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I switched to linux desktop about 2.5 years ago. TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 74

I switched to linux desktop about 2.5 years ago. TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 747 cockpit is pretty cool and definitely very powerful. And it has auto-pilot if you just want the basics. But man, if you want to do more than the absolute basics, a regular Toyota corolla drivers seat is _way_ more accommodating and intuitive. You don't need to spend a year studying the machine to use it fluidly. Linux is cool, the idea incredible, but man, searching for guides that tell you to turn cryptic knobs, flick unlabeled switches, and push seemingly random buttons just to get the window to roll down has become too taxing for me. Especially when half the time it doesn't even work. I want a GUI, .exe's, and hover text on options. There is a reason every consumer grade linux/unix OS hides the terminal (android, iOS, macOS).

aaomidi 2y ago
You practically described how I feel every time I run into an issue on windows and have to resort to editing undocumented registry keys.
- AndroTux 2y ago
  And that happens how often? Once a year? On Linux, that’s more like one a day. Once a week if you’re lucky.
  - JrProgrammer 2y ago
    I have no idea what you are talking about, I've used fedora for over a year now and aside from some tweaking, which I explicitly did myself, I've never had to go into some weird configs to change anything. It just works
  - soerxpso 2y ago
    Can you elaborate on what exactly you're doing with Linux that's causing that? I use Arch daily (programming, gaming, web browsing, etc), and the last time I had to do anything more complicated than `sudo pacman -Syu` to configure my system was over a year ago.
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    Can you be specific? I like to tinker with my config so am not the comparison point, but my partner, two young daughters and my mother are all on Linux and neither do I help them, nor do they use the terminal. My mother switched to Linux several years ago and the amount of questions I receive are less than when she used Windows, mainly because if she encounters issues it's much easier for her to find a solution herself.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Linux is great for grandmas and linux junkies. If all you do is check email and watch youtube, it works excellent. Its when you are someone in the middle that it becomes a huge PITA.
      - AndroTux 2y ago
        Exactly. I’m someone who can fix his broken Linux install because the driver update broke something again or because the display scaling is fucked again or because the game won’t launch on Steam or because wayland crashed again or because the application is missing some weird dependency, but I really, really don’t want to. I want to use my computer to do my work. I don’t want to work on my computer.
      - keyringlight 2y ago
        I'd agree with that, my sense is there would be a lot of benefit from adding GUIs that bridge the gap and show what they're doing. So instead of firing up a text editor to reach into the depths of /etc or googling the huge breadth of guides that essentially have "copy this into the terminal and pipe into grep" to get information sometimes without providing context. Another aspect to this is setting up guardrails on what is being done, and feedback on limits, which could increase confidence in using the system instead of treating it as something that will shatter at the slightest wrong touch or an appliance.
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    I think honestly PEBCAK. I use an AMD GPU. When I installed windows, windows kept insisting to downgrade my drivers. I looked it up and the official solution on Microsoft was a regedit to disable auto updates for GPU drivers. This actually happens pretty often when I’m using windows as a power user. On Linux, I’ve setup endeavourOS once (and by setup I mean installed it, and then installed Flatpak for the rest of my applications). I run yay every once in a while and everything works.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Meh if you’re not picky about the way your desktop looks/acts then you can install it and run __aslongas__ linux has the software you need. If you use office/play games all day long linux probably isn’t for you because it simply doesn’t have the the software you want to run which is the most important thing for people. That isn’t the fault of linux it’s just a market fact. Linux has everything I need and 80-90% of the games I play install easily via steam. I mean I know I’m giving up a little, but it’s just games. I prefer to have a stable system that isn’t spying on me 24/7 and trying to insert ads between myself and my very prodigious computer time.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Arnavion 2y ago
  Or worse, the knobs don't exist because Daddy knows what's best for you, and you can't have the source to implement those knobs yourself either.
silverquiet 2y ago
I've found Pop!_OS to be completely boring in a good way, though I do think there are some rough edges that are inherent to Linux as a sort of hacker first OS, if that makes sense. I also buy Corollas or at least cross shop them when looking for a car.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Can you outline what things you were messing with? I am a long time linux user, and I haven't configured my computer on the command line in years. Everything works, so there is no need to change much. Last time was 3 years ago, when I really wanted an pipewire ahead of time, and so I spent some time installing and configuring it. That was indeed painful. Otherwise, I fight with python on the command line, but you do that on Windows and Macos as well.