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It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint,

by ftl64 4y ago

It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot have taken so many hours of troubleshooting that could've been spent doing something actually productive. Windows has many issues, but it never decided to break on me in the middle of the day. For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one.

junkilo 4y ago
*NIX is the only viable choice for mission-critical desktop stability in 2023. But that isn't to say Windows isn't feature complete. It is still king when it comes to gaming. Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles. The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.
aNoob7000 4y ago
I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life has been good. I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.
xpil 4y ago
My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say, sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a kernel upgrade and so on. Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.
- ftl64 4y ago
  Mine's also almost stock, the only changes being tracking and startup menu/taskbar garbage disabled.
- LorenDB 4y ago
  For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though. GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files).
  - duckhelmet 4y ago
    @LorenD: "For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though. GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files)." How dare you not have a problem in a discussion on Linux. (Not just there yet :)
ajdude 4y ago
MacOS doesn't have the issues that you've described while giving you many of the same tools Linux has, in addition to support for most mainstream windows software. And while macOS isn't as free as Linux, it's certainly less "spyware" than windows.
- ftl64 4y ago
  Growing up in a developing country, until recently Apple devices (laptops/desktops especially) have been a bit out of price range for me. Although I can afford one now, my current laptop is nowhere near its end of life, and something in my soviet-scarcity-mentality-influenced mind doesn't feel right about upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. That said, Apple laptops look very convincing at the moment, and when the time comes they will probably be my first choice.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    One thing that helped me is realising that I should be selling ild electronics, so it goes to people that need it most. Instead of having it collect dust in the drawerr untill it becomes c dead and obsolete
  - EricE 4y ago
    One thing that more than balances it out for me - my Mac's have a lot longer of a lifespan than my Windows machines. I have a larger up front cost, but get far more out of them over time. I average at least 7 years without having to do anything with my Mac's (and used my last two for just under 10 years) - Windows has improved dramatically since the 2000's, but I seem to either need to reload Windows from scratch on the same hardware to maintain decent performance, or upgrade hardware a lot more frequently than I have with my Mac's. Also when setting up a new machine I have found Apple's migration assistant to be flawless in moving everything from my old machine to my new one. I only deviated with my current M1 MacBook Pro because of the CPU architecture change - and friends overwhelmingly positive experiences with using migration assistant to move from Intel to AS Mac's indicate I probably wasted a bunch of time needlessly in setting everything up fresh.
- 4y ago
Arisaka1 4y ago
One of the reasons I went with AMD for my new GPU was Linux support. Nvidia has been abhorrent of Linux before Torvalds did the famous gesture and that was over 10 years ago! My old workstation had an Nvidia and performance has been all over the place, and that's on lucky days!
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I have found that more recent cards from both vendors are a lot better on Linux than their older gear. My 10 year old GPU had huge issues on Linux (running fine on Windows), but when I got a more recent GPU for my Linux box, it ran fine.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    That's one of the main issues that is solved with open drivers. A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards: the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon 9600 with a built-in capture card. This was also around the time I was really getting into Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008. As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support. I lived it. At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good. I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager", and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of virtual desktops. This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future of Linux was bright and close. A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering). Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for whose benefit? A few more years passed, and fglrx became the best driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful card for ~$30, so the point was moot. When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a major hardware company found the value in making a full-featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the first place: proprietary video drivers.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
Pop OS seens to be the best one for me at the moment. Definitely recommend a try.
MSFT_Edging 4y ago
When Windows breaks, it stays broken. I had a W10 install unable to update, running the update would break windows and be unable to log in at all. It required rolling back the upgrade. Best part? It would automatically try to install that update every time I forgot to click the dead mans switch. I'd regularly try to unlock to a useless machine. No online support was helpful, just had to re-install. Linux is the opposite, nearly everything has a documented fix. It can be fixed in less time than it takes to backup, reimage, and reconfigure your machine.
naremu 4y ago
It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches. In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my problems were...definitely me problems. At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes sense. Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them. Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.
- hirundo 4y ago
  > It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches. Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking the board I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily driver a decade later. And though there have been issues I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Was that machine a laptop? In my experience, power-oriented laptops and Windows mix like oil and water. I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it had to be running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it wasn’t it’d perform 20-30% worse while running just as hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia driver is split up into several pieces which then resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all sorts of things. I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a custom built tower instead, which has had none of these issues.
alpaca128 4y ago
> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. It was more stable, that's why I used it. Then starting with a certain Windows 10 update I had to reinstall the system multiple times because automatic updates kept breaking it overnight, it started crashing the USB driver, suddenly it kept randomly switching keyboard layouts by itself, and somewhere around the third ruined weekend due to an unbootable system I had enough. Switched to an Arch-based distro for 3 years in which I only had one update-related issue and it took me a whole 5 minutes and one reboot to fix. Now I partially use Mac OS and while I'm disappointed by some of its aspects I can at least be certain it will boot tomorrow and it won't install a system update without my confirmation. Oh, how the turntables.
- tracker1 4y ago
  I had similar issues... especially after Win11. Admittedly, I was running Insiders builds, because I wanted new WSLg features, etc. Then one day I was on Windows 11... okay, got the app bar pinned back on the left... a month later, oh, you don't have secure boot enabled, you'll need to reinstall... enabled secure boot, still had to reinstall... a few months later, the nvidia drivers kept borking out and blanking my screen. The Windows release kept overriding the newer NVidia drivers for w11. Figured out how to pin them... another couple months, start seeing adverts in the damned start menu search. That's it, I'm out. I reinstalled Win10 in case I needed it, disabled secure boot and tpm... and haven't booted back to my windows drive since. I've had two small issues in Ubuntu, both relatively easily fixed. I don't think I'm going back. I use Win10 at work, and fortunately most of my actual day is in VS Code under WSL. And that's about all I can stand.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > I was running Insiders builds In fairness, you can't take your experience with insider builds as an indicator of the stability of the OS. Insider builds are expected to be unstable.
    - tracker1 4y ago
