Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.
Of course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you shouldn’t want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.
Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.
I’d clarify that the shear customizability of Linux is optional.
Take a SteamDeck with SteamOS versus a RPi with e.g Debian.
If you “just” play with the SteamDeck and you don’t tinker, well, it “just works”. In most, even though not all, normal situations, e.g plugging a screen, pairing a BT headphone, mouse, keyboard, etc it is solid. It has no problem even while using a compatibility layer like Proton for games themselves made for Windows. It even enable some tinkering thanks to its immutable OS and let the player switch to desktop mode. Not everything works but my personal experience since it’s been out has been pretty much flawless.
Now, take a RPi, with just as stable hardware, with Debian, even stable, and put on it some IoT device, make some weird modifications for it, try a bunch of stuff, remove package, tinker more, chances are it will still work. Tinker more, make stranger modifications to the point it becomes unstable. Is it Linux itself? I’d argue it’s not. I’d argue that instead because we CAN tinker we sometimes do then forget that it’s not the same context as something expected to run without hiccup because it’s been limited to basically the same verified usage.
So… IMHO Linux is even better than it is, we just shouldn’t confuse weird (and important) tinkering with how it can be actually used day to day.
This. I distrohopped for about 4 years. I am now on Bazzite since 4 months ago and I love that it just works.
As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn’t “just work.”
I can’t begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.
Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc…
New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.
Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.
I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.
All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.
Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn’t matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it’s so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.
I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two… It’s been 4 months and he loves it.
He says it’s super fast and easy to use, he doesn’t have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.
I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It’s great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn’t an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I’ll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.
Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.
Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.
I agree 110% but it’s also worth mentioning that windows isn’t as finicky as we complain about. If it was, companies wouldn’t by and large rely on it. People are delusional if they think Windows is only around because of some conspiracy or historical precedent. “It works” plain and simple. As you scale you’re going to run into issues regardless of the OS. It’s naive to think Linux is the be all that end all. As much as anyone I want to be Linux only. My home computers have been Linux for decades now. I’m a realist. There’s value and challenges with every OS. I hate the industry trend of Windows over Linux but I get it
It’s important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don’t think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.
But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.
Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.
Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.
People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base…which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.
I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client’s Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, “We heard you’re a Linux guy.” At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client’s Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.
Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn’t offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.
At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.
I did something similar with 4 15 year old optiplexes for a student lab. IT wasn’t happy until the saw how well they ran
It’s pretty incredible how well it works. I installed Arch with Plasma 6 on a 2015 T450 thinkpad and it was so crazy how fast everything was.
Felt like a brand new machine, almost a decade old, and bottom of the line specs for that model, but it still ran cutting edge Linux like it was meant to.
My other desktops are even older, but it’s the same with Debian 12 and Plasma, they are super responsive and stable. It’s pretty wild to see a desktop that’s over 10 years old feel smoother and snappier than Windows 11 on a 3 year old, enterprise grade laptop.
No, not really. I believe it is because a lot of us linux users have more understanding of our systems, so we know why a certain outcome happened vs “it just works tm”.
Also I would like to point out something that I have been telling people for years whenever a post like this comes up. Windows and Mac users do the same thing. They constantly overlook bugs, bad design, artificial limitations, and just the overall lack of care when it comes to various details that more community oriented projects cater to. The reason is because of familiarity. Just like many of us will often not see issues with new comers struggles because we have already worked around all of the issues. These users do the same.
At least on Linux you can have some kind of control while on Windows or Mac there is an illusion like “can’t do that, fuck you”, while Linux is like “can do that… will you manage”?
Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?
No, it’s better.
Seriously, when something that I paid for it doesn’t work is annoying when something that I choose to use doesn’t work is somewhat my fault, I think that’s the difference.
It’s an operating system. It’s not supposed to be noticed as good or bad. It should stay out of your way. If you ever notice it, it’s doing something wrong.
Generally, when things work on windows, it is the effort of whomever made the device or software. Microsoft generally does not develop drivers. However, when things work on GNU/Linux it is the effort of GNU, Linux, or the community. The manufacturer probably did nothing. This simply explains why we are generally relaxed or “give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work””.
So fairly comparing a Linux distro to raw windows, Linux is better. When you install a distro, things just work, when you install windows, most stuff do not work and you need to complete setup. Unless you use tools provided by the manufacturer, but then again, it is same story.
Linux is clean and nicer looking than Windows and that is enough for me to switch to Linux
Linux is as good as Linux is, just as Windows is as good as Windows is and MacOS is as good as it is.
All operating systems have their place, purpose, and use cases, so the question is subjective. Different OS’s are good or bad for different people, and different scenario’s which is why they all have a part of the market share.
MacOS has ease of use and excellent intercompatibility with other Apple products, and Windows has boatloads of compatible software and compatibility with Microsoft’s Active Directory domains in businesses.
What Linux has is cost effectiveness and true ownership and control.
At the moment most people prefer ease of use for home computing, but on a long enough timeline Linux will obtain this as well, just look at what Valve did with SteamOS and the steam deck when it comes to that. Making it easy to use there is, I suspect, one of the major reasons the steam deck as a device is so well reviewed, and partly why we have seen such an increase in market share recently I suspect.
So right now, most people probably prefer another OS because of ease of use, but at some point in the future, Linux will probably be holding all the cards. It just seems that those who develop the distributions are often tied up with other goals apart from ease of use for the common user in the contemporary, but eventually they will begin to tackle this goal as well.
