> “I don’t have time to tinker with my computer so I will run Linux on it…” > I find the lack of self awareness astonishing. You don't understand the context

> “I don’t have time to tinker with my computer so I will run Linux on it…” > I find the lack of self awareness astonishing. You don't understand the context. That is a comment from Linus, and he is going to run Linux on his laptop. So the comment is referring to either using a laptop that is reasonably well supported by Linux with no changes, or using the Apple one which at the time was not well supported. So he would have to tinker to get it working. Mind you, it's not really true that Linux = tinkering these days. I just got a new laptop with Windows on it. I thought I'll give it a try since I haven't used it for a few years. Hyper-V was pretty clunky inflexible but it worked. The console / graphics driver for the VMs is horrible and clunky, no apparent way to change that, probably some obscure registry option or 3rd party thing I'd have to download. After installing and setting up a few VMs, I was informed (for about the 15th time since booting) that Windows had something it needed to restart for. Upon return, all hyper-v images and snapshots were gone or corrupted. It wouldn't even start until I messed around with the filesystem. Until then the entire manager refused to start because some snapshots were corrupted or something. No option to ignore, delete, or try to recover them. Okay that's a pain in the butt, I'll start out just using ssh to get to some systems elsewhere. Hallelujah, ssh client is finally provided out of the box. Turns out the shell is the biggest piece of garbage and makes it impossible to do much over ssh. The internet browser is horribly slow and unresponsive. Guess I'll have to install something sane. I give up. I pick it up a couple days later and decide to have another try. The thing chews battery when it's suspended, it almost ran flat after a couple of days. No doubt I'd have to go in and tinker with settings or get a 3rd party thing to do it for me to improve that. Start trying to install another VM. The input system gets stuck thinking the down arrow key or pg down is being held. Then goes unresponsive. Corruption, data loss, crashes, at least a dozen reboots after about 2 solid days of using it (and achieving less than nothing) and that was with Windows mostly-installed already. Not to mention a poor out of the box environment for doing anything. I'm sure after installing a bunch of stuff on it and changing a bunch of settings it could be made to work okay. By contrast I ended up installing a Linux distro on it in about 30 minutes, one reboot, and that comes with editors and compilers and git and a reasonable web browser. Nothing had to be changed except screen brightness and track pad sensitivity. For me, for the work I do on my laptop, Linux works great out of the box and Windows seems to require a lot of tinkering. So a lot of it comes down to what you're doing with it I think. Windows is great for running games and Microsoft software I'm sure.