      When I reinstalled after the insiders build first nuked itself, I switched to stable/mainline. Still had issues after that. I had run insiders on Win10 about 3 years without issue before that.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well. >> reduced laptop battery life ??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something. >> general UI clunkiness, For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well. The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups of any kind.
- vetinari 4y ago
  > Linux and windows will never share a drive well. Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager. The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop doing stupid shit that worked with legacy BIOS and is not necessary anymore. Grub breaking itself randomly is mostly self-inflicted problem.
gspencley 4y ago
It's funny because I've had a lot of people share this exact same experience with me, since they know I've been a Linux user since the late 90s. But this is my experience with Windows! Especially the shortened laptop battery life. Windows runs so much in the background that performance feels 10x slower on the same machine and the battery drains much faster ... in my experience anyway. But I also have issues with Windows drivers and applications crashing often. Whereas on Linux things "just work" for me the vast majority of the time. To be fair, though, there was a short-lived period a couple of years ago where a lot of laptop trackpads wouldn't work, and I had a work-issued laptop that didn't seem to want to play nicely with an external monitor. So I wonder if this is largely what you're used to. I run Linux on all of my devices, which are hardware I've chosen myself and had high confidence would have good Linux support. It's only been the work-issued machines that I've had issues with... so I probably just have a sense of how to get things to play nicely because it's what I've used primarily for so long.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  > the vast majority of the time It's the times when it breaks that make the difference for me. One Windows, most breakage is an annoyance. On Linux it can grind my day to a halt. Here's something I did on an Ubuntu install recently. apt install python3 Oops. That's not what I wanted. apt autoremove python3 OMG! What have I done! IIRC that stripped out so much stuff I didn't even have networking. Lol.
  - dizhn 4y ago
    Does autoremove take a package name parameter? Did you mean something else?
    - donmcronald 4y ago
      I guess so. I just tested it and 'apt autoremove python3' seems to be the equivalent of apt remove python3 apt autoremove The above also leaves you with no GUI and broken networking.
srjilarious 4y ago
I dual booted Windows on my desktop and laptop for a few years and also noticed lots of weird issues - reduced battery life on my laptop, sleep/hibernate being broken, GRUB occasionally just dying on me. I eventually got rid of Windows all together and now just run Manjaro. I was surprised that suspend issues and battery life on my laptop, for instance, completely went away. The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games, but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due to anti-cheat software like Battleye.
beams_of_light 4y ago
I’ve experienced the same. In fact, I recently tried migrating to Ubuntu. The user experience is a lot better than it once was, but it’s still not great. For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome, I need to install a weather app. There are several, and amongst them, the Ubuntu software installer says they’re not verifiable because a 3rd party developed them. Ok, fine, I just want the one most people are using, because I assume that is the one that is best maintained and has the best features. I’m not sure which one that is. Oh well, install the first one after a brief search to determine which is considered most “native” to gnome and Ubuntu. After installation, I don’t see the weather on my top bar. I open the weather app, look around the settings, but there’s no option to see the weather displayed on the bar. I give up. Later, my machine seems to be stuttering a bit (64 GB RAM, AMD 5970, RTX 3060), so I reboot and it’s back to normal. I try to play a game, and get an error stating that Vulkan isn’t installed (it is). I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again. I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works. I don’t mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It’s pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they’re able to make strides on the experience.
- tracker1 4y ago
  The issue with the taskbar, is there are a couple different implemetation APIs, your shell probably only supports gnome out of the box. I don't recall the name, but there's an extension that will add support for the KDE api for taskbar extensions. I'm running Budgie, with a relatively customized setup, and that was a long while ago, so not as immediately familiar with all that I did. Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes out though.
- mehdix 4y ago
  I think KDE would serve users coming from Windows much better. You'd have much better experience out of the box. I have used Ubuntu, Fedor, and Arch Linux with gnome-shell and have rigorously kept my extensions for a few years up and working but eventually got tiered of them breaking with every gnome update and desktop crashing every few days. I switched to tiling windows managers since then such as i3/sway for work and to KDE for personal use (for example with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
bacchusracine 4y ago
>I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness Oh boy where to begin? >Nvidia and Intel driver issues Not a personal dig, but this is a result of having been spoiled. I still remember the small dime novel that came with my box of WinNT 4.0 workstation, all it did was list the various hardware that was on its hardware compatibility list. You wanted to buy some piece of hardware? Better do the homework because not everything was going to be compatible or even supported at the same level. Today everyone expects everything to just work out of the box when you throw an operating system at it. They've completely forgotten the need to even check for compatibility, they've outsourced that to the operating system. They expect it to 'just work' without input. When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing and that to get the best use of your hardware you're advised to research it before purchasing and to make sure you check compatibility with the operating system(s) you plan to use. >package manager bugs OK, this has hit us all eventually. Valid. But I've noticed most of the time when I've run into this it was a result of me doing things that I really shouldn't or at least which should prime me to monitor my system more carefully. Such as installing Debian packages into Ubuntu. Sure it can work, especially if you do your best to install any needed dependencies. But you'd better know what you're doing and watch for issues after doing so. I'm sure there are other ways the package manager can crap the bed. It's not all on us when it does so. But I really don't think Windows is any better in this regard. I've had stuff eat itself there too with applications and systems upgrading DLLs and leaving me up the famous creek without a paddle. >reduced laptop battery life Valid as well. But have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life? >general UI clunkiness This heavily depends on your desktop of choice. As a Mate desktop user I've been fairly happy with how my UI behaves. To the point where it is actively annoying to be in another desktop now. Different strokes for different folks though. If Windows is the UI you rely on to the point you have muscle memory, I can sympathize. I'd argue there is a desktop that can match that UI for you on Linux but you'll have to customize it a bit and you'll have to test for which one is closest to what you prefer. But if your preferred desktop UI is indeed Windows, it's not Linux's fault that it is not Windows any more than it would be OSX's fault it is not Windows. You have to adapt and accept that things work differently in a different operating system. Not wrong. Not misconfigured. Different.
andrepd 4y ago
> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot Well I've had the exact opposite experience. Windows was an endless source of bugs, crashes, and instability. Linux (Mint) is rock-solid, clean, fast, pretty, and stable. I've had more blue screens that I can count but I remember less than a handful of kernel panics over the last 10 years. No more fiddling around in settings, no more having to use external tools off some forum thread to accomplish something as simple as updating drivers. The only issue I give you credit for is the battery life, which is indeed better on Windows by some ~20%.
JohnFen 4y ago
Interesting. My experience is that Linux (Debian, anyway -- Ubuntu has never given me anything but headaches and instability) is at least an order of magnitude more reliable than Windows. It's been over a decade since I've hit a serious or crashy bug in Linux. I hit one about every other day with Windows. I wonder why there's a difference in our experiences here?
mattpallissard 4y ago
> Nvidia and Intel driver issues Intel is pretty good about upstreaming drivers into the kernel. The only bugs I've ever ran into are around brand new wifi cards that haven't been mainlined yet. And even then I don't think I've seen that in about ten years. Nvidia on the other hand is a huge pain on Linux, but thats deliberately done by Nvidia. > reduced laptop battery life. Been using Linux as a daily driver for over 15 years and laptop life has been better than windows nearly the entire time. To be fair, I cut my teeth automating Linux environments in physical datacenters. So I've lived in a world where power consumption mattered, know how to select hardware with good driver support, and can tune the os. That said, you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w. > For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one. Funny how you and I have the same value but wound up at opposite conclusions. I guess it's all about the tools and how we need/expect to use them. Edit: grammar
