I’ve been using Linux on my personal desktop system since 1997 and I think it’s great. However as a user I fucking hate Linux so much. It is so frustrating to use, it always breaks in weird ways.
It can do anything because you can configure so much and you can even go into the code and make thing your own. But at the same time it can’t do anything, there usually isn’t a basic framework to do what most people want. Each user is just supposed to figure it out for themselves and put their system together in a way that makes sense. Even someone like me who can understand all this crap and can read, understand and contribute to the code, doesn’t always want to do this. And most users wouldn’t be able to do it anyways. Let me just spend 12 hours of my own free time to figure out something that isn’t documented very well, with often wrong or outdated information, weird bugs with quirks and workaround and fun interactions with other bugs and workarounds I have on my system.
Just the other day I raged my head off because some kind of update broke my shit. There is this protocol that allows for the OS to tell monitors what brightness they need to be on. This is awesome for tablet/convertibles/laptops/all-in-ones, but for desktop systems I don’t really see the use case. But it can’t hurt the feature is there and you choose not to use it right? However it turned out this latest update had a nasty bug in it. At boot it somehow set all my monitors to 100% brightness, which was highly unpleasant and kept resetting it to 100% every boot. Not only that, it turned out my main monitor had too much clever for its own good. It has two modes of operating, one mode where the builtin OS inside the monitor does everything, it handles all the settings, profiles, color shit, protocols etc. The other way of operating is where the OS inside the computer does everything, they have a driver for Windows and some neat software that allows you to do everything in there. It has game recognition software and tweaks the monitor to work perfectly with that game etc. However me being a Linux user, they ofcourse don’t have any of that, not even a driver etc. but I know this when I selected the monitor so I made sure it could handle everything inside the monitor as well, so I could use it to it’s full potential on Linux. But this update broke all of that, because the monitor saw the OS was telling it to go to a certain brightness setting, so it assumed the OS inside the computer would be running the show and reverted back to some default safe profile until the software utility could tell it what to do. This made my monitor borderline unusable and flash bang me every reboot (which was a lot of times whilst I was trying to figure out how to fix it).
I put in a lot of hours and was able to somewhat consistently block the brightness control so the monitor could again be in charge. But not after the monitor was fed up with all my shit and just completely doing a factory reset, so I lost the personal profile I had been tweaking for years.
Now I know the monitor probably shouldn’t work this way and it’s bullshit the manufacturer doesn’t create Linux drivers and makes sure the software utility is available on Linux. But on the other hand, this is just the way the world is. Blaming it on some huge corporation that doesn’t give a shit and runs on cost/benefit calculations doesn’t fix my monitor. In my experience this is a huge problem in the Linux community (me included), we tend to get mad at other entities that cause the problem as an excuse for not fixing said problem. Which is perfectly valid from a person point of view, but very frustrating from a user point of view.
Most people who went through what I went through with my monitor wouldn’t be able to fix it and simply give up on using Linux forever. Or at least till they get a new monitor 5-10 years down the line.
In all seriousness you have a fair point. Linux does occasionally have weird bugs if you are using something closer to upstream. Fedora does a pretty hood job of catching most stuff but it misses some things. If you want a more stable experience you want something that’s for of a LTS such as Linux Mint or Debian.
Humans are pretty complex so what may seem like a self contradiction actually isn’t in fact.
But I can hit you with another one for me personally: I fucking love a big juicy burger, especially with cheese, pineapple, lettuce and spicy sauce. However I am normally a vegetarian and try to restrict my meat consumption as much as reasonably possible. I’m not a full vegan, because that just seems like self torture without a lot of extra gains, but maybe I’ll become one in the future.
And I can write you essays upon essays about how much I hate Windows and other Microsoft software. Even though it has a special place in my heart, because when I got my first computer in 1984, it ran Microsoft BASIC as its primary “OS”.
Debian WSL has been legit more stable for me than running it as the primary OS. Dunno what to tell you, because you can’t change my past experience with what I have been dealing with for the past two decades using Linux as my daily driver coming up as a broke student and now have money to pay for an OS that is less robust but more stable and better driver development.
Dealing with Linux for 2 decades doesn’t make you and expert in modern Linux. It just makes you old.
Even leaving Linux for a few years means that you get behind. I had to explain to a coworker what Wayland was because he hasn’t used Linux in years.
If WSL works for you that’s great but here are the issues I’ve had
weird networking issues where Windows can access Linux but Linux can not access Windows without lots of work.
any advanced networking like VPN’s will not work
It is slow and requires working virtualization
Filesystem sharing is not as easy as I would like
It is a bit finicky to get working and requires a bunch of disk space and resources.
Meanwhile native Linux doesn’t have these issues and git bash/cygwin is almost native in the sense that it has little overhead. Architectural perspective Cygwin is a lot like Wine. It just translates Linux calls to Windows ones.
If you need Windows I would run it in a VM under Linux as that’s going to be a much better experience.
Without doxxing myself, I promise you I know more about linux than you do and I’m not saying windows is better, you silly fuck, I am saying it’s more stable. I don’t even recommend using either as a server when BSD is better at stability than both OS combined.
I’ve been using Linux on my personal desktop system since 1997 and I think it’s great. However as a user I fucking hate Linux so much. It is so frustrating to use, it always breaks in weird ways.
