Because every time I try Linux Desktop, I spend hours fixing and configuring stuff. I just don't care and want to waste time with this. So Windows on the Desktop is perfect for me and then I just use WSL2 to be in my Linux Terminal environment.
This comes up repeatedly and I'd like to understand it better. I have bought computers from Dell and Lenovo mostly and they have worked flawlessly. I've been consciously avoiding Nvidia GPUs (and dGPUs in general) because they are overkill for developer work (unless I did an insane lot of local number crunching). My Fedora and Ubuntu installs have tended to work out of the box.
Would you like to describe what happened in more detail?
Spent the past 6 months on Linux before switching back to Mac.
I bought a new Dell XPS 13” with Ubuntu preinstalled. It was still a nightmare. Some of the hardware/driver issues I encountered:
- Laptop would constantly get stuck in suspend, often when plugging or unplugging my thunderbolt docking station. The only way out of this was to hold the power button for 10 seconds, which I had to do almost daily.
- Sometimes the laptop would randomly wake from sleep in my backpack, resulting in a burning hot laptop.
- The battery seems to drain very quickly even while in sleep mode. Possibly related to previous point but it seems to lose charge in sleep mode even if it doesn’t not spontaneously wake.
- Doesn’t seem possible in Gnome to run an external display at a different DPI from the laptop display. This meant I had to constantly switch DPI when I moved from external display to laptop mode.
- Couldn’t get my jabra Bluetooth headset to work. I could get sound, but it required switching the Bluetooth profile every time I connected them, and I couldn’t find a way to get it to remember the correct setting despite hours of searching. I also couldn’t get the mic to work whatsoever.
- Doesn’t seem possible to configure keyboard remapping on certain keyboards only (e.g. swap modifier keys on my external keyboard).
- Couldn’t get scrolling to work with my apple Magic Mouse, had to buy a new mouse. Maybe a minor issue but it works fine on Windows.
- Not a hardware issue but I had a weird issue where google chrome tabs could not be repositioned without the tab becoming “detached” and creating a new window. This was incredibly frustrating.
I don’t think Linux is ready to be used as a daily driver for people who care about getting work done and not tinkering. Maybe if you use a desktop with a couple years old hardware it will work, but latest gen hardware, laptops, or external devices are a recipe for pain.
I am using an XPS that i installed Ubuntu on for dev work and I am facing many of the issues mentioned above.
Whenever i put the machine to sleep I do a check always assuming the risk that the app states I have, might never be accessible again. I still can't get hibernate working on it to make it all just work for me. But each rabbithole into making my life a little easier comes at a cost of so much time that I just don't find reasonable.
Windows has it's pain points but having WSL running makes life so much easier.
I didn't like the pain, so I switched to a company that supports Linux on its hardware. I'd rather have the team do the system integration work for me rather than debug hardware I don't have the time or the specs for.
This comes up repeatedly and I'd like to understand it better.
I recently spent days testing 'random' kernel parameters and config settings from various forums in a desperate attempt to get my Ryzen APU to run stably without tearing. I still can't get it to reliably wake from sleep.
The new laptop I got from the company had nVidia graphics. After hours of trying, I was still not able to set-up nVidia drivers, and I have ultimately given up.
But a lot of small things added up:
* full-disk encryption in combination with dual-boot is doable, but not easy
* most of the software is either late with updates, or worse. For many vendors Linux support is an afterthought, and it shows. Teams is almost unusable (at least was in April 2021).
* every system update carries the risk of the OS not booting up any more. These days it's easy to restore back, but still, it's a risk of wasting time that is not easy to accept in a professional environment.
> full-disk encryption in combination with dual-boot is doable, but not easy
Kinda. You can't configure it during install, but I think it would be pretty easy to set up LUKS afterwards.
> most of the software is either late with updates, or worse
It really depends on your distro. Many of the 'stable' options will try to hold back updates in order to prevent breakage, which is why I personally prefer a more cutting-edge, rolling-release design. To each their own, though.
> every system update carries the risk of the OS not booting up any more
Ironically, the thing that got me to switch to Linux was having my entire PC bricked by a Windows update. The bootloader and partition table appeared to have completely erased itself off my drive, so I pulled the trigger and just switched to Arch. I haven't had my computer refuse to boot since, but I have gotten some surprises when my desktop updates behind my back. YMMV, but I feel like every OS is horribly unstable these days. At least Linux obeys my commands when I ask them.
I am not a web developer. I would love to have a GPU that allowed me to compile my code faster, but, so far, it's not the case. I don't do 3D visualization or games either, so, for me, the tiny, cheap, and very compatible iGPUs work just fine.
My guess is people buying hardware for their Windows, and then try to install Linux, and some of the hardware doesn't end up working, or is weird in some way.
I personally had very good luck, all of the random laptops I have tries ran the current Linux well, and on desktop I had even fewer problems, especially because I have checked Linux compatibility before buying.