Lutger 4y ago
On various hardware, over the years, I've had both the same and the opposite experiences. For example, linux doesn't decide to reboot during the day to perform updates without your consent. Overall, when there is not some specific hardware issue, I've found linux running much smoother and more user friendly _for me_. Gnome is a lot less cluttered, things are easier to find. It is also often much better in supporting older hardware and, ironically, older windows applications.
bennysonething 4y ago
Pretty much the same as me. Windows hardware support is really great, Linux is always a hassle for me. I've tried and tried with Linux, but I've given up on it as my primary desktop
papito 4y ago
There is a middle ground. I use Windows/Mac for gaming, entertainment, and casual browsing, and I run Mint in a VMWare for serious stuff. The added benefit is that I can easily back up, snapshot, and transfer my work OS anywhere. And Mint/Ubuntu provide much better out-of-the-box productivity tools. I map my multiple Mint desktops to numpad keys. You can't do that with the other ones without additional software.
whatever1 4y ago
I have been using Linux for work and my home server for around 20 years.For my personal computing I have been using windows and MacOS. Every now and then I get my hopes up that the year of Linux is finally here and I install the latest. I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition. I am still using just windows and macos for my personal computing needs.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > it means that more pain is coming in the future So you're no longer reality checking this prediction? What are the reasons for firing up the terminal? Config file editing? Or something more serious?
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    last time for me was the audio was glitching which never happened on pc. i think the solution had something to do with changing the audio sampling rate fixed it.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  > I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition. This is exactly my litmus test. The requirement to touch the CLI indicates little thought for the UX or care for users who don't want to use the CLI. Every year I boot up another flavour of Linux and every year it fails this test. Linux is built by developers, for developers. That's fine, but let's be honest about it.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
My experience is the opposite. I use Windows at work and Linux for everything else. Linux is much more stable and when something is wrong, much easier to fix. Windows has definitely broken for me in the middle of the day.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
Linux driver support was hell from roughly around 2010 to 2016. Both major GPU manufacturers had awful proprietary drivers (with even worse packaging), and most wifi chipsets required proprietary firmware blobs to work at all: which was very tricky to package, because of copyright bullshit. This was also the era of major desktop environments playing fast and loose with there UX. GNOME3 was released in 2011. Ubuntu started defaulting to Unity in 2010, and started their Wayland competitor (Mir) in 2014. KDE Plasma 5 (2014) defaulted to fancy composting, and felt really bloated relative to the others. The only desktop environments that really kept true to the good old days (~2008) are XFCE4 and MATE (the GNOME2 fork). KDE5 isn't bad, either, but it's still a bit too bloated. The other problem caused by proprietary video drivers was package versioning. It's tricky to have the right kernel version and Xorg version necessary to run a proprietary video driver blob; and keep the rest of your system up-to-date. Ubuntu found its initial success by creating a generally stable package repository roughly as up-to-date as Debian unstable. Unfortunately, Ubuntu became a bloated mess with strange things like Unity and Mir bundled in. Archlinux has been a good alternative, but it does expect a level of familiarity with shell utilities. Linux Mint (an Ubuntu or Debian fork) is still my first recommendation to casual users. One of these days, it will be NixOS, which is a giant leap in stability and package versioning. The last change of that era that has been breaking the Linux experience is the switch from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT. This shift was slow and messy, with most hardware adoption following the release of Windows 8 in 2012. GRUB used to break in one predictable way: windows overwrites the MBR, replacing GRUB with its bootloader. Now, with UEFI, boot entries are saved directly to the motherboard, and the bootloader itself lives in the ESP partition. The windows installer will put its bootloader in the first ESP it can find, and you don't get to choose which one that is. Now you have to worry about the ESP running out of space, but that's about it: everything else has been generally resolved, and the UEFI bootloader experience is very solid (apart from the windows installer caveat). Now that AMDGPU is mature, and NVIDIA's drivers are relatively well maintained (and packaged), the Linux desktop experience is even more stable than its heyday back in 2008. If you install a distro that targets relatively recent package versions, like Archlinux, Linux Mint, or even Fedora; and you use a solid familiar desktop environment like MATE or XFCE4; you can avoid most UI/UX clunkiness and have very little need to fiddle with your package manager. Boot issues are pretty unlikely now, so long as you install in UEFI mode (not legacy BIOS emulation), and completely avoid MBR.
amalcon 4y ago
The issue is pretty much the same as it ever was -- hardware manufacturers support Windows first. Linux is usually later if at all. Community support sometimes steps in to fill in the gap, and some manufacturers (most notably AMD) are coming around, but this is still usually the issue. Oddly enough, this means that Linux tends to work better as the computer it's running on gets older. The reverse is true for Windows -- updates tend to make it slower and/or have more compatibility issues. A computer that worked better with Windows a few years ago will not-infrequently perform better under Ubuntu today. It's not usually suggested on new PCs unless it's spec'd specifically with Linux compatibility in mind.
f4stjack 4y ago
All these might have been true for Windows 10, but with Windows 11 all the things you mentioned are my daily woes. W11 suddenly "upgrades" the video driver and explorer crashes; updates bios and camera borks. With Linux I have the opportunity to freeze the upgrades and go on to my work. Also due to behind the scenes shenanigans battery lives are worse all across the board - I am managing more than 100 laptops. In addition with this OS, 8gb of ram becomes a joke and most of my users are running office applications. Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.
rbanffy 4y ago
> Nvidia Every time someone mentions Linux driver problems, I see that name. For me, the strategy that has worked for the longest time is to get boring computers. The boring Thinkpad, the boring Vostros and Latitudes, the boring ThinkStation and ThinkServer boxes. Large PC makers don't want their corporate-oriented products causing support calls, and that forces them to not be overly creative with their implementations. With that powerful incentive, the hardware is usually well supported by the two boring operating systems (for generic hardware) out there. Either that, or get a machine that's designed together with its OS (and know the odds of you installing anything other than that are slim).
smukherjee19 4y ago
>For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool I hard agree on this. I use my W11 22H2 as a daily driver because of that: it just works (TM). Also, I don't see any kind of news or the likes on Windows, and it feels really close to Windows 7. Here are the things I've done so far: - Bought a Windows 10 Education license from a shady website, and it's been working fine for the past 4? years. The upgrade to Windows 11 Education went smoothly as well. - Local account only. No Sign in to Windows crap. - (Most important imo) Installed OOSU Shutup10++ (it's for Windows 11) and turned almost everything off there. - Bought a Start11 license for 5 USD and installed it, and switched to the Windows 7 start menu using it. No ads anywhere in Windows, feels like Windows 7, talks much less to whatever 3rd party people MS have contracts with to get my data. FWIW, I did try daily-driving Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the best Linux for me imho. However, there is a show-stopping bug as follows: I have 3 monitors, with the main one being a 4K over DP. My monitors are set to turn off after 5 minutes, and in Windows, they turn back on just fine when I move the mouse (minor annoyance: display scaling is not reflected across all application windows till I minimize and open the window again but no big deal). For Linux, the DP monitor won't get detected; it behaves as if my other 2 monitors are the only ones connected. I have to turn off the monitor switch and turn it on again for it to be detected. I looked around but didn't find any good way to solve it...

