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?
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.
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.
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.
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”?
I’ve used DOS, 3.11 to all the way to 11. Switched to Linux as main driver around 2009. Used MacOS at work for over a year now. I occasionally boot into windows for rare game that uses some anti cheat that doesn’t play well with wine.
I’m old enough that I just want things to work. I don’t care for any fanboyism. These are my opinions:
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Windows is a mess. It has different UI from different decades, depending on what and where. NT kernel is ancient. The registry is a horror show. The only edge it has, is third party software, like propriatery drivers. that’s it. And that’s isn’t a merit of windows, but rather market share.
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MacOS is inconsistent at every turn. It’s frustrating to use, and riddled with UX bugs, and seemingly deliberate lack of functionality. The core tooling, like the file manager, is absolute garbage. The only good thing it has going it, is that the Unix core is solid. In that year, I’ve experienced a soft brick once, that almost was a hard brick, and the reason was having set the display refresh rate from 120 to 60 Hz. Something I changed BTW, because certain animation transitions in MacOS took twice as long on 120 Hz… Yeah, top notch QA there Apple.
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Linux. It has its own flaws. For sure. But as for “just works”, it happens so often, that it’s exactly why Windows and MacOS feels so frustrating. I’d have my grandmother use Linux.
And, I’m not just saying this. When I upgraded components on windows, I spent 2 hours debugging problems. One of the problems was also that it reverted a GPU driver, where every single version information was unmistakably older. It also made it not work.
I’ve also experienced that the WiFi network adapter also doesn’t work until I download some proprietary software over ethernet cable.
On Linux? I didn’t need to do a single thing in either case. It for sure didn’t use to be this way. In 2009 I was hunting WiFi drivers for fedora over ethernet. But in the last, say 5 years, on Arch, it’s been amazing. Did I mention that I use arch?
Ps: The last 4 times I’ve had problems on Linux have been:
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- A Windows update fucks up grub.
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- Reboot from windows doesn’t release hardware claim on WiFi adapter, so it doesn’t work on Linux.
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- The system clock is wrong, which was easy to notice because of 2. leading to a lack of remote sync. This is due to Windows storing system time as local time, and not UTC. If you do software development, you’d know how dumb the former is.
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- Raid partition destroyed because a windows 7 install decided to, unprompted, write a boot partition on a disk with “unknown” file system.
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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.
For me it’s I can make Linux do this when I see another system perform well, in contrast with they took my vertical taskbar in windows 11 and I have to gut the system to get it back
I do have to remind myself that I’m still used to living in a world where Linux enjoyed immunity to most “consumer” malware just because it wasn’t a popular desktop. Ultimately Linux is not more secure than any other system unless someone put in the work to make it that way.
It depends on who you ask. If you ask this to a M$ refugee, they will praise it. If you ask a *BSD user, they will bitch about it.
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.
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.
No. It really isn’t.
Windows with the proper license and configuration is more stable, more productive, and that configuration takes less than an hour once for the life of the machine.
In 2024 if you’re still bashing Windows for BSODs, stability, updates, etc, you’re doing it wrong. You can bash all day long for privacy violations and corporate greed but both of those are fixed with the proper version like Windows Enterprise. Costs more, but you are less of the product.
Wait, you seriously think Windows is more stable?
It 100% is in a desktop environment used by users.
In an embedded locked system not in space, it’s the same.
I really wish I could BASH windows 🙂. Per customization, it’s a moving target. How TF do I get rid of the icon asking if I like the picture on my desktop? Registry edits? Go F yourself
I’m sure if you edit the registry inside emacs from a live iso boot from 6 burned CDs, it will unlock all the golden rainbow features you require.
Ah yes, Windows, where you buy a licence for around 100€, still get ads (WTF) and bloatware you cannot get rid of, still are the beta tester for their shitty software, because they fired their QA department. That’s on top of a shitty OS that still does not allow multiple users being logged in simultaneously (only in Windows server) and AI shit baked in alongside spying tools (Recall is coming back soon).
I could go on…
Or… Read what I said. Spend the $300 on the enterprise license. No ads. No forced notifications. A single computer with multiple users at one time in a home environment is not a use case that would get any thought. Those that want it, can do it. And it’s easy, and free. Hyper-V is free and the licenses for the virtual machines are free too because the container host is windows. Lock an instance per output and voila. Recall won’t be coming to enterprise or server and if it does, it will be disablable. Just like forced updates are disabled in enterprise. Forced reboots disabled. Etc.
If you want that experience you buy that experience.
Sorry, but no. 300 USD for an OS is absolutely absurd. Just to be “on the safer side” from MS and its shitty tactics?
“Recall won’t be coming to enterprise or server and if it does, it will be disablable”
Sweet summer child, I pity you. How anyone can still have any trust in MS is beyond me, but so be it.
$300 for the most important piece of software on the hardware that you interact with every day, sometimes all day, for years? That’s a steal.
And again, as an OS, Windows just works and Linux doesn’t. Even if you wanted to set things manually in the registry to disable the bad consumer “features”, you’d still spend less time than configuring a standard Linux install and it would be more stable.
It’s like Apple fan bois nowadays. Ridiculous.
Yeah, keep paying ransom to a company that does not even manage to get the basic security right, it’s your money after all. I’m happy without Microsoft and with an OS that works and works for me, not some greedy CEO.
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 also use Linux & Ungoogled Android on everything–and it is the best we got now that doesn’t involve a significant time sink or expertise to get things working. I would love to see alternative platforms be popular & with general hardware compatibility & either Nix or Guix support as well, I would consider giving it a run in the future since I like being open if something better is on offer. I like to keep light tabs on the Haikus, BSDs, OpenIndianas, & such of the world just in case… particularly if we ever got a memory-safe kernel with some proofs behind its logic (Rust doesn’t go hard enough, sorry fanboys). That said, generally, Linux is still good.
Linux is clean and nicer looking than Windows and that is enough for me to switch to Linux
