I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows(jpain.io) |
I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows(jpain.io) |
> Linux friction is unpredictable. [..] The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
The good news is this is largely a matter of experience: if you can push through and get used to doing root cause analysis on Linux, you'll find that desktop Linux issues tend to become transparent and easy to fix. If you stick to distros that support rollbacks, you also win back the option to defer anything that feels likely to be a time sink until either you have time/patience/interest, or someone else has fixed the issue and sent their fix upstream.
The bad news is that it's an experience issue: if you want to get to the other side of it, you have to invest in building the skill. The age old tongue-in-cheek advice is actually still good: install Gentoo. (Install Arch if you want a diet version of the experience.) The desktop Linux userland is indeed Lego, and if you go through the process of piecing it together instead of grabbing a preassembled kit, even just once, you will build a new troubleshooting muscle that serves you well for a long time. Can you find the energy for that? Can you make the time? Probably, but it won't be effortless. Maybe you'll even need to dual-boot, or have two computers for a while.
But I promise it's an issue of familiarity, intuition, and skill. You absolutely can cultivate those things.
If Windows works for a person or they need it for certain software that's fine. For me, I'm living a Linux-default life for the first time and it's nice.
Here are some minor things that always went sour on Windows:
Webcam's settings would always get reset semi-randomly
The date from the clock would frequently disappear
Mic's volume would often get lowered
Switched to native Linux. Had a rough start but it improved after going down a few rabbit holes.
My GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB) didn't play nice with Wayland. The official NVIDIA drivers have big problems allocating system memory when GPU memory is filled causing apps to crash constantly[0]. Games were lagging and stuttering. My whole machine would pause for 5-10 seconds and then unpause, a few times a day.
Ended up having to modify a udev setting on my SSD to enable max_performance for its power management and the machine never paused again.
Switched to an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU and all of the GPU related problems went away, and the games I played stopped stuttering and lagging.
Now it's quite stable but there's still 3 problems. I've gone down pretty deep rabbit holes for each one but didn't resolve them.
If I'm downloading a file with Firefox and I start a Docker container that involves configuring a Docker network, my file download will get interrupted. Not 100% of the time but pretty close to it. I tried a million settings individually and nothing has stopped this behavior.
If pretty heavy I/O or network traffic is happening while recording a video with OBS, sometimes my webcam's audio will get desync'd from the the video, making my lips move a half second after the video happens. Tried a ton of different PipeWire settings here, couldn't find out a resolution.
If I'm on a video call in a browser with Firefox (Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, etc.), usually after about 45-60 minutes folks will say my audio is getting really choppy and I have to reload the browser for it to get fixed. I tried a ton of things other than switching browsers and it made no effect.
Nothing in the journalctl logs for any of the above 3 issues are present.
I'm not posting this expecting someone to fix it, but I can relate with the OP in that Windows "just works".
I don't mind going down these rabbit holes if I find a resolution and when it's working, it's a much better environment for me than Windows without question.
I'm not switching back to Windows but there is certainly an expectation that there could be issues. This is the sole reason why I wouldn't recommend Linux to all of my technical friends, unless they are die hard into tech and fully understand what they're getting into.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi...
In fact, I am using now Pop!_OS in parallel with Windows. But linux desktop experience still feels broken when compared with Windows and macOS.
I want to install the system with the defaults, not spend time configuring it and have an "it just works" experience. But even if I spend tons of time configuring and fiddling with it, something will fail, there will be problems, something won't work at all, something won't work properly and something will require complex workarounds that take time and exhaust my patience.
Before trying Pop!_OS I tried CachyOS. It provided me a broken desktop experience but in a different way.
Probably the best linux desktop experience now is provided by WSL2, followed by ChromeOS.
It's the fragmentation in linux that will always make it tough for "normies". Distro differences is obvious first thing, but the two big ones are desktop environments (gnome/kde/etc) and app package formats (flatpak/snap). These add friction and more problems (I heard you like packaging: here's another package format and big ass repository for you. And portals? really?).