by ftl64 4y ago

junkilo 4y ago

*NIX is the only viable choice for mission-critical desktop stability in 2023. But that isn't to say Windows isn't feature complete. It is still king when it comes to gaming. Desktop stability and reliability hasn't been a top-level OKR at Microsoft for many years. The company has been growing more product driven for years and falling victim to roadmaps being driven by muggles. The only place where you can actually design a truly stable and reliable desktop is with open-source kernels and user software.

aNoob7000 4y ago

I did the same thing with Ubuntu. I used it roughly for a year before getting tired of having to find workarounds for things like a webcam. I moved over to a Mac mini and life has been good. I still think the future is Linux. I see Microsoft and Apple taking their O/S in directions that are anti-consumer.

xpil 4y ago

My personal record is 11 months on Mint. I have also used Ubuntu, Fedora and (a long time ago) SUSE. But as you say, sooner or later something comes up that forces me to go back to Windows. Things like poor GPU performance for certain applications (like Obsidian for example) or GRUB acting up or WLAN/GPU drivers suddenly not working after a kernel upgrade and so on. Would you mind sharing your Win10 setup? I use it too, but it's a stock version with just some basic cleanup.

ftl64 4y ago
Mine's also almost stock, the only changes being tracking and startup menu/taskbar garbage disabled.
LorenDB 4y ago
For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though. GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files).
- duckhelmet 4y ago
  @LorenD: "For the record, I've never had a WLAN issue in 3 years of Linux (Ubuntu and then openSUSE). I can't attest to GPU as I don't have a dedicated GPU though. GRUB has also been quite the happy camper in my experience (at least if you don't go mucking about with config files)." How dare you not have a problem in a discussion on Linux. (Not just there yet :)

ajdude 4y ago

MacOS doesn't have the issues that you've described while giving you many of the same tools Linux has, in addition to support for most mainstream windows software. And while macOS isn't as free as Linux, it's certainly less "spyware" than windows.

