Depends what you want in an OS. The increasingly invasive ads and loss of control in Windows is overwhelmingly a good enough reason for me. But it is not the case for everyone.

Linux has its quirks, and it’s a different approach to an OS in general, so it can be intimidating if you only want an office machine.

Nah, still has a lot of bugs, it simply don’t have the same money that Microsoft has to fix quirks in certain hardware, and it’s too fragmented, Microsoft knows what kernel that interface gonna run, KDE don’t so they always need to fix for different kernels

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.

Well, I don’t use a DE so your scenario of the new display not switching over right away is basically my life every time autorandr decides not to run on startup.

Unix is definitely a less headache than Windows at this point.

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.

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.

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.

Who is “we”, my friend? This all depends on your research and expectations. IMO Linux works great, but you should consider it before you buy a machine. Make sure your graphics card and other hardware is going to work. When in doubt, buy from a reliable shop that preinstalls Linux for you.

I find that the default settings and programs of Debian (or whatever major distro) do 95% of what I expect and want, and maybe 5% involve some customization. In other words, it’s much simpler than getting Windows or Apple and then purchasing or downloading all the extra programs. But this depends on what you wanna do.

Windows will continue to get more and more user-hostile as time goes on, and they want everyone to have a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud services, so they can be in total control of what they deliver to the user and how the user is using their services/apps, and they also will be able to increase pricing regularly of course once the users are dependent enough (“got all my work-related data there, can’t just leave”).

The next big step that will follow after the whole M365 and Azure will be that businesses can only deploy their Windows clients by using MS Intune, which means MS will deploy your organization’s Windows clients, not your organization. So they’re always shifting more and more control away from you and into MS’ hands. Privacy is always an obvious issue, at the very least since Nadella is CEO, but unfortunately the privacy-conscious people have kind of lost that war, because the common user (private AND business sector) doesn’t care at all, so we will have to wait and see how those things will turn out in the future, they will start caring once they are being billed more due to their openly known behavior (driving, health, eating/drinking, psychology, …) or once they are being legally threatened more (e.g. your vehicle automatically reports by itself when you’ve driven too fast, or some AI has concluded based on your gathered data that you’re likely to cause some kind of problem), or once they are rejected at or before job interviews because of leaked health data or just some (maybe wrong) AI-created prognosis of your health. So I think there will be a point when the common user will start caring, we just haven’t reached that point yet because while current data collection and profile building is problematic because it’s the stepping stone to more dystopian follow-ups, it alone is still too abstract of an issue for most people to care about it. Media is also partly to blame here when they do reviews or news about new devices and then just go like “great camera and display, MUST BUY” and never mention the absurd amount of telemetry data the device sends home. MS is also partnering with Palantir and OpenAI which will probably give them even more opportunities to automatically surveil every single one of their business and private sector users. I think M365 also already gives good analytics tools to business owners to monitor what their employees are doing, how much time they spend in each application, how “efficient” they are, things like that. Plus they have this whole person and object recognition stuff going on using “smart” cameras and some Azure service which analyzes the video material constantly. Where the employees (mostly workers in that case) are constantly surveilled and if anything abnormal happens then an automatic alert is sent, and things like that. Probably a lot of businesses will love that, and no one cares enough about the common worker’s rights. It can be sold as a security plus so it will be sold. So I think MS is heavily going into the direction of employee surveillance, since they are well-integrated into the business world anyway (especially small and medium businesses) and with Windows in particular I think they will move everything sloooowly into the cloud, maybe in 10-15 years you won’t have a “personal” computer anymore, you’re using Microsoft’s hardware and software directly from Microsoft’s servers and they will gain full, unlimited, 100% surveillance and control of every little detail you’re doing on your computer, because once you hand away that control, they can do literally anything behind your back and also never tell you about it. Most of the surveillance stuff going on all the time already is heavily shrouded in secrecy and as long as that’s the case there will be no justice system in the world being able to save you from it, because they’d first need concrete evidence. Guess why the western law enforcement and secret services hunted Snowden and Assange so heavily? Because they shone some light into what is otherwise a massive, constant cover-up that is also probably highly illegal in most countries. So it needs to be kept a secret. So the MS (and Apple, …) route stands for total dependence and total loss of control. They just have to move slowly enough for the common user not to notice. Boil the frog slowly. Make sure businesses can adapt. Make sure commercial software vendors can adapt. Then slowly direct the train into cloud-only territory where MS rules over and can log everything you do on the computer.

