Linux Desktop: A Collective Delusion
tadeubento.com
Linux has made significant strides, and in 2023, it's better than ever. However, there are still individuals perpetuating a delusion: that desktop Linux is as user-friendly and productive as its mainstream counterparts. After a few discussions on Lemmy, I believe it's important to provide a clear review of where Linux falls short as a daily driver for average users.

Linux has made significant strides, and in 2023, it’s better than ever. However, there are still individuals perpetuating a delusion: that desktop Linux is as user-friendly and productive as its mainstream counterparts. After a few discussions on Lemmy, I believe it’s important to provide a clear review of where Linux falls short as a daily driver for average users.

EDIT: can I just make it clear I don’t agree with this article one bit and think it’s an unhinged polemic?

  • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
    22·
    1 year ago

    Windows licenses are cheap and you get things working out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’ll be productive from day zero. There are annoyances from time to time, sure, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.

    It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

    This is wild lol.

    On my dual-boot machine, I once had to spend an hour on the phone with Microsoft because I put in a new GPU and Windows decided that meant it was installed on the wrong PC and locked me out of it.

    I’ve had my printer for years and it still doesn’t work properly on Windows. It prints, but it fucks up in subtle ways constantly such as setting the print scale to 100% which prints slightly larger. My SO prints sewing patterns so this can actually be a big fuck up.

    I had to do a registry edit in Windows to get the fucking clock to display the correct time.

    It can’t even turn off properly. About 40% of the time when I shut it down from Windows it’ll wait about 30 seconds and then turn back on again.

    When I boot it from Linux, none of these things are issues and it just behaves like a normal computer.