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Just recently I got the urge to play dwarf fortress again. For the first time on Linux too. Of course you need to run dwarf therapist, a 3rd party program, alongside the game to manage your dwarves. Dwarf therapist hooks into dwarf fortress to load data about your game in real time. Of course, as I have come to normally expect, it didn't work. It could not find the active game session, despite the game running. So you get on the linux answer machine (google) and start looking for those cryptic codes to painfully ctrl+shift+v (note: cannot have ctrl+v like every other interface on earth) and offer up to the emotionless terminal god with the hope that things work after submitting those magic characters (no response or confirmation, you just try to do the thing you want to do again to see if it worked). This time around it was "ptrace_scope" settings. What is that? I have no fucking idea, I just want to use dwarf therapist. https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/master/dist/ptrace_scope/README.md https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/mast... So I follow those steps to make a permanent adjustment, including getting this thing called "libcap2-bin" (again, no idea what that is, could be installing a botnet for all i know). And as I have come to expect, it doesn't work. So instead now I have to run a terminal command (i have it saved in a text file on my desktop) everytime i turn on the PC to disable ptrace so I can run dwarf therapist. Compare this to windows: Download dwarf therapist. Run it. Works first time. It's just such a classic linux experience.
  - eqvinox 2y ago
    The 'funny' thing here is that you've run afoul of security restrictions, apparently dwarf therapist hooks into dwarf fortress as a debugger (=ptrace) to mess around with its interna. Why it does that is beyond me, there are better ways to achieve similar things (e.g. LD_PRELOAD). This (hopefully) doesn't hold in the general case, but for this very specific instance the classic Windows experience of it "works first time" seems intimately tied to the fact that it is a less secure OS.
resource_waste 2y ago
You didnt mention which distro. Are you using outdated Linux? (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) Or modern linux? (Fedora) Too many people fell for Ubuntu's Free CD marketing 20 years ago and repeat a prayer that its 'sTaBlE'. Its not stable, Outdated linux is garbage. Since switching to Fedora, I install RPM fusion + Nivida and never touch the terminal. I don't use app managers either, I just havent had a reason to use either app managers or the terminal in the last 1.5 years.
- eqvinox 2y ago
  > Are you using outdated Linux? (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) > Or modern linux? (Fedora) Citation needed. As an application developer, I'm seeing interest and activity on Fedora and Ubuntu decrease, and Debian and Mint increase. (I'll agree with Ubuntu being a "trap", though not really for any reason related to stability.)
surgical_fire 2y ago
Without knowing what distro you use it is impossible to derive any meaning from your post.
dark__paladin 2y ago
I have had a lot of luck using the Plasma desktop environment (on Arch). Super customizable, to the level of hyper specificity you've described (down to the pixel, sometimes), and is mostly intuitive how to make these customizations. My local machine basically looks/runs like Windows 10, but with the KDE Plasma logo in the corner instead of Microsoft Windows. I have a similar setup using Cosmic on Pop_OS!
zokier 2y ago
> TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. I'm ready to go back to Windows 7. But between Windows 11 (or 12 or whatever), ios ("macos"), and Linux, it's not so simple anymore. It's just bad options all around.
albertopv 2y ago
I had a very old HP laptop. I installed Ubuntu 20.04, no problems. Laptop board died. I bought a mini pc, different CPU and GPU. I moved Ubunuty SSD from HP laptop to mini pc as it was, and it worked. Without doing anything all was running: wifi, gpu, bluetooth (even better than corporate Win11 laptop). I run Steam and I was playing just like before my old games. Magic.
minkles 2y ago
100% agree with this. From my perspective, Linux only works for people if you give a fuck about Linux and make it part of your core being. Some of us give a fuck about solving the problem, not the tool. There is nothing more frustrating when I'm told "have you used Linux on the desktop". I literally use it on the server, have done everything down to writing kernel modules, have brought up startups and piles of infrastructure on it for 25 years but fuck no, it isn't going to the desktop because it doesn't solve any problems there, only creating new ones.
- feoren 2y ago
  Despite the downvotes, I agree with you: I only care about getting the thing done. I don't want the OS to matter. I don't want it to be part of my identity. I don't want to think about the OS at all. Whereas most people using Linux are like: "whatever, once you read all the man pages and understand how the process isolation model works and find the right Discord chats to ask your question and know which packages to download and pick correctly from the 743 different distributions and make sure all hardware you buy is Linux-compatible and configure your kernel to sudo dev/null/ then you really don't have to jump down to the console more than once every few weeks" ... sorry, it's still currently much easier to unplug the internet when you first install Windows, edit a few regex keys to disable some ads, and then tell that popup "later" every few weeks. While the latter is infuriating, it takes two orders of magnitude less upfront mental load.
paretoer 2y ago
You can't be using KDE Plasma then. I don't even know how to access the KDE Plasma help because it is just so easy to use. I am writing this on a $500 ASUS Vivobook that came with Windows 11. The hardest thing was making the KDE thumb drive because Windows kept giving me a blue screen of death. Once installed everything just works.

aaomidi 2y ago

You practically described how I feel every time I run into an issue on windows and have to resort to editing undocumented registry keys.