ftl64 4y ago
Growing up in a developing country, until recently Apple devices (laptops/desktops especially) have been a bit out of price range for me. Although I can afford one now, my current laptop is nowhere near its end of life, and something in my soviet-scarcity-mentality-influenced mind doesn't feel right about upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. That said, Apple laptops look very convincing at the moment, and when the time comes they will probably be my first choice.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  One thing that helped me is realising that I should be selling ild electronics, so it goes to people that need it most. Instead of having it collect dust in the drawerr untill it becomes c dead and obsolete
- EricE 4y ago
  One thing that more than balances it out for me - my Mac's have a lot longer of a lifespan than my Windows machines. I have a larger up front cost, but get far more out of them over time. I average at least 7 years without having to do anything with my Mac's (and used my last two for just under 10 years) - Windows has improved dramatically since the 2000's, but I seem to either need to reload Windows from scratch on the same hardware to maintain decent performance, or upgrade hardware a lot more frequently than I have with my Mac's. Also when setting up a new machine I have found Apple's migration assistant to be flawless in moving everything from my old machine to my new one. I only deviated with my current M1 MacBook Pro because of the CPU architecture change - and friends overwhelmingly positive experiences with using migration assistant to move from Intel to AS Mac's indicate I probably wasted a bunch of time needlessly in setting everything up fresh.
4y ago

Arisaka1 4y ago

One of the reasons I went with AMD for my new GPU was Linux support. Nvidia has been abhorrent of Linux before Torvalds did the famous gesture and that was over 10 years ago! My old workstation had an Nvidia and performance has been all over the place, and that's on lucky days!

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I have found that more recent cards from both vendors are a lot better on Linux than their older gear. My 10 year old GPU had huge issues on Linux (running fine on Windows), but when I got a more recent GPU for my Linux box, it ran fine.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That's one of the main issues that is solved with open drivers. A year or two after AMD acquired ATI in 2006, I had just gotten my hands on my first ever modern graphics cards: the All-in-Wonder 2006 edition. It was basically a Radeon 9600 with a built-in capture card. This was also around the time I was really getting into Linux. I'm pretty sure I could dig up a CD with Ubuntu 8.04 that I burned fresh in 2008. As a poor teenager living on abandoned hardware, I watched the full life cycle of that card's Linux support. I lived it. At first, the proprietary driver support was pretty good. I could just open Ubuntu's handy dandy "driver manager", and get a neatly wrapped .deb installed. A quick restart of Xorg, and I had full GPU support. I could turn on all the flashy compiz effects: wobbly windows and a cube of virtual desktops. This was the most exciting era for the Linux desktop. It was easy, familiar, and powerful. All we needed was a compatible MS office alternative and a few well-ported AAA games, and we would be living the dream. The future of Linux was bright and close. A few years passed, and proprietary Radeon drivers weren't getting packaged anymore. The free fglrx driver was stable, but didn't have DRM (direct GPU rendering). Even in windows, there wasn't great driver support for ATI cards. This was pain from every direction, and for whose benefit? A few more years passed, and fglrx became the best driver: better than the proprietary one. By the time this happened, though, you could get a vastly more powerful card for ~$30, so the point was moot. When AMDGPU was announced, I was ecstatic. Finally, a major hardware company found the value in making a full-featured, performant, and open driver. Never again will I need to fight the most purposeless incompatibility, the pain with no benefit, the hell that need not exist in the first place: proprietary video drivers.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

Pop OS seens to be the best one for me at the moment. Definitely recommend a try.

MSFT_Edging 4y ago

When Windows breaks, it stays broken. I had a W10 install unable to update, running the update would break windows and be unable to log in at all. It required rolling back the upgrade. Best part? It would automatically try to install that update every time I forgot to click the dead mans switch. I'd regularly try to unlock to a useless machine. No online support was helpful, just had to re-install. Linux is the opposite, nearly everything has a documented fix. It can be fixed in less time than it takes to backup, reimage, and reconfigure your machine.

naremu 4y ago

It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches. In fact unless I was new and heavily tinkering with my distro, linux has easily be the more "stable". All my problems were...definitely me problems. At the end of the day, they're both OSes running on a jaw droppingly wide variety of hardware, but whenever I look up a problem I have on linux, I find an answer that makes sense. Meanwhile, the brand new, mainstream hardware I bought for gaming with windows forcibly sold to me with it, spent a year not being able to play audio properly while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them. Also, waking my computer from sleep occasionally just crashes my entire system, or even booting it up will cause it to crash or bootloop a few times. It's genuinely amazing what "paid development" gets you from monopolists.

hirundo 4y ago
> It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches. Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking the board I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily driver a decade later. And though there have been issues I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Was that machine a laptop? In my experience, power-oriented laptops and Windows mix like oil and water. I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it had to be running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it wasn’t it’d perform 20-30% worse while running just as hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia driver is split up into several pieces which then resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all sorts of things. I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a custom built tower instead, which has had none of these issues.

alpaca128 4y ago

> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. It was more stable, that's why I used it. Then starting with a certain Windows 10 update I had to reinstall the system multiple times because automatic updates kept breaking it overnight, it started crashing the USB driver, suddenly it kept randomly switching keyboard layouts by itself, and somewhere around the third ruined weekend due to an unbootable system I had enough. Switched to an Arch-based distro for 3 years in which I only had one update-related issue and it took me a whole 5 minutes and one reboot to fix. Now I partially use Mac OS and while I'm disappointed by some of its aspects I can at least be certain it will boot tomorrow and it won't install a system update without my confirmation. Oh, how the turntables.

tracker1 4y ago
I had similar issues... especially after Win11. Admittedly, I was running Insiders builds, because I wanted new WSLg features, etc. Then one day I was on Windows 11... okay, got the app bar pinned back on the left... a month later, oh, you don't have secure boot enabled, you'll need to reinstall... enabled secure boot, still had to reinstall... a few months later, the nvidia drivers kept borking out and blanking my screen. The Windows release kept overriding the newer NVidia drivers for w11. Figured out how to pin them... another couple months, start seeing adverts in the damned start menu search. That's it, I'm out. I reinstalled Win10 in case I needed it, disabled secure boot and tpm... and haven't booted back to my windows drive since. I've had two small issues in Ubuntu, both relatively easily fixed. I don't think I'm going back. I use Win10 at work, and fortunately most of my actual day is in VS Code under WSL. And that's about all I can stand.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I was running Insiders builds In fairness, you can't take your experience with insider builds as an indicator of the stability of the OS. Insider builds are expected to be unstable.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    When I reinstalled after the insiders build first nuked itself, I switched to stable/mainline. Still had issues after that. I had run insiders on Win10 about 3 years without issue before that.