I just keep to a simple desktop in fedora using rpm/dnf and build from source if I have to. Yes, I know that's not an answer for normies, but there's not going be simple answers.
Linux as a server is very good, and there is not much discussion on that front.
Linux as a desktop system is fine. I could live with it for the added value of having a flexible, predictible system. Windows is much more polished but, again, this is a tradeoff I would happily make.
The problem are applications. And particularly Outlook. I have to use Outlook because of its integration with the calendar, Zoom, ... This is the Outlook client for on-premises Exchange.
OWA suck to the point I simply cannot look at it (the one coming with Exchnage on premises, I do not the MS365 one). Without Outlook working seamlessly I am done.
This is really a pain - one software that stops an extended trial.
This is absolutely not true anymore.
Between malfunctions on a multi-screen setups, audio problems with applications, issues with sleep recovery on some monitors, etc. -- Winodws is much more polished
Sure YMMV but I am making active attempts at moving, with the will to move, but it is not as good yet.
Like I said, this is not a showstopper for me.
And what can I say: It worked. There are still aspects I'm missing (Preview app, Mail) and other Aspects I really hate (Printing on my Canon MB5150 just does not work) but I stayed. I found workarounds and solutions, fought my way through the distro-jungle and I'm glad I made it.
All in all I think it is more a know-how Problem, than a Problem with the system itself.
However, if you don't have this time, it's understandable but how much time goes into experimenting every year and then switching back?
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
> I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore.
Until Microslop OS decided on its own that you haven't had a reboot in a while and since we're at it some of the drivers you desperately need suddenly are not kosher anymore.
When stuff breaks I prefer something I'm actually allowed to repair. That's just me.
Also, if you're familiar with sysinternals suite for Windows there's a Linux equivalent to all the tools with nice GUIs. So you should be able to track down most process-caused performance issues fairly easily without knowing all the appropriate CLI commands.
- dns cache configuration
- wlan power saving which is kind of aggressive since Linux has had some power management issues
It's really why I go for a minimal distro, debian with xfce. There's not many components, they're not "tuned", and I can just kinda research any issues myself and find what works. Usually there's some pretty big gaps (missing a whole component, wildly malfunctioning, high resource utilization) and then it's easy to figure out. There's not much code, or really hard scripts to understand. Just maybe enable debug on the service. Learn where the developers put diagnostics (about:support is a godsend). You get to architect your hardware's success and get a rock-solid system. But yeah, if it's weird it might be weird for a while, haha.
For my setup I think the last few lessons were like:
- use gamescope for X11 Wine/Proton (huge.)
- Firefox profile reset to fix hardware decoding (followed some good guides and some bad guides)
- to make changes use the same git tag as your distro so the deps are easily in-reach.
My favorite new discovery for debian in particular is their extensive functional docs. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/
absolutely adore this.
It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.
It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).
Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.
The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."
Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.
Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.
As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.
Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.
Okay, that does sound pretty dang nice for older games.
I've tried Windows a few times over the years and every time I regretted it. From nagging notifications, random restarts while I sleep (for "updates"), ads in the start menu, ai shoved into every orifice, to constant "updates required" after you just updated.
On the bright side, the battery life was better on Windows and sure-- games work. The latter is slowly becoming the norm on Linux as well.
On the other hand, Debian Xfce on my old Acer laptop with a i3-370M runs superb - Windows feels like a downgrade there.
The OS/Desktop is not the show, it's the stage/floor.
With LLMs I've been able to tackle bugs to a level that either fix or lower down the annoyance level. It's still not perfect, but the tradeoff is in linux favor IMO.
To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
People really dislike change, it's the same thing about some freak thing that happens like twice that you heard of, like shark attacks, but still drive their ton and half vehicles for thousands of hours a year. People accepted those issues as part of the thing, they blame Linux in general when an application doesn't work, but never blame Windows in general when the OS doesn't work.