AndroTux 2y ago
And that happens how often? Once a year? On Linux, that’s more like one a day. Once a week if you’re lucky.
- JrProgrammer 2y ago
  I have no idea what you are talking about, I've used fedora for over a year now and aside from some tweaking, which I explicitly did myself, I've never had to go into some weird configs to change anything. It just works
- soerxpso 2y ago
  Can you elaborate on what exactly you're doing with Linux that's causing that? I use Arch daily (programming, gaming, web browsing, etc), and the last time I had to do anything more complicated than `sudo pacman -Syu` to configure my system was over a year ago.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  Can you be specific? I like to tinker with my config so am not the comparison point, but my partner, two young daughters and my mother are all on Linux and neither do I help them, nor do they use the terminal. My mother switched to Linux several years ago and the amount of questions I receive are less than when she used Windows, mainly because if she encounters issues it's much easier for her to find a solution herself.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Linux is great for grandmas and linux junkies. If all you do is check email and watch youtube, it works excellent. Its when you are someone in the middle that it becomes a huge PITA.
    - AndroTux 2y ago
      Exactly. I’m someone who can fix his broken Linux install because the driver update broke something again or because the display scaling is fucked again or because the game won’t launch on Steam or because wayland crashed again or because the application is missing some weird dependency, but I really, really don’t want to. I want to use my computer to do my work. I don’t want to work on my computer.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      I'd agree with that, my sense is there would be a lot of benefit from adding GUIs that bridge the gap and show what they're doing. So instead of firing up a text editor to reach into the depths of /etc or googling the huge breadth of guides that essentially have "copy this into the terminal and pipe into grep" to get information sometimes without providing context. Another aspect to this is setting up guardrails on what is being done, and feedback on limits, which could increase confidence in using the system instead of treating it as something that will shatter at the slightest wrong touch or an appliance.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  I think honestly PEBCAK. I use an AMD GPU. When I installed windows, windows kept insisting to downgrade my drivers. I looked it up and the official solution on Microsoft was a regedit to disable auto updates for GPU drivers. This actually happens pretty often when I’m using windows as a power user. On Linux, I’ve setup endeavourOS once (and by setup I mean installed it, and then installed Flatpak for the rest of my applications). I run yay every once in a while and everything works.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Meh if you’re not picky about the way your desktop looks/acts then you can install it and run __aslongas__ linux has the software you need. If you use office/play games all day long linux probably isn’t for you because it simply doesn’t have the the software you want to run which is the most important thing for people. That isn’t the fault of linux it’s just a market fact. Linux has everything I need and 80-90% of the games I play install easily via steam. I mean I know I’m giving up a little, but it’s just games. I prefer to have a stable system that isn’t spying on me 24/7 and trying to insert ads between myself and my very prodigious computer time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Arnavion 2y ago
Or worse, the knobs don't exist because Daddy knows what's best for you, and you can't have the source to implement those knobs yourself either.

silverquiet 2y ago

I've found Pop!_OS to be completely boring in a good way, though I do think there are some rough edges that are inherent to Linux as a sort of hacker first OS, if that makes sense. I also buy Corollas or at least cross shop them when looking for a car.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

Can you outline what things you were messing with? I am a long time linux user, and I haven't configured my computer on the command line in years. Everything works, so there is no need to change much. Last time was 3 years ago, when I really wanted an pipewire ahead of time, and so I spent some time installing and configuring it. That was indeed painful. Otherwise, I fight with python on the command line, but you do that on Windows and Macos as well.