Exactly. I give more credits to linux, and it deserves this. I like your garden metaphor, yes my linux pc is like my garden and linux behaves to be, unlike windows.
As a newbie in this space, I had interactions with a few distros over the years and lately switched (hopefully) permanently.
My first experience was with Mint 10 years ago. Installing it would cause some GPU driver defect (AMD card) and would turn the whole login screen into an epileptic checkerboard pattern with no way of doing anything. It took me a few reinstalls and a ungodly amount of googling to find a solution which involved opening the terminal at boot process. You can only imagine how frustating that can be for a newcomer.
Later in time I had Ubuntu on my laptop which had a bug that wouldn’t spin up the CPU fan and it would simply overheat and shutdown. I had to take it to a technician to find out what was causing the random shutdowns.
A year ago I decided to try Debian on my desktop PC as many have praized it for it’s rock-wolid stability. It didn’t want to work on my PC. No internet connection and some weird bugs. Took me two-three days to get ti to work and I still don’t know what exactly fixed it as I have applied every possible solition I came across.
Much later, aka now, I decided to go with Bazzite on my desktop as many have claimed excelent support. I wanted to install the mimalloc because I play Factorio a lot and a few reddit posts claimed 20% UPS improvement over the stock scheduler. After downloading the source code and following the 4 very easy steps, cmake would throw some random eerors at me claiming some critical files were missing, although they were right there in the usr directory. Turns us Bazzite some some issue and Fedora 40 compiled the code in seconds without any issues.
Conclusion: Linux users, which are very tech savvy or work in that space, know what to do when things don’t work out, while the rest of us keeps googling and crying over error messages for things that seem trivial. You never seem to know if it’s you, the system or your hardware.
It’s something we’ll take for granted. With enough time and experience, you could fire off a one liner to fix a problem in less than a minute. For most people thst could take an hour, and they’d probably give up within 10 minutes
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
Nope. My laptop for example doesn’t automatically use an output when plugged in, but that doesn’t bother me because I know other DEs would do that, and it’s my choice of having a minimal window manager that causes that.
And this goes into your next point, because I know that this comes from decisions I made, I’m okay with that. I also know I could probably fix it somehow, even if just by running a script in the background that checks if an output is plugged and tries to use it.
And for me that’s the big difference. As a general rule when things break or don’t work are not the fault of Linux as a general, but of a specific piece of the stack, and more often than not it’s because that piece was backwards engineered without any help from the manufacturers of the hardware it’s meant to be controlling, so I can be very tolerant of these errors since the bad guys here are the third-party who’s refusing to make their things work on Linux. But even things that don’t work as I want to, I can make them do so, and that’s a huge change in viewpoint.
In other words, on Windows I used to be of the thought of things you can do, and things you can’t, with time I noticed that in Linux this thought shifted, to the point that the only question I ever ask myself is: “HOW do I do this?”. This implies that there are no impossible things in Linux, which is obviously false, but I would argue that the correct way to think about this is “things that are impossible on Linux, for now”, and that’s a huge difference, because Linux is always evolving and getting better and better, things you thought are impossible now might be trivial in a few months or years whenever someone with the knowledge to fix it gets bothered with it.
growing it like a garden is a perfect phrase imo
because on windows or Mac it may have just worked. …until it doesn’t, or leaves your windows scaled wrong or placed on monitors that don’t exist or some other failure condition. at which point you reboot and hope for the best.
when it doesn’t work on Linux I’d check logs, actual configuration, and even the source if I need to.and then I’d hopefully improve things and make it work the way I want it to.
It depends on what you’re using it for. Elaborate multi monitor setups? Starting a web server? Controlling a robot? A car’s ECU?
Linux isn’t a specific platform. Linux the kernel is a generic kernel that can be used and tuned for virtually any hardware. GNU/Linux the OS is also a generic OS that can be customized to work for variety of use cases. The most popular desktop Linux OSes are still very generic. Most of them aren’t built to be power efficient on laptops for example. Yet we know Linux can be very power efficient on variety of purpose-built mobile hardware.
Windows on the other hand was built from the start to be a desktop OS. The desktop and later laptop use cases have always been primary. To the point of making other use cases more difficult. The same is true for macOS. So when you see them performing well in some desktop-related use cases where Linux might struggle a bit, it’s no surprise. If enough of us wanted it to be better at that, we could make it happen. If enough of us wanted macOS or Windows to do something Apple or MS didn’t, tough luck. So it’s just a matter of priorities and resources.
I think about this a lot, and my take is that Linux is waaayyy better if you have perfect or close-to-perfect knowledge of how the operating system works and what software is available. Similarly, I think an argument can be made for Linux being better if all you need is a web browser and you’re not using really unusual hardware.
Where things fall apart is for people who have very specific needs that are complex, even if they only need it 1% of the time, and they don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it with the power-user tools available. Microsoft has spent decades paying developers to handle these edge cases and ensuring GUI settings discoverability.
At the same time, schools and workplaces have taught people the design language of Windows, and the network effect of having so much of the world’s end-user PCs running on Windows means that there are vast resources available targeted at people without technical knowledge. At this point, for better or worse, Microsoft’s design language is the global default for non-technical people.
If a person never has to touch a setting because all they need is a browser, they don’t hit any friction and they are happy. If they need to do even one thing that requires them to dig into settings or touch the terminal, the difference from Microsoft’s design language is enough for that one frustrating experience to give them a bad taste in their mouth about Linux as a whole.
