Off the top of my head:
- Pirated software is more scarce.
Most of it is unnecessary, but if you must use a specific application for professional reasons, it can be more difficult to find pirated copies even if they officially support Linux. This doesn’t apply to games for the most part, where WINE/Proton will run the Windows versions quite well, but in my case I need to use Creo Parametric occasionally (to work with other people’s models) and it does not work well in WINE. If I were designing something myself, I’d use FreeCAD obviously.
- The state of technical support is getting worse every day.
This is mostly due to the general degradation of search engines along with the proliferation of SEO AI slop tech support articles designed to capture ad revenue. The official documentation is still generally great (for anything load-bearing), but this requires you to know which software component you’re dealing with and thumb around in manuals. A Google / DDG search for a question about Python will NEVER take you to the relevant page in the Python manual, for instance. This really blows.
- Fragmentation of everything.
There are hundreds of Linux distributions. We have two major display server systems (X11 and Wayland) with several toolkits (GTK, Qt, Wx, etc). We have (at least) 5 major audio subsystems (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Jack, PipeWire). We have dozens of desktop environments / window managers (Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Cinnamon, LXDE, etc. etc.). Dozens of package managers (Apt, RPM, Pacman, Portage, Nix, etc). A dozen shells, a dozen terminal emulators, a dozen text editors, a dozen filesystems, a dozen compression formats. There are three major competing “all in one, portable” package formats (FlatPak, AppImage, Snap).
I think this is mostly a good thing, but it can be quite overwhelming, and a lot of this shit is technical debt. Tech like X11 is obsolete but must be supported for eternity. Even as things like PulseAudio and Jack are made redundant by PipeWire, the vast majority of software is implemented with either the PulseAudio or ALSA APIs and these too must be supported for eternity. etc.
Things are generally better than Windows in terms of maintenance and malfunctions. Usually when something is broken, everything stops working (this sounds bad, but wait!). The problem and solution exist in one place. Compared to the situation on Windows where every application ships layers and layers of its own middle-ware and if something stops working it can be anything. This is slipping though. Particularly when bundling is involved (Snaps, AppImages, software which requires programming language package managers such as NPM/PIP/Cargo/CPAN/etc to build). Especially when it comes to less-common use cases (like accessible workflows for vision impaired users).
- Everything is always your responsibility.
Due to the fact that very few hardware manufacturers ship and support GNU+Linux systems. There is no guaranteed out-of-the-box experience. There are many people who are happy to help when they can, but there’s a big gap between that and an actual “or your money back” warranty (though honestly you’re not getting that kind of service from Microsoft either unless you are a big corporate client).
In light of all that, I’ve been running Linux for about 20 years now and for the past two years or so I haven’t had any Windows machines at all. It is worth it.
Yeah tbh the fragmentation and overwhelmingness of it are really bothering me. Idk how to do anything. The documentation is confusing. I look something up and it’s years out of date. I turn to google AI overview or DDG AI overview to sift through the chaff out of desperation because they’ll at least summarize the info, and they’re wrong too. I try a new distro or desktop on a live USB to see if I like it better and some things are better, some are worse. Making sense of what is what and where is like the “it’s on Poob” problem of streaming.
I suppose I’m curious, if you fire up a Linux mint USB what’s your first blocker to just hitting the “install” button?
I actually have Mint, I’m trying other distros on live USBs because I’m just unnecessarily picky. I liked the visuals of Ubuntu better, it handled my trackpad better, but the windows and desktop management of Mint way more. Mint gets harsh on my eyes after a while and I do not know why.
I see, do you know that you can change your desktop environment (generally on charge of the visuals) without changing distros?
It would be easier to install/uninstall DEs than spinning up a live USB. I would only change away from Mint if something didn’t install correctly, although I have found it very reliable in recent years.
Yeah, but it looks like exactly what I’m seeking might not exist. I tried xfce and MATE and thought Cinammon was better. I still don’t understand why Ubuntu played so much nicer with my trackpad but it might have to do with using Wayland instead of X11?
Could be something like that, trackpads can be a bit tricky unfortunately. It sounds like you’re in the spot of “I want things to work a certain way but I’m not up for the tinkering it would take to get it there”, which is reasonable. I’ve sucked up a lot of quirks that annoyed me when I didn’t feel like fixing them, but at the same time there’s true of windows as well (for me).
More like the tinkering I’ve tried has broken things :(
Only if you’re not using either StalinOS or TempleOS.
Sorry for the pedantry but TempleOS is not Linux. It was built from scratch by Terry Davis and doesn’t have a lot in common with Linux.
https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS?tab=readme-ov-file https://templeos.org/
That makes TempleOS even more impressive.
It’s an impressive technical feat, and a bit tragic. Try it sometime in a VM (or on a separate hard drive) and read a bit about king Terry.
I assumed you were joking but it’s real!
It’s impossible to joke about a distro. Even if you’re somehow the first one to have the thought, someone will have made it within 24 hours.
If you’d like to know more, search Linux Rule 34, it’ll take you directly to the relevant part.
Yea, the users. And also the people that make distros. If I had a dollar for every time a distro creator turned out to be a POS or nazi, I could afford a Big Mac. Which isn’t much but it’s still weird that it keeps happening.
I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon from Windows 11 a couple of months ago and I haven’t had any issues at all ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and I don’t know dick about computers. If you do plan to tweak anything you can use timeshift to create a “snapshot” where if things get screwed up, you can just revert to the settings you had before.
I haven’t tried to game on it yet. I would only be playing Disco Elysium or Hades or something but I think it would be fine. I downloaded a VM so that I can use Microsoft Office for school if I need to, and that works for me. Its a little laggy which is annoying, but that might have more to do with my VM settinfs. I like it a lot.
I have a thinkpad with AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB RAM 512GB SSD
afaik installing Linux gives Richard Stallman full access to your navel so plan accordingly
I feel like if you are trying it for the 20th time you must be well aware of the downsides
Yeah, a couple days ago someone posted a serious question “as a Linux newbie, are there any downsides to dual booting” to the tech comm. Then people started riffing on that in this shitposting comm. This is not a serious question