sandworm101 4y ago

>> and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well. >> reduced laptop battery life ??? Odd. I find battery life on my laptops far better on linux, generally because linux knows how to actually stop doing things when asked. Windows, no matter what you do, will randomly decide to install/download something. >> general UI clunkiness, For me, the fact that linux UIs don't change every few months, and when they do I can undo them, makes window the clunkier UI. It is monday morning here. I have so far had to restart Outlook twice on my work computer as new "updates" are applied. I'd take a thousand clunky-looking widow borders over MS's daily popup pollution of my screen time.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
> I suspect you are dual-booting, which is itself a hacky middle ground full of bugs. Linux and windows will never share a drive well. The Windows installer unfortunately will happily clobber the EFI partitions on completely unrelated drives. Had it happen on a triple boot (Win/Linux/Hackintosh) setup a couple of times, with each OS getting its own drive. MS almost certainly is not testing against multi-OS setups of any kind.
vetinari 4y ago
> Linux and windows will never share a drive well. Nowadays with UEFI and GPT, sharing a drive is not a problem; they don't stomp on each other's MBR anymore and even UEFI itself comes with a boot manager. The bigger problem is to learn about these "new" things ("new", because introduced ~15 years ago) and stop doing stupid shit that worked with legacy BIOS and is not necessary anymore. Grub breaking itself randomly is mostly self-inflicted problem.

gspencley 4y ago

It's funny because I've had a lot of people share this exact same experience with me, since they know I've been a Linux user since the late 90s. But this is my experience with Windows! Especially the shortened laptop battery life. Windows runs so much in the background that performance feels 10x slower on the same machine and the battery drains much faster ... in my experience anyway. But I also have issues with Windows drivers and applications crashing often. Whereas on Linux things "just work" for me the vast majority of the time. To be fair, though, there was a short-lived period a couple of years ago where a lot of laptop trackpads wouldn't work, and I had a work-issued laptop that didn't seem to want to play nicely with an external monitor. So I wonder if this is largely what you're used to. I run Linux on all of my devices, which are hardware I've chosen myself and had high confidence would have good Linux support. It's only been the work-issued machines that I've had issues with... so I probably just have a sense of how to get things to play nicely because it's what I've used primarily for so long.

donmcronald 4y ago
> the vast majority of the time It's the times when it breaks that make the difference for me. One Windows, most breakage is an annoyance. On Linux it can grind my day to a halt. Here's something I did on an Ubuntu install recently. apt install python3 Oops. That's not what I wanted. apt autoremove python3 OMG! What have I done! IIRC that stripped out so much stuff I didn't even have networking. Lol.
- dizhn 4y ago
  Does autoremove take a package name parameter? Did you mean something else?
  - donmcronald 4y ago
    I guess so. I just tested it and 'apt autoremove python3' seems to be the equivalent of apt remove python3 apt autoremove The above also leaves you with no GUI and broken networking.

srjilarious 4y ago

I dual booted Windows on my desktop and laptop for a few years and also noticed lots of weird issues - reduced battery life on my laptop, sleep/hibernate being broken, GRUB occasionally just dying on me. I eventually got rid of Windows all together and now just run Manjaro. I was surprised that suspend issues and battery life on my laptop, for instance, completely went away. The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games, but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due to anti-cheat software like Battleye.

beams_of_light 4y ago

I’ve experienced the same. In fact, I recently tried migrating to Ubuntu. The user experience is a lot better than it once was, but it’s still not great. For instance, if I want to see what the temperature outside is on gnome, I need to install a weather app. There are several, and amongst them, the Ubuntu software installer says they’re not verifiable because a 3rd party developed them. Ok, fine, I just want the one most people are using, because I assume that is the one that is best maintained and has the best features. I’m not sure which one that is. Oh well, install the first one after a brief search to determine which is considered most “native” to gnome and Ubuntu. After installation, I don’t see the weather on my top bar. I open the weather app, look around the settings, but there’s no option to see the weather displayed on the bar. I give up. Later, my machine seems to be stuttering a bit (64 GB RAM, AMD 5970, RTX 3060), so I reboot and it’s back to normal. I try to play a game, and get an error stating that Vulkan isn’t installed (it is). I reboot instead of fiddling with it to find the root cause, and it’s working again. I don’t have to do this stuff with Windows. It just works. I don’t mean to downplay the efforts Ubuntu developers have gone to in order to get it to its current usability. It’s pretty good, it just has a bit more maturing to do before I can make the permanent jump. A while back, I read that Ubuntu was hiring a product manager for the desktop, or maybe gaming? Anyway, I wish them luck, and hope they’re able to make strides on the experience.

