the less time I have to spend trawling forums, logs, and restarting processes to find the correct incantations of dependencies and configuration variables the better. I've stuck with my MacPro Retina, despite my early trepidation about a GUI-driven proprietary OS, because I've spent probably less than an hour in the last 4 years administering it. It's still snappy and works as well as it did on day one (also the hardware is nothing short of amazing). The only thing that sucks at this point is that the OpenGL drivers Apple ships are woefully out of date and I'm thinking of jumping to Windows unless something changes (damnit I wants me compute shaders). I still use Linux every single day... just in a VM, container, or on some server.

agentultra 11y ago
Oh... and integration with my devices too. I use hand-off to take calls from my phone on my MBPr all the time. I also use the Keynote app on my phone which controls the application on my laptop. The sync features I don't use as much only because I trust their cloud about as far as I can throw it. I don't remember Bluetooth or any device integration working well or at all on any Linux distro I've tried. Maybe that has changed but that kind of stuff is nice!
pera 11y ago
from StumpWM to OSX? ouch
- agentultra 11y ago
  I was not happy at first. :)
Frondo 11y ago
My counterpoint: as a full-time Mageia user on my laptop/workstation since 2011, my linux configuration knowledge has atrophied to the point of near-uselessness. Mageia is the first and only distribution I've ever tried that, on a variety of hardware, Just Works. Every hardware feature works out of the box, and with as little surprise as you'd expect (e.g. plugging in a monitor, using wifi out at a coffee shop, plugging in a printer). I've even done the distribution upgrades (e.g. version 3 to 4), which I was always scared of, and somehow those too just work. I literally cannot remember the last time I hand-edited a config file (not counting Apache configs on a Linode VPS with Ubuntu Server). I've had a chance to use recent versions of OS X, and I even experienced more crashing (not a lot, mind, but my linux laptop never crashes) than on this stock HP with mageia. Happy that you've found a solution that works for you, but I'm also extremely happy that I get to keep using Linux without spending one more second thinking about hand-editing configs! :)
cookiecaper 11y ago
I have a friend who went through much the same process. I converted him to full-time Linux usage, and he stuck with it for a good 5-6 years, but eventually went back to Windows as his host OS so that he could conveniently play games, connect projectors, modify photos and video, and do all of the other basic things that only Windows and OS X users get to do reliably. He still does all of his development and sysadmin work from a Linux VM that runs on his Windows host. I've considered doing this myself, especially with WINE taking eons to implement adequate DX11 support (most games released in the last 3 years won't work), but it's a plunge I haven't been able to make yet. I think I'm going to just set a Windows box right next to my Linux workstation and move the mouse, kb, and monitors over when I want to do something Windowsy. The ideal would be getting hardware that supported raw GPU passthrough, getting a spare GPU, and doing all of the Windows stuff in a VM (this allows you to get 90-95% of your full GPU performance, and have the card controlled by the Windows system), which would really be the ideal solution IMO. However, I found that even the full technical manuals rarely mentioned if the hardware had the IOMMU, the require capability (both the processor and the motherboard must support), and that by far the vast majority of hardware doesn't. I have a dual-boot partition now, but I use it probably about once every 9 months, and mostly just to poke around for a second and see if it has spontaneously combusted whilst unsupervised before rebooting back into my workstation OS. It's simply too much hassle to have my primary workstation offline for hours at a time while I game, because it hosts many services that my house relies on. I also have a Windows VM that I do most of my photo editing in.
zobzu 11y ago
we're soon in 2016, 4 years later. you might want to try again (with arch in particular). I've zero issue with Plasma 5. I plug my laptop into the projector and it just works ;-) I used to have that problem as well, like everyone else. But honestly its been a thing of the past since 2 years or so. Also, using Plasma ensure I don't have to fiddle with configuration. It's not as leet as stumpwm or many others, but its certainly more customizable and more easily than OSX - while still working out of the box, just like OSX.
lemming 11y ago
Yep. I'm glad that someone compiles a list like this every year so I'm not tempted to lose another week trying Linux again.
Shorel 11y ago
That's about the date I went back to Linux. I really hated that the old KDE4 was just a clone of WinXP, and later Gnome until 2010 was just a clone of OSX. Ubuntu's Unity is the first linux that's proud to be itself, and it shows.

