I’ve always found that windows is free as in beer, but Linux is just some jerk handing you bunch of grain and hops and a vague diagram of what to do next. It’s free, and it’ll make beer, but it might also make weird oatmeal instead.
Windows is free as in beer until it decides arbitrarily that you can’t output audio from certain applications on certain sound devices. Or how about arbitrarily deciding that the volume output on my headset should be 90% lower? Please go through a painful troubleshooting process that results in losing 15 minutes of your time and then having to reinstall the drivers anyway. By the way, did you need to change some audio settings? No not that audio control panel, the other one (changes in that audio control panel don’t actually have an effect)! Or that some wifi settings should just be hidden and inaccessible even from the command line (I mean who would need to set a static IP anyway). Or meh let’s not respect your selected times for scheduled updates and just do it whenever Windows wants (this will only take an hour or so ;). Oops, the start menu can’t search local applications anymore for some reason, but maybe bing search results will work. Did you want to pay $100 to upgrade this Windows 10 Home PC to Pro? Ok we charged your card. :( Something went wrong and we couldn’t complete the upgrade. Please proceed to spend 1 hour getting in touch with Microsoft support. Oh, we know it says you don’t need a license key and we didn’t send you one, but you actually need one so use this key.
And honestly all of this would be acceptable except I have zero control over what it’s doing. You can get this exact same experience on Linux except you have full control over everything. So just give me the weird Linux oatmeal, at least I can pick what spices go in it.
+1 - I laughed. (Haven't used Windows in 20 years, but it's all just so much deja vu)
BUT. I used to have full control. And then Ubuntu foisted snap on me and now I have to suffer the constant worry that snapd might choose to update some trivial piece of shit right when I need to be doing something actually important.
So, yes, I just did `sudo apt purge snapd` but now I'm stuck with messing with the oatmeal for a couple of applications, and that's likely to increase as time goes by.
I'm in the market for a new distro, but would prefer to stick with something based on Debian/apt because of the rich app ecosystem. Oh, and KDE.
I've found Fedora to strike a good balance between working out-of-the-box and getting out of my way when I want to customize it. I can't say how well KDE works because I don't use it but it is supported. With the half-year release cycle it stays fresher than Debian and I prefer DNF over APT anyway.
I've never had any issues with application support, but even in the worst case you can always run an Ubuntu container or something.
KDE on Fedora works great. I'm one of those people that has a hard time figuring out why people are complaining about desktop Linux.
My Fedora+KDE does have some problems occasionally, but they are problems of my own making, such as compiling the entire graphics stack and kernel myself so I can use the cutting edge development versions...
Yeah, that's my experience too. Fedora generally just works unless I break it myself. This system has seen 5 or 6 major release upgrades and the only time I've had issues was when I let the root disk fill up mid-upgrade, and even then it was easy to fix without a reinstall thanks to dnf distro-sync.
Granted, I specifically chose my hardware to be Linux-compatible, which meant no nvidia and a bit of googling when choosing the motherboard, but even Windows would have issues with a lot of the shoddy hardware that's out there.
My hardware wasn't even selected for Linux compatibility. Also, I've done in-place upgrades on this PC for the last 6 years. I did skip some versions though.
As far as I can remember, nothing actually broke when doing upgrades ever.
I love Fedora's in-place system upgrade, and it just keeps getting better.
I persuaded my partner to switch to Linux, because Windows is increasingly hostile if you don't want online services, accounts and offers.
We went with Silverblue, because it Just Works™, it's simple to upgrade, and it's difficult to break (and it's what I've used for years now).
One of my criteria when recommending a distro is "if I leave them alone with it for 10 years, would it be EOL (or broken)?" and IMO Silverblue makes major version upgrades much simpler than Ubuntu.
I can’t say much about the KDE experience on Debian, but Debian with Gnome was my daily driver for many years and I didn’t have much trouble with it. I’m on more exotic distros as of late, but if something happens, I always have Debian to fall back on. My only problem with the Debian lineage is it holds me back on older software versions and their unstable is … unstable as advertised, haha.
Depends on distribution. Ubuntu works quite well out of the box for a lot of hardware. It’s great for basic usage like editing docs, browsing the web etc.
I found that Manjaro just works, which is super confounding: Arch is supposed to be one of the nerdier distros. I've thrown Manjaro (and now pure Arch) at my Linux-hostile laptop, and everything works. Provided you have access to good internet Arch is almost like off-cloud-SaaS on your machine, and that model makes tons of sense for desktop usage.
Printers, the bloody cursed things, are far more reliable than Windows.
In terms of hardware support, Ubuntu comes really close. The Linux desktop has come very far in the past few years.
I very recently took a look at Manjaro to replace Kubuntu and the fucking trashfire that is snap, but got stuck on several apps that I use all the time not being available through their repo. And yes, I could go all Gentoo and `configure && make install` but really... I no longer have the time and patience for that.
And sadly, no, I do not have good internet, so that's an interesting thing to note.
Seriously ? ,
You look at docs provided by stuff like archiwiki, gentoowiki, man pages, tldr tools, whole bunch of other cool blogs helping you around with setting things up, entire web forums, matrix rooms, irc chats, mailing lists, and all sorts of other places to get help from.
And it is a jerk handing you a “vague” diagram?.
..... idk, if you can’t read a manual, then say so. A person doesn't become a jerk to provide you with one.
I understand linux/bsd variants of open source operating systems can be unviable/hard to use for people. Doesn't mean the builders become a jerk just because you cant match it to your usecase.
Those who argue that , should not use the tools provided which definitely need a manual for.
There are extensive manuals and documents for those tools, because of the flexibility and freedom they provide, its a lot harder on windows to code a script to change my display screen's color tone , depending on my mood, time of the day, or any way i want to, meanwhile with xrandr and a bash script, its just 3 lines away from me.
To some people it might be unacceptable to even just operate with xrandr or similar such commandline tools, but then, why are you trying to use these tools in the first place ?, use mac, windows or a linux distro which is more hands free like Ubuntu, or Deepin or Pop_Os.
My point was someone isn't a jerk, for providing that flexibility or freedom, no one likes to write huge manuals or documents, they do it out of kindness to help others use their tools, I just think it's wrong to call people like that jerks.
Man, I was making a joke. Obviously maintainers of documentation aren’t jerks. I’m usually good at reading documentation. I’ve run Ubuntu on a laptop for a year or two in the past, but the headaches of audio and Wi-Fi drivers were beyond documentation, and well into SO and google rabbit holes.
Ultimately I gave up and reverted to Mac. If my choice was windows or Linux, I might choose Linux, but as long as I can keep Mac OS, I’ll probably not use either.
Ah okidoki,
Meh linux , no linux both are ok, I’ve just had too many people genuinely call people jerks for providing foss tools that don’t meet their criterias....