tracker1 4y ago
The issue with the taskbar, is there are a couple different implemetation APIs, your shell probably only supports gnome out of the box. I don't recall the name, but there's an extension that will add support for the KDE api for taskbar extensions. I'm running Budgie, with a relatively customized setup, and that was a long while ago, so not as immediately familiar with all that I did. Will likely switch back to PopOS when the next LTS comes out though.
mehdix 4y ago
I think KDE would serve users coming from Windows much better. You'd have much better experience out of the box. I have used Ubuntu, Fedor, and Arch Linux with gnome-shell and have rigorously kept my extensions for a few years up and working but eventually got tiered of them breaking with every gnome update and desktop crashing every few days. I switched to tiling windows managers since then such as i3/sway for work and to KDE for personal use (for example with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

bacchusracine 4y ago

>I've tried hard to become a full-time workstation Linux user for years, daily driving Ubuntu, Mint, and Fedora for months at a time, but I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness Oh boy where to begin? >Nvidia and Intel driver issues Not a personal dig, but this is a result of having been spoiled. I still remember the small dime novel that came with my box of WinNT 4.0 workstation, all it did was list the various hardware that was on its hardware compatibility list. You wanted to buy some piece of hardware? Better do the homework because not everything was going to be compatible or even supported at the same level. Today everyone expects everything to just work out of the box when you throw an operating system at it. They've completely forgotten the need to even check for compatibility, they've outsourced that to the operating system. They expect it to 'just work' without input. When it works well it's great! It's magical! But people forget that it's a relatively recent thing and that to get the best use of your hardware you're advised to research it before purchasing and to make sure you check compatibility with the operating system(s) you plan to use. >package manager bugs OK, this has hit us all eventually. Valid. But I've noticed most of the time when I've run into this it was a result of me doing things that I really shouldn't or at least which should prime me to monitor my system more carefully. Such as installing Debian packages into Ubuntu. Sure it can work, especially if you do your best to install any needed dependencies. But you'd better know what you're doing and watch for issues after doing so. I'm sure there are other ways the package manager can crap the bed. It's not all on us when it does so. But I really don't think Windows is any better in this regard. I've had stuff eat itself there too with applications and systems upgrading DLLs and leaving me up the famous creek without a paddle. >reduced laptop battery life Valid as well. But have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life? >general UI clunkiness This heavily depends on your desktop of choice. As a Mate desktop user I've been fairly happy with how my UI behaves. To the point where it is actively annoying to be in another desktop now. Different strokes for different folks though. If Windows is the UI you rely on to the point you have muscle memory, I can sympathize. I'd argue there is a desktop that can match that UI for you on Linux but you'll have to customize it a bit and you'll have to test for which one is closest to what you prefer. But if your preferred desktop UI is indeed Windows, it's not Linux's fault that it is not Windows any more than it would be OSX's fault it is not Windows. You have to adapt and accept that things work differently in a different operating system. Not wrong. Not misconfigured. Different.

andrepd 4y ago

> It's just more stable, at least this has been my experience. I always had to come back to Windows. Nvidia and Intel driver issues, package manager bugs, reduced laptop battery life, general UI clunkiness, and times when GRUB suddenly decided not to boot Well I've had the exact opposite experience. Windows was an endless source of bugs, crashes, and instability. Linux (Mint) is rock-solid, clean, fast, pretty, and stable. I've had more blue screens that I can count but I remember less than a handful of kernel panics over the last 10 years. No more fiddling around in settings, no more having to use external tools off some forum thread to accomplish something as simple as updating drivers. The only issue I give you credit for is the battery life, which is indeed better on Windows by some ~20%.

JohnFen 4y ago

Interesting. My experience is that Linux (Debian, anyway -- Ubuntu has never given me anything but headaches and instability) is at least an order of magnitude more reliable than Windows. It's been over a decade since I've hit a serious or crashy bug in Linux. I hit one about every other day with Windows. I wonder why there's a difference in our experiences here?

mattpallissard 4y ago

> Nvidia and Intel driver issues Intel is pretty good about upstreaming drivers into the kernel. The only bugs I've ever ran into are around brand new wifi cards that haven't been mainlined yet. And even then I don't think I've seen that in about ten years. Nvidia on the other hand is a huge pain on Linux, but thats deliberately done by Nvidia. > reduced laptop battery life. Been using Linux as a daily driver for over 15 years and laptop life has been better than windows nearly the entire time. To be fair, I cut my teeth automating Linux environments in physical datacenters. So I've lived in a world where power consumption mattered, know how to select hardware with good driver support, and can tune the os. That said, you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w. > For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool, and Windows performs much better as one. Funny how you and I have the same value but wound up at opposite conclusions. I guess it's all about the tools and how we need/expect to use them. Edit: grammar

Lutger 4y ago

On various hardware, over the years, I've had both the same and the opposite experiences. For example, linux doesn't decide to reboot during the day to perform updates without your consent. Overall, when there is not some specific hardware issue, I've found linux running much smoother and more user friendly _for me_. Gnome is a lot less cluttered, things are easier to find. It is also often much better in supporting older hardware and, ironically, older windows applications.

bennysonething 4y ago

Pretty much the same as me. Windows hardware support is really great, Linux is always a hassle for me. I've tried and tried with Linux, but I've given up on it as my primary desktop

papito 4y ago

There is a middle ground. I use Windows/Mac for gaming, entertainment, and casual browsing, and I run Mint in a VMWare for serious stuff. The added benefit is that I can easily back up, snapshot, and transfer my work OS anywhere. And Mint/Ubuntu provide much better out-of-the-box productivity tools. I map my multiple Mint desktops to numpad keys. You can't do that with the other ones without additional software.

whatever1 4y ago

I have been using Linux for work and my home server for around 20 years.For my personal computing I have been using windows and MacOS. Every now and then I get my hopes up that the year of Linux is finally here and I install the latest. I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition. I am still using just windows and macos for my personal computing needs.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> it means that more pain is coming in the future So you're no longer reality checking this prediction? What are the reasons for firing up the terminal? Config file editing? Or something more serious?
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  last time for me was the audio was glitching which never happened on pc. i think the solution had something to do with changing the audio sampling rate fixed it.
Gareth321 4y ago
> I have a simple heuristic. If in the first day of setting up the system I am required to fire up the terminal, it means that more pain is coming in the future, so I immediately delete the Linux partition. This is exactly my litmus test. The requirement to touch the CLI indicates little thought for the UX or care for users who don't want to use the CLI. Every year I boot up another flavour of Linux and every year it fails this test. Linux is built by developers, for developers. That's fine, but let's be honest about it.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