I loved it for my work laptop but then Apple Silicon MacBooks came along and forced a main OS due to the hardware (though nowadays Asahi is pretty good on the older ones). I suppose on a home use case you get big multiplayer game DRM support as well (different people will consider that a plus or minus).
It's a cult of false simplicity (like most cults of simplicity).
"update tool was bricked"? What?
As many complaints as I have about Apple and MacOS and iOS, their products hit a niche and commoditized it.
Everything else can be re-created yourself on Linux except for that.
I'm honestly surprised why it's taking the rest such a long time.
I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.
I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.
There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.
linux can be a massive time sink at times unfortunately
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
> That's not what the author said.
It is exactly what the author said. TFA makes a point that Windows' issues are well known and predictable. And the author would rather endure the daily nuisances infliced by Windows than fix the sporadic breakages that Linux might throw.
I tend to have better luck with google-fu when it comes to Windows problems, just though the user base being so much larger, so it's much more likely that someone's written a guide or an explanation of my exact problem, while on Linux, it's much less likely that someone's written an exact guide, but general knowledge goes further (but you need more of it to fill in the gaps).
One additional issue I've found is that in the cases there is a guide or a Stackoverflow question regarding my exact problem, the solution is 6 years out of date and may be non-functional or less than ideal, while on Windows, that solution would still work.
If this were true there’d be no need for IT/tech support services.
Apart from the ones that are completely 100% usage-blocking.
What?
Sure - if one has some weird hardware? or need to use some specialist windows only software/workflow.
> they are just fucking annoying
> are either solvable without a comp sci degree,
with that argument - even ChromeOS is great. Just works. Especially for all the school kids without compsci degree or even Amazon staff (that use a modified form of chrome OS).
Windows Performance Analyser and Windows Performance Recorder are pretty easy to use to troubleshoot boot performance and have a nice, simple GUI. For fairness, there's also systemd analyze on Linux
I haven't used Windows in ~5 years but at least with XP to 10 it used to be fairly well documented and not terribly hard to troubleshoot assuming you're willing to do some learning and leg work.
I'd say macOS is the worst in that department--things randomly break just like Windows and Linux but it's largely a blackbox.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
This mostly means nothing because the hardware drivers between the 2 OSs are totally different.
For example you could have bad memory and Linux isn't sticking anything important there, whereas Windows is. Same with things like video drivers and storage drivers.
As someone that's salvaged a lot of old machines, sometimes some particular hardware is bad in a particular OS and replacing it with a non broken card of the same kind fixes the issue.
As an afterthought I downloaded Steam and played on Debian. Worked out of the box. No crashes. Minimum of 30fps, most of the time around 50-60. It was more than playable, enough to be pretty fun.
The BSOD where the computer shits itself so much, that it gives you a nonsensical "error", which you have to use another machine to look up. Or if you want to deep-dive, you have to use 3rd party software to deal with.
Meanwhile a Linux Kernel Panic will dump out (while very technical) everything it knew at that moment...
And things like memory errors are picked up, and you can test your memory, BY STANDARD
Or "Disable IPv6".
It's so nonsensical when it comes to Windows World that people put up with that shit
I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month.
So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still shows whatever it was showing when it froze, no USB mouse or keyboard does anything, cannot be RDP'd to cannot be pinged... hold-down-power-button only answer.
(I have swapped all the cabels, just to be sure.)
The only differences: moved it 20 meters physically, connected it to a slightly newer TV. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
macOS maybe as long as you're only using Apple hardware. As soon as you use 3rd party peripherals, you're in for very interesting bugs that are not getting confirmed by Apple and suddenly disappear again with a macOS update (if you're lucky).
Mysterious binaries from shady websites, great.
I can attach a debugger to a process, I can look at the CPU/IO/Network transactions. I can see where stuff is waiting and being blocked by any of them, all with basic GNU tooling that comes with every distro, even the most minimal!
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
I get "You need to reboot for these Dell Updates" daily...
Meanwhile in Linux world, you can switch out the entire kernel live...