Linux, on the other hand, stands for independence. It means you can pick and choose what components you want, run them whereever and however you want, build your own cloud, and so on. You can build your own distro or find one that fits your use case the most. You’re in a lot of control as the user or administrator and this will not change considering the nature of open source / free software. If the project turns to sh!t, you’re not forced to stick with it. You can fork it, develop an alternative. Or wait until someone else does. Or just write a patch that fixes the problematic behavior. This alone makes open source / free software inherently better than closed source where the users have no control over the project and always have to either use it as it is or stop using it altogether. There’s no middle ground, no fixes possible, no alternatives that can be made from the same code base because the code base is the developer’s secret. Also, open source software can be audited at will all the time. That alone makes it much more trustworthy. On the basis of trustworthiness and security alone, you should only use open source software. Linux on its own is “just” the kernel but it’s a very good kernel powering a ton of highly diverse array of systems out there, from embedded to supercomputer. I think the Linux kernel can’t be beaten and will become (or is already) the objective best operating system kernel there is out there. Now, as a desktop user, you don’t care that much about the kernel you just expect it to work in the background, and it does. What you care more is UI/UX, consistency and application/game compatibility. We can say the Linux desktop ecosystem is still lacking in that regard, always behind super polished and user-friendly coherent UIs coming from especially Apple in that regard (maybe also a little bit by Microsoft but coherent and beautiful UIs aren’t Microsoft’s strong point either, I think that crown goes to Apple). That said, Apple is very much alike Microsoft in that they have a fully locked-down ecosystem, so it’s similar to MS, maybe slightly less bad smelling still but it will probably also go in the same direction as MS does, just more slowly and with details being different. Apple’s products also appeal to a different kind of audience and businesses than MS’ products do. Apple is kind of smart in their marketing and general behavior that they always manage to kind of fly under the radar and dodge most of the shitstorms. Like they also violate the privacy of their users, but they do it slightly less than MS or Google do, so they’re less of a target and they even use that to claim they’re the privacy guys (in comparison), but they also aren’t. You still shouldn’t use Apple products/services. “Less bad than utterly terrible” doesn’t equal “good”. There’s a lot of room between that. Still, back to Linux. It’s also obviously a matter of quality code/projects and resources. Big projects like the Linux kernel itself or the major desktop environments or super important components like systemd or Mesa are well funded, have quality developers behind them and produce high quality output. Then you also have a lot of applications and components where just single community developers, not well funded at all, are hacking away in their free time, often delivering something usable but maybe less polished or less userfriendly or less good looking or maybe slightly more annoying to use but overall usable. Those applications/projects could use some help. Especially if they matter a lot on the desktop because there’s little to no alternative available. On the server side, Linux is well established, software for that scenario is plentiful and powerful. Compared to the desktop, it’s no wonder why it’s successful on servers. Yes, having corporations fund developers and in turn open source projects is important and the more that do it, the more successful those projects become. It’s no wonder that gaming for example took off so hugely after Valve poured resources and developers into every component related to it. Without that big push, it would have happened very slowly, if at all. So even the biggest corpo haters have to acknowledge that in capitalism, things can move very fast if enough money is being thrown at the problem, and very slowly if it isn’t. But the great thing about the Linux ecosystem is that almost everything is open source, so when you fund open source projects, you accelerate their growth and quality but these projects still can’t screw you over as a user, because once they do that, they can be forked and fixed. Proprietary closed-source software can always screw over the user, no one can prevent that, and it also has a tendency to do just that. In the open source software world, there are very few black sheep with anti-user features, invasive telemetry, things like that. In the corporate software world, it’s often the other way around.

So by using Linux and (mostly) open source products, you as the user/admin remain in control, and it’s rare that you get screwed over. If you use proprietary software from big tech (doesn’t even matter which country) you lose control over your computing, it’s highly likely that you get screwed over in various ways (with much more to come in the future) and you’re also trusting those companies by running their software and they’re not even showing the world what they put in their software.

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.

My experience is generally it doesn’t just work straight away unless it’s something I’ve hammered out myself

I am also using one of the more DIY distros and window managers though, so I wouldn’t expect it to without some attention from me to get it hammered out first

That said, once it’s hammered out it continues to work exactly the way I want it to, it doesn’t spy on me, it doesn’t shove ads down my throat every 5 minutes

Would be an interesting experiment to see how non techy windows/mac users would get on if you just put stock mint/pantheon on their systems but I get the feeling it would not be as smooth as if they just had the thing everyone knows all the flaws of already

For me the main difference is Linux only does something when I ask it to.

Windows does whatever Microsoft wants it to do.

Both have major usability issues. But Linux gets a higher tolerance level, because of higher trust levels.

When I’ve thought about this is in the past I’ve concluded that my expectations of Linux are actually higher than Windows or Mac. It’s given me the expectation that if something doesn’t work the way I want it then it will be possible to make it do that, whereas with other operating systems I have been more inclined to just accept a limitation and move on.

I’m inclined to give Linux more benefit of the doubt than, say, Windows. That’s because of the motives behind it.

Microsoft have a very long history of making design choices in their software that users don’t like, and quite often that’s because it suits their interests more than their customers. They are a commercial business that exists to benefit itself, after all. Same with Apple. Money spoils everything pure, after all. You mention privacy, but that’s just one more example of someone wanting to benefit financially from you - it’s just in a less transparent and more open-ended way than paying them some cash.

Linux, because that monetary incentive is far less, is usually designed simply “to be better”. The developers are often primary users of the software. Sure - sometimes developers make choices that confuses users, but that over-arching driving business interest just isn’t there.