Workaccount2 2y ago
Just recently I got the urge to play dwarf fortress again. For the first time on Linux too. Of course you need to run dwarf therapist, a 3rd party program, alongside the game to manage your dwarves. Dwarf therapist hooks into dwarf fortress to load data about your game in real time. Of course, as I have come to normally expect, it didn't work. It could not find the active game session, despite the game running. So you get on the linux answer machine (google) and start looking for those cryptic codes to painfully ctrl+shift+v (note: cannot have ctrl+v like every other interface on earth) and offer up to the emotionless terminal god with the hope that things work after submitting those magic characters (no response or confirmation, you just try to do the thing you want to do again to see if it worked). This time around it was "ptrace_scope" settings. What is that? I have no fucking idea, I just want to use dwarf therapist. https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/master/dist/ptrace_scope/README.md https://github.com/Dwarf-Therapist/Dwarf-Therapist/blob/mast... So I follow those steps to make a permanent adjustment, including getting this thing called "libcap2-bin" (again, no idea what that is, could be installing a botnet for all i know). And as I have come to expect, it doesn't work. So instead now I have to run a terminal command (i have it saved in a text file on my desktop) everytime i turn on the PC to disable ptrace so I can run dwarf therapist. Compare this to windows: Download dwarf therapist. Run it. Works first time. It's just such a classic linux experience.
- eqvinox 2y ago
  The 'funny' thing here is that you've run afoul of security restrictions, apparently dwarf therapist hooks into dwarf fortress as a debugger (=ptrace) to mess around with its interna. Why it does that is beyond me, there are better ways to achieve similar things (e.g. LD_PRELOAD). This (hopefully) doesn't hold in the general case, but for this very specific instance the classic Windows experience of it "works first time" seems intimately tied to the fact that it is a less secure OS.

resource_waste 2y ago

You didnt mention which distro. Are you using outdated Linux? (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) Or modern linux? (Fedora) Too many people fell for Ubuntu's Free CD marketing 20 years ago and repeat a prayer that its 'sTaBlE'. Its not stable, Outdated linux is garbage. Since switching to Fedora, I install RPM fusion + Nivida and never touch the terminal. I don't use app managers either, I just havent had a reason to use either app managers or the terminal in the last 1.5 years.

eqvinox 2y ago
> Are you using outdated Linux? (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) > Or modern linux? (Fedora) Citation needed. As an application developer, I'm seeing interest and activity on Fedora and Ubuntu decrease, and Debian and Mint increase. (I'll agree with Ubuntu being a "trap", though not really for any reason related to stability.)

surgical_fire 2y ago

Without knowing what distro you use it is impossible to derive any meaning from your post.

dark__paladin 2y ago

I have had a lot of luck using the Plasma desktop environment (on Arch). Super customizable, to the level of hyper specificity you've described (down to the pixel, sometimes), and is mostly intuitive how to make these customizations. My local machine basically looks/runs like Windows 10, but with the KDE Plasma logo in the corner instead of Microsoft Windows. I have a similar setup using Cosmic on Pop_OS!

zokier 2y ago

> TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows. I'm ready to go back to Windows 7. But between Windows 11 (or 12 or whatever), ios ("macos"), and Linux, it's not so simple anymore. It's just bad options all around.

albertopv 2y ago

I had a very old HP laptop. I installed Ubuntu 20.04, no problems. Laptop board died. I bought a mini pc, different CPU and GPU. I moved Ubunuty SSD from HP laptop to mini pc as it was, and it worked. Without doing anything all was running: wifi, gpu, bluetooth (even better than corporate Win11 laptop). I run Steam and I was playing just like before my old games. Magic.

minkles 2y ago

100% agree with this. From my perspective, Linux only works for people if you give a fuck about Linux and make it part of your core being. Some of us give a fuck about solving the problem, not the tool. There is nothing more frustrating when I'm told "have you used Linux on the desktop". I literally use it on the server, have done everything down to writing kernel modules, have brought up startups and piles of infrastructure on it for 25 years but fuck no, it isn't going to the desktop because it doesn't solve any problems there, only creating new ones.

feoren 2y ago
Despite the downvotes, I agree with you: I only care about getting the thing done. I don't want the OS to matter. I don't want it to be part of my identity. I don't want to think about the OS at all. Whereas most people using Linux are like: "whatever, once you read all the man pages and understand how the process isolation model works and find the right Discord chats to ask your question and know which packages to download and pick correctly from the 743 different distributions and make sure all hardware you buy is Linux-compatible and configure your kernel to sudo dev/null/ then you really don't have to jump down to the console more than once every few weeks" ... sorry, it's still currently much easier to unplug the internet when you first install Windows, edit a few regex keys to disable some ads, and then tell that popup "later" every few weeks. While the latter is infuriating, it takes two orders of magnitude less upfront mental load.

paretoer 2y ago

You can't be using KDE Plasma then. I don't even know how to access the KDE Plasma help because it is just so easy to use. I am writing this on a $500 ASUS Vivobook that came with Windows 11. The hardest thing was making the KDE thumb drive because Windows kept giving me a blue screen of death. Once installed everything just works.