Like mouse or printer will not work when you are at home but will at work. So you live with it.
The funniest is you see the user use the computer and at regular occurence there are weird error popup showing up but the user is trained to click ok mechanically without even reading.
The worse is if like the author you use ms365 or outlook. You are in a world of pain and things suddenly breaking or with lot of unexplainable frustrations. For example when you used outlook with an account/user and add a second one. And then delete the first one. And somehow there would be an email account associated with your whole computer that outlook is using in shadow. And like you would receive emails but sending will not work. And the only working solution in the end is to nuke everything and start again.
Your intuition was right.
Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.
You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.
But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.
Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.
Additional the UI behavior also more often changed than windows e.g gnome 2 to newer versions many core apps are more minimal/less functions and yes I just can fork and use the old behavior as open source but then my pc is more about fixing issues like under windows.
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
[1] For example, there is some ridiculous problem with wayland and notifications on GNOME at least, see this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/work_items/358?... which has to be disabled with an extension unless you want to go insane
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
MS's own documentation is incredibly lacking in actual resolution to problems, just always shifting or work arounds.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.
Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience
Windows has a lot of annoyances and quirks, but generally it seems much more reliable that I'll at least be able to log in and look at the desktop, even when things are really messed up. The issues are usually just annoying, they don't stop me using the computer for basic tasks.
I'm using linux now, but I keep a separate windows machine just in case. It's already payed off, because my linux install is slowly breaking for no apparent reason. Sometimes the entire computer locks up completely, and sometimes after a reboot, the mouse won't move or will get stuck in a corner. I no longer try to fix these kinds of issues, I just re-install if things get annoying enough. But I've had the same windows install for five years now, and I've never managed to make a linux desktop last longer than a year.
I'm using Mint at the moment, and it's locked up twice more since my last comment. In fairness I've narrows this issue down to some software crashing that's taking the system down with it. But can't help but feel if it was crashing on Windows, at least I'd be able to get into task manager, or it would just close, rather than needing to reboot.
I decided I'd rather start from scratch on Linux than Windows for reasons of Microsoft's various decisions and direction. Windows essentially pushed me away by saying my prior experience was no longer useful.
It's a decision I'm frequently reminded of how good it was.
I hate it when I see newbies ask for help with Windows, and they say the checked the settings menu, but couldn't fix it. That menu is essentially lying to them (by omission of relevant settings and information), but they aren't experienced enough to know that.
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
In my case, installing linux on a laptop and while everything was fine, there was an unexplained network delay. What ultimately fixed it (and I really don't know why) is I had to fix the time on my system clock to the right date/time and then got ntp setup and working correctly. My system clock was far in the past. I THINK (but don't know) that the root cause was in certificate validation. Perhaps hiccups because the certs were issued in the future?
WSL is okay but you are better going full Linux as host. Linux Mint is a good platform for most. Stable, keeping modern kernels updated, but not crazy bleeding-edge wastes of time.
You don't have to quit Windows but you can quit being hostage to Windows.
Does windows bloat bother you? It bothers me. Ever tried doing a windows install from something like tiny10 and then use the system? Nothing works quite right.
The rest of my argument as to why windows is less predictable than Linux is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150812
Missing : good old debian :)
Install anything KDE if you enjoy the welcome screen crashing and random Plasma crashes :) Particular shout out to Kubuntu for the awful installer
And no, Gimp is not alternative. Neither Affinity, bucause lack of linux support. Or Capture One. Only DaVinci resolve is competition to Premiere because of linux support.
I'm curious if Adobe ends because of unsustainable pricing models and aggressive terms of use (no offline more than week, constant data sending to adobe servers) or because of Ai. Because post-production via complex tools will soon became obsolete compared to prompt-like editing.
Also you might prefer gimpshop(or whatever the latest PS-ified gimp is these days), as the default hotkeys in gimp are shit. Ctrl, shift, and alt have universal contexts beyond Adobe products that gimp completely ignores.