My experience is the opposite. I use Windows at work and Linux for everything else. Linux is much more stable and when something is wrong, much easier to fix. Windows has definitely broken for me in the middle of the day.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

Linux driver support was hell from roughly around 2010 to 2016. Both major GPU manufacturers had awful proprietary drivers (with even worse packaging), and most wifi chipsets required proprietary firmware blobs to work at all: which was very tricky to package, because of copyright bullshit. This was also the era of major desktop environments playing fast and loose with there UX. GNOME3 was released in 2011. Ubuntu started defaulting to Unity in 2010, and started their Wayland competitor (Mir) in 2014. KDE Plasma 5 (2014) defaulted to fancy composting, and felt really bloated relative to the others. The only desktop environments that really kept true to the good old days (~2008) are XFCE4 and MATE (the GNOME2 fork). KDE5 isn't bad, either, but it's still a bit too bloated. The other problem caused by proprietary video drivers was package versioning. It's tricky to have the right kernel version and Xorg version necessary to run a proprietary video driver blob; and keep the rest of your system up-to-date. Ubuntu found its initial success by creating a generally stable package repository roughly as up-to-date as Debian unstable. Unfortunately, Ubuntu became a bloated mess with strange things like Unity and Mir bundled in. Archlinux has been a good alternative, but it does expect a level of familiarity with shell utilities. Linux Mint (an Ubuntu or Debian fork) is still my first recommendation to casual users. One of these days, it will be NixOS, which is a giant leap in stability and package versioning. The last change of that era that has been breaking the Linux experience is the switch from BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT. This shift was slow and messy, with most hardware adoption following the release of Windows 8 in 2012. GRUB used to break in one predictable way: windows overwrites the MBR, replacing GRUB with its bootloader. Now, with UEFI, boot entries are saved directly to the motherboard, and the bootloader itself lives in the ESP partition. The windows installer will put its bootloader in the first ESP it can find, and you don't get to choose which one that is. Now you have to worry about the ESP running out of space, but that's about it: everything else has been generally resolved, and the UEFI bootloader experience is very solid (apart from the windows installer caveat). Now that AMDGPU is mature, and NVIDIA's drivers are relatively well maintained (and packaged), the Linux desktop experience is even more stable than its heyday back in 2008. If you install a distro that targets relatively recent package versions, like Archlinux, Linux Mint, or even Fedora; and you use a solid familiar desktop environment like MATE or XFCE4; you can avoid most UI/UX clunkiness and have very little need to fiddle with your package manager. Boot issues are pretty unlikely now, so long as you install in UEFI mode (not legacy BIOS emulation), and completely avoid MBR.

amalcon 4y ago

The issue is pretty much the same as it ever was -- hardware manufacturers support Windows first. Linux is usually later if at all. Community support sometimes steps in to fill in the gap, and some manufacturers (most notably AMD) are coming around, but this is still usually the issue. Oddly enough, this means that Linux tends to work better as the computer it's running on gets older. The reverse is true for Windows -- updates tend to make it slower and/or have more compatibility issues. A computer that worked better with Windows a few years ago will not-infrequently perform better under Ubuntu today. It's not usually suggested on new PCs unless it's spec'd specifically with Linux compatibility in mind.

f4stjack 4y ago

All these might have been true for Windows 10, but with Windows 11 all the things you mentioned are my daily woes. W11 suddenly "upgrades" the video driver and explorer crashes; updates bios and camera borks. With Linux I have the opportunity to freeze the upgrades and go on to my work. Also due to behind the scenes shenanigans battery lives are worse all across the board - I am managing more than 100 laptops. In addition with this OS, 8gb of ram becomes a joke and most of my users are running office applications. Linux has its own pain points, I agree, but especially after 2019 they are rare. With Pop_Os! I never experience any of the stuff I deal at work. I dare say Pop makes Linux boring - because everything works out of the box.

rbanffy 4y ago

> Nvidia Every time someone mentions Linux driver problems, I see that name. For me, the strategy that has worked for the longest time is to get boring computers. The boring Thinkpad, the boring Vostros and Latitudes, the boring ThinkStation and ThinkServer boxes. Large PC makers don't want their corporate-oriented products causing support calls, and that forces them to not be overly creative with their implementations. With that powerful incentive, the hardware is usually well supported by the two boring operating systems (for generic hardware) out there. Either that, or get a machine that's designed together with its OS (and know the odds of you installing anything other than that are slim).

smukherjee19 4y ago

>For me, an OS is not a religious affiliation but a tool I hard agree on this. I use my W11 22H2 as a daily driver because of that: it just works (TM). Also, I don't see any kind of news or the likes on Windows, and it feels really close to Windows 7. Here are the things I've done so far: - Bought a Windows 10 Education license from a shady website, and it's been working fine for the past 4? years. The upgrade to Windows 11 Education went smoothly as well. - Local account only. No Sign in to Windows crap. - (Most important imo) Installed OOSU Shutup10++ (it's for Windows 11) and turned almost everything off there. - Bought a Start11 license for 5 USD and installed it, and switched to the Windows 7 start menu using it. No ads anywhere in Windows, feels like Windows 7, talks much less to whatever 3rd party people MS have contracts with to get my data. FWIW, I did try daily-driving Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the best Linux for me imho. However, there is a show-stopping bug as follows: I have 3 monitors, with the main one being a 4K over DP. My monitors are set to turn off after 5 minutes, and in Windows, they turn back on just fine when I move the mouse (minor annoyance: display scaling is not reflected across all application windows till I minimize and open the window again but no big deal). For Linux, the DP monitor won't get detected; it behaves as if my other 2 monitors are the only ones connected. I have to turn off the monitor switch and turn it on again for it to be detected. I looked around but didn't find any good way to solve it...