agentultra 11y ago

Oh... and integration with my devices too. I use hand-off to take calls from my phone on my MBPr all the time. I also use the Keynote app on my phone which controls the application on my laptop. The sync features I don't use as much only because I trust their cloud about as far as I can throw it. I don't remember Bluetooth or any device integration working well or at all on any Linux distro I've tried. Maybe that has changed but that kind of stuff is nice!

pera 11y ago

from StumpWM to OSX? ouch

agentultra 11y ago
I was not happy at first. :)

Frondo 11y ago

My counterpoint: as a full-time Mageia user on my laptop/workstation since 2011, my linux configuration knowledge has atrophied to the point of near-uselessness. Mageia is the first and only distribution I've ever tried that, on a variety of hardware, Just Works. Every hardware feature works out of the box, and with as little surprise as you'd expect (e.g. plugging in a monitor, using wifi out at a coffee shop, plugging in a printer). I've even done the distribution upgrades (e.g. version 3 to 4), which I was always scared of, and somehow those too just work. I literally cannot remember the last time I hand-edited a config file (not counting Apache configs on a Linode VPS with Ubuntu Server). I've had a chance to use recent versions of OS X, and I even experienced more crashing (not a lot, mind, but my linux laptop never crashes) than on this stock HP with mageia. Happy that you've found a solution that works for you, but I'm also extremely happy that I get to keep using Linux without spending one more second thinking about hand-editing configs! :)

cookiecaper 11y ago

I have a friend who went through much the same process. I converted him to full-time Linux usage, and he stuck with it for a good 5-6 years, but eventually went back to Windows as his host OS so that he could conveniently play games, connect projectors, modify photos and video, and do all of the other basic things that only Windows and OS X users get to do reliably. He still does all of his development and sysadmin work from a Linux VM that runs on his Windows host. I've considered doing this myself, especially with WINE taking eons to implement adequate DX11 support (most games released in the last 3 years won't work), but it's a plunge I haven't been able to make yet. I think I'm going to just set a Windows box right next to my Linux workstation and move the mouse, kb, and monitors over when I want to do something Windowsy. The ideal would be getting hardware that supported raw GPU passthrough, getting a spare GPU, and doing all of the Windows stuff in a VM (this allows you to get 90-95% of your full GPU performance, and have the card controlled by the Windows system), which would really be the ideal solution IMO. However, I found that even the full technical manuals rarely mentioned if the hardware had the IOMMU, the require capability (both the processor and the motherboard must support), and that by far the vast majority of hardware doesn't. I have a dual-boot partition now, but I use it probably about once every 9 months, and mostly just to poke around for a second and see if it has spontaneously combusted whilst unsupervised before rebooting back into my workstation OS. It's simply too much hassle to have my primary workstation offline for hours at a time while I game, because it hosts many services that my house relies on. I also have a Windows VM that I do most of my photo editing in.

zobzu 11y ago

we're soon in 2016, 4 years later. you might want to try again (with arch in particular). I've zero issue with Plasma 5. I plug my laptop into the projector and it just works ;-) I used to have that problem as well, like everyone else. But honestly its been a thing of the past since 2 years or so. Also, using Plasma ensure I don't have to fiddle with configuration. It's not as leet as stumpwm or many others, but its certainly more customizable and more easily than OSX - while still working out of the box, just like OSX.

lemming 11y ago

Yep. I'm glad that someone compiles a list like this every year so I'm not tempted to lose another week trying Linux again.

Shorel 11y ago

That's about the date I went back to Linux. I really hated that the old KDE4 was just a clone of WinXP, and later Gnome until 2010 was just a clone of OSX. Ubuntu's Unity is the first linux that's proud to be itself, and it shows.