Just like Macs and the stupid command button. And don't even think of remapping, say the clipboard, to use Ctrl. Many apps just won't honor it. Because that would just make too much sense.
PhotoPea might work for casual editing. That's not why I use Adobe.
If you have a problem open the agent and tell it, give it the access (after backup of course), let it figure it out for you.
Then when it has ask it what it did and what the issues were.
Doing this massively reduces the friction of even very advanced Linux issues that you don't have time to look at.
And at the end you can document the solution or turn it into scripts that you keep forever.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
At this point WSL2 is more than filling this void. I even stopped using VMWare since WSL is that good.
I get that every person is different, so what works for someone might be dysfunctional for someone else. But I wonder if there's a growing tendency to over-emphasise things that aren't "perfect" or the perceived friction caused by different ways to approach or solve things.
Perhaps it's my own personal bias but the same way I like using Ubuntu, I think Windows is fine, as well as MacOs. They're fine the same way many other products I use are. Often, I struggle to find big differences between the stuff I use. I mean, I can see the differences (often small, rarely big), but I'm the same guy. I'm not that special.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
The massively wide variety of desktop options makes your opinion difficult to assess. Which have you tried?
Been trying for 30 years.
Historically, a sense of intimidation and the difficulty of onboarding blocked a lot of people from accessing these benefits. It's been cool to see how LLM agents have helped a lot of people get started and tap into the fun parts.
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with
Still, it can be dreadful to face even small issues when you only feel like using your computer and not fixing it. Having an LLM agent help with fixing issues is a lifesaver. Ask it what you don't understand, take note of the commands it uses or suggests while troubleshooting and fixing your issue, and you'll supercharge your learning and not get as hung up on the issues.
If someone doesn't care much to learn though, I'd say Linux is still tough to recommend.
Do you think that Windows *isn't* a learning experience?
But as a Linux user, who had a stint on OSX because it's closer to Unix, I hated it.
Simple things like keyboard shortcuts doing the entirely opposite of what I expected (which is my fault in reality) but doing stupid things themselves
I daily drive a MBP now, and have since the M1 air released, but even this many years later I still think the more windows-y desktop metaphor is superior for any type of work that requires heavy multi-tasking (which I do as a sysadmin type role).
Apple tends to assume you are working inside one app at a time, on one workspace at a time. This is evident from the get go with how the OS treats apps & windows/documents as separate, and how Cmd+Tab only switches between apps, not app windows.
Without third party tools, it's a terrible OS for actually managing multiple windows and contexts and that throws people off because nearly everything else outside of mobile doesn't use that paradigm. Context switching is expensive on macOS, by design, but most general user's and office workers work involves heavy context switching, and frequently.
I used to do support for a "Marketing Agency" so was a 100% Mac shop, and it was interesting to get calls to say they couldn't recover documents. Or a shared document was locked, because OSX had it open perpetually in the taskbar...
On the flip side, I run a Windows gaming laptop alongside my Mac. It is a constant source of rage to the point that I am genuinely shocked at how bad things are and regularly suspect that the people who choose to use it are the victims of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.
make it make sense.
Kick those threads way up.
I feel that was half of this article...The author did ZERO investigations
It's been a long time since I've seen a kernel panic in Linux, and it's been my daily driver for years. I don't use any exotic hardware on either system.
Things that are mere "annoyances" to other people are blocking to me because distraction is blocking. If I have everything set up a certain way and Windows restarts overnight, I lose my place completely. If I'm working and stupid ads pop up uninvited, or Windows takes a moment to tell me about the great new AI feature I'll never use, it throws me off. I'll take the risk that Linux won't support a piece of hardware over the guarantee that Windows will shred my attention and concentration.
ms.com "support" pages.
Meanwhile, Archi Wiki? That is like... the best thing and should be a national treasure.
"that didn't work. That has never done or found anything"
"I'm just going to close this issue as solved"
Most support posts
It's been a while since I've had to look up Windows problems to be fair, so my experience on that front is a year and a bit out of date (and probably more, since most permanent issues would have been solved on my desktop install years earlier).