It can do anything because you can configure so much and you can even go into the code and make thing your own. But at the same time it can’t do anything, there usually isn’t a basic framework to do what most people want. Each user is just supposed to figure it out for themselves and put their system together in a way that makes sense. Even someone like me who can understand all this crap and can read, understand and contribute to the code, doesn’t always want to do this. And most users wouldn’t be able to do it anyways. Let me just spend 12 hours of my own free time to figure out something that isn’t documented very well, with often wrong or outdated information, weird bugs with quirks and workaround and fun interactions with other bugs and workarounds I have on my system.
Just the other day I raged my head off because some kind of update broke my shit. There is this protocol that allows for the OS to tell monitors what brightness they need to be on. This is awesome for tablet/convertibles/laptops/all-in-ones, but for desktop systems I don’t really see the use case. But it can’t hurt the feature is there and you choose not to use it right? However it turned out this latest update had a nasty bug in it. At boot it somehow set all my monitors to 100% brightness, which was highly unpleasant and kept resetting it to 100% every boot. Not only that, it turned out my main monitor had too much clever for its own good. It has two modes of operating, one mode where the builtin OS inside the monitor does everything, it handles all the settings, profiles, color shit, protocols etc. The other way of operating is where the OS inside the computer does everything, they have a driver for Windows and some neat software that allows you to do everything in there. It has game recognition software and tweaks the monitor to work perfectly with that game etc. However me being a Linux user, they ofcourse don’t have any of that, not even a driver etc. but I know this when I selected the monitor so I made sure it could handle everything inside the monitor as well, so I could use it to it’s full potential on Linux. But this update broke all of that, because the monitor saw the OS was telling it to go to a certain brightness setting, so it assumed the OS inside the computer would be running the show and reverted back to some default safe profile until the software utility could tell it what to do. This made my monitor borderline unusable and flash bang me every reboot (which was a lot of times whilst I was trying to figure out how to fix it).
I put in a lot of hours and was able to somewhat consistently block the brightness control so the monitor could again be in charge. But not after the monitor was fed up with all my shit and just completely doing a factory reset, so I lost the personal profile I had been tweaking for years.
Now I know the monitor probably shouldn’t work this way and it’s bullshit the manufacturer doesn’t create Linux drivers and makes sure the software utility is available on Linux. But on the other hand, this is just the way the world is. Blaming it on some huge corporation that doesn’t give a shit and runs on cost/benefit calculations doesn’t fix my monitor. In my experience this is a huge problem in the Linux community (me included), we tend to get mad at other entities that cause the problem as an excuse for not fixing said problem. Which is perfectly valid from a person point of view, but very frustrating from a user point of view.
Most people who went through what I went through with my monitor wouldn’t be able to fix it and simply give up on using Linux forever. Or at least till they get a new monitor 5-10 years down the line.
Ok Grandpa let’s get you to bed
In all seriousness you have a fair point. Linux does occasionally have weird bugs if you are using something closer to upstream. Fedora does a pretty hood job of catching most stuff but it misses some things. If you want a more stable experience you want something that’s for of a LTS such as Linux Mint or Debian.
The self contradictions here are astounding. I love this thing that I hate. Now let me write 12 paragraphs about how much I hate to love to hate it
Humans are pretty complex so what may seem like a self contradiction actually isn’t in fact.
But I can hit you with another one for me personally: I fucking love a big juicy burger, especially with cheese, pineapple, lettuce and spicy sauce. However I am normally a vegetarian and try to restrict my meat consumption as much as reasonably possible. I’m not a full vegan, because that just seems like self torture without a lot of extra gains, but maybe I’ll become one in the future.
And I can write you essays upon essays about how much I hate Windows and other Microsoft software. Even though it has a special place in my heart, because when I got my first computer in 1984, it ran Microsoft BASIC as its primary “OS”.
I gave up daily driving Linux and reverted to Win11 Pro and do all my Linux shit in WSL.
No Cygwin/git bash?
WSL in my experience really sucks.
Debian WSL has been legit more stable for me than running it as the primary OS. Dunno what to tell you, because you can’t change my past experience with what I have been dealing with for the past two decades using Linux as my daily driver coming up as a broke student and now have money to pay for an OS that is less robust but more stable and better driver development.
Dealing with Linux for 2 decades doesn’t make you and expert in modern Linux. It just makes you old.
Even leaving Linux for a few years means that you get behind. I had to explain to a coworker what Wayland was because he hasn’t used Linux in years.
If WSL works for you that’s great but here are the issues I’ve had
weird networking issues where Windows can access Linux but Linux can not access Windows without lots of work.
any advanced networking like VPN’s will not work
It is slow and requires working virtualization
Filesystem sharing is not as easy as I would like
It is a bit finicky to get working and requires a bunch of disk space and resources.
Meanwhile native Linux doesn’t have these issues and git bash/cygwin is almost native in the sense that it has little overhead. Architectural perspective Cygwin is a lot like Wine. It just translates Linux calls to Windows ones.
If you need Windows I would run it in a VM under Linux as that’s going to be a much better experience.
Without doxxing myself, I promise you I know more about linux than you do and I’m not saying windows is better, you silly fuck, I am saying it’s more stable. I don’t even recommend using either as a server when BSD is better at stability than both OS combined.