I left 