> but for Linux I'm much more likely to hit a wiki or forum with in-depth technical information to solve my problem.
That's part of the problem, at least in my experience. When I ran Windows, I'd find someone's article called 'Solution for $Error in $Program when doing $Thing', or a forum thread or whatever else along those lines, and it would in the best case be accurate and fix my problem, and in the worst case help me figure it out from there.
On Linux, that wiki page or forum won't have a solution for my exact problem, but it will help me figure it out. Linux's default case has often been equivalent to Windows's worst case when looking for solutions, but both of them very rarely ended in a true worst case (not finding a solution at all). Linux's solution will more often than not be transferable to other situations, so the knowledge gained is useful, while on Windows, the equivalent solution is bespoke and won't be useful in any other case.
My best guess at this point is the 2025 LG TVs have some different HDMI ARC something something compared to the 2019 it was plugged into before.
But also my point is that there's no way a human with 3 kids and job could ever know... it either starts working or I get a PlayStation or a different PC or whatever.
Or just tell my kids, "Hey, Death Stranding works on your Mac now, so shut the fuck up until you finish that whole game." ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
I came through with Windows certs, but had always been a Linux guy, and now work entirely with Linux. Windows people don't actually solve problems, hence the joke about "Turn it off and on again", making it into mainstream.
You will very rarely see a Windows person open up a debugger, unless they're an actual developer. Meanwhile on Linux you can peek inside the process that's hanging and see what it's borked on.
Oh no, the NFS mount has dropped and the process is stuck trying to read it!
Oh no, reboot
Windows has pretty robust tooling to do the same, even if no one uses it. Process Monitor (procmon) will trivially tell you the same on Windows. Arguably the GUI is easier to use than strace since you can both proactively and retroactively apply filters. Main issue is letting it run too long and eating up a bunch of RAM with the event buffer
There's a real cost/benefit question involved in root cause analysis, of course. But that childhood experience turned out to be representative of what I'd continue to witness in the rest of my professional life. When you always choose expedient ignorance, you end up living and working without ever having a clear idea of what your computer is doing, and each investigation feels like another Herculean task you're obliged to skip.
DISM largely does the same thing as reinstall without nuking all your files/settings assuming you can get it pointed at a valid source if winsxs doesn't have the thing it needs.
This shit still happens today.
Twice in 1 year I've had my bootloader entry just disappear after a reboot. No idea what happened. Wasn't tied to any particular update either.
If I were non-technical, it would ruin my week.
But KDE at least recovered kicker (the panel) over after a message. Windows 11 shows up nothing.
I do remember common fixes for various things, but not much of it can be extrapolated to other issues in my experience.
Which really isn't too much different, docking ports were by and large PCI with extra sauce
I think immutable distros/software are the most intuitive way, even if people get intimidated with the idea. What's the action you did as a junior when windows/linux/x broke? You most likely reinstalled. When encountering issues we tend to try to emulate immutability.
The sad thing about NixOS is that there's 0% chance of seeing it used at work. Even in the devops people you're lucky if people can edit a Dockerfile. Good luck spending the next 3 years explaining it might look like json but it's not, and it would help to learn the syntax.
However, we felt the benefit was worth the cost, overall, especially because we used the same flakes and therefore versions across all dev and deployed envs, and we didn’t have to deal with the hassle and performance issues of running all the dev services in docker containers.
I don't really know why that is, because it doesn't seem to have to do with intelligence or general experience with adjacent skills. I think it's probably at least 30% down to temperament, but it may also be because my team is mostly fairly senior and each person has a lot of responsibilities of their own.
On the bright side, the tooling is easy enough that nonetheless, my team generally has no problems spinning up new Nix environments without me, or making small changes to the ones I've set up. And LLM agents are now good enough with Nix that I'm confident they can unblock themselves until my return whenever I'm on vacation or whatever.