The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.
These often require workarounds via the terminal – if we’re lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it’s terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that’s why I’m typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won’t ever quite decouple from Linux.
But it’s important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That’s the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can’t do. It’s what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn’t have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they’ve moved to servers too anyway.
Honestly I spend more time fighting weird bugs, performance issues and crashes with xcode than I do with any IDE under arch, including when I mained hyprland for like 6 months. And in this case, there usually was a way to actually fix or work around the issue.
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Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.
Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user
For me was when Mint suddenly broke my Bluetooth driver and I had to dig deep about how to fix that wasting my entire day on it, this was 2016 I think.
I just wanted to play some games.
Weird edge cases. You would think that edge cases are a minority, but a setup without any edge case is the real minority.
From screens that decide to not power up (Nvidia !!!) to programs not wanting to start (Minecraft flatpak who doesn’t run from desktop but okay from command line), sometimes when you want it to just work it’s exhausting.
On my side I’ve totally given up on windows and happily run a full AMD household, it’s fine, but still.
I am dual booting because I bought a nice OLED monitor with HDR and Linux doesn’t support it yet. For certain games with nicer graphics, HDR is really beautiful.
The moment Linux support HDR, I nuke windows for good.
KDE Plasma 6 supports HDR now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/hdr-support-for-kde-plasma-6-seems-to-be-shaping-up-nicely/
Too much of a hassle. I don’t wanna risk having my setup break when… Never, really. I want to use my machine and that’s it.
About 23 years ago I couldn’t make it boot when I plugged in a USB hub.
And since, my life just became too invested in Microsoft/Adobe products to be able to use something else as a daily driver.But I “use” Linux every day - whether it’s the PiHole, the NAS, the server that runs my 3D printer, or WSL in Windows PowerShell. I’m about to spin up my own OPNSense router, too.
Weird trajectory on WSL - I learned Unix commands using MacOS terminal for a previous job, but I generally abhor windows command line (it just doesn’t work with my brain). So now when I use commend line in windows, I default to *nix.It sort of works out that I use Macs for personal use, Windows for work, and Linux to run the systems of my life.
People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you’ll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.
I put Linux Mint on my mom’s laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It’s still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven’t had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.
The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.
As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface…it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version…still didn’t work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)…gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.
If everything works out of the box, you’re golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.
To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I’m still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it’s age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well “new” to me…I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).
Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue…no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.
Pop OS uses archaic software packages. For me Alpine has a good balance between stability and new stuff (no graphical installer though), on the same note my gaming daily driver, Artix, which is based on Arch never broke but that might be due to the fact I installed a lot of my software using nix, cargo and flatpak.
POP!_OS does not use archaic packages for system components. It ships with the latest stable kernel, mesa and pipewire (and Steam + Nvidia)
The distribution is just on a feature hiatus until the summer when COSMIC is realeased.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it’s a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won’t catch on for the average PC user.
Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.
Some of those that don’t find it intimidating do find it tiring. I grew up using MSDOS and later Windows 3.1 when it came out. Most of what we did was in command line and having everything in a GUI is just a QOL upgrade you don’t really want to come back from.
I’ve been using mint on my laptop for a few months now and it’s great, but like you said there’s still some things that require command line tinkering and I just don’t have the energy for it.
It’s the same reason I like console games, they just work. Don’t get me wrong, the console modding scene is non-existent and any kind of customization is generally out of the question, but it just works, and it works the first time every time.Tbh for some people there’s no going back once you learn it. Navigating a GUI and clicking through several buttons vs having a nice shell with completions and whatnot like Fish and learning piping at some point just becomes faster, same thing as using modal editors.
Full agree on tiring. I work as an SRE, my job is administrating Linux machines (containers these days). When I need to use a computer, I just want it to work out of the box and Linux doesn’t offer that yet. I don’t want to spend time getting it to work
There’s still no way to log into Nautilus as root user from Nautilus.
So you can’t just double click on an icon to decompress it below the home folder.
And then people will give out this long series of terminal commands…hello, I said FROM NAUTILUS.
I’m actually quite okay with using the terminal, the problem is almost nothing invoked from the CLI actually works properly. If the programmer can’t be arsed making a skin, they generally can’t be arsed with proper playtesting either.
Agreed. This should be the #1 priority for at least one Linux distribution to make it accessible. The issue is that Linux fanatics will cry blasphemy for it and that’s counter intuitive.
Nkt with GNOME. I only needed to use the Terminal in GNOME to do complex things an ordinary user wouldn’t do anyway.
I’m comfortable using a terminal, but with my Linux machines s common pattern is:
Need to get some software working. Find how to fix it, edit some config files.
Months later I run a system update and it’s starts asking me about merging the changes I made to various files. What were they for again? Are they still even necessary with the update or are the values I changed no longer used?
Then sometimes, something I installed is no longer supported, or needs a manual update because of how I installed it.
Tinkering in terminal is the thing I like most about Linux. What’s holding me back is most of the tools and games I want to use is not yet available on Linux but I think it’s getting there soon
Most of the games? Or just a few? Because my experience recently with Proton has been pretty amazing, and I’ve yet to run into a game (that my laptop meets the requirements for) that hasn’t worked. Even some games that Steam marked as “unsupported” worked just fine for me.
Thank you! Glad I’m not the only one to mention this or agree with it. Had some twit bitching at me last night to prove it, as if I kept screenshots or something. I just fixed things and moved on.
I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.
this is actually my case lol, no way I’m writing thesis in libreoffice or onlyoffice if I didn’t have much experience of using it
Why aren’t you using LaTeX to write your thesis though?
If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.
It’s just too much work, and I’ve only ever experienced Gnome in the distros I’ve tried and hated it. Windows is far from perfect but I know it like the back of my hand. Every step of the way in trying to use Linux for me was a chore.
People told me “oh yeah, gaming on Linux is a comparable or even better experience compared with gaming on windows.” Well after a whole weekend spent troubleshooting and trying different distros only to get 20fps max and no controller support for a 5 year old pc game I went back to windows and was playing within about 30 minutes including the time to install the OS.
Edit: Before you go giving me tips: yes, I tried that too. You’re missing the point if your solution to the above is “more troubleshooting, I guess.”
This right here is why the Linux community needs to pick a single desktop that just works for people who are switching over for gaming purposes.
Yeah, having the choice of multiple Distros is great from a technical perspective. But most people forgot what it was like on Windows.
Gamers are not interested in distro hopping on their first time attempt to get Linux to work.
If we’re going to say that a benefit of Linux is the multiple distros to a new person, you had better warn them that some distros are not as easy to work with as others. Looking at the cool desktop pictures on the website is not a sign that a distro is easy to work with.
Usually this means you didint install the proprietary graphics driver. Which you also have to do on windows (Geforce Experience )
30 minutes including installing the os
Having installed windows 11 about a month ago, I know that is a big fat lie.
Last time I changed the SSD on my computer, it took me about 30 min to make the Windows ready to play Steam games. Win 11 took 15 min to install, the Nvidia driver and Steam took the rest. So it’s not a lie at all.
Nothing works without extended fiddling. While fiddling, nothing works the way the manual says it should. Googling for solutions gets results that are terminal commands than don’t do what the poster says they should.
Microsoft sucks, but Windows programs work as expected 95% of the time. Linux programs don’t work at all 75% of the time, even after extensive reading and extended periods of time wasted fucking around with fixes proposed by the internet.
What were you using? I installed Debian and didn’t even give it a thought, just installed shit through Discover and everything worked just fine lol
I’ve been having this weird issue with wifi where it will just switch itself off (shown in NetworkManager as “no available connections”) and not allow me to restart the OS normally. It’s like the driver is crashing or something. Hardware isn’t the issue, otherwise it would have happened on Windows. Drivers can be an issue, as NVIDIA users know too well. Games can be a bit choppy on Linux if you use ray-tracing, probably due to drivers as well as the intermediary processes for getting games to work like DXVK. This was my experience with Cyberpunk 2077. Game modding can be an issue due to .NET not being fully there yet, especially if you have games that are glitchy and require stability mods for a good experience. (e.g. any Bethesda game that exists.)
The only thing keeping me from full-timing Windows is the fact that Windows 11 just plain sucks. I feel like I have to use it, rather than want to use it. Compared to even a bog-standard KDE setup, the Windows experience is miserable. As for Mac, I have a Hackintosh but Apple really loves to render everything on the GPU side and it’s chugging my ol’ GPU. Maybe I need to go get an M-series MacBook this year.
there were some kernel issues with numerous WiFi cards prior to linux 6.6.6 (hehe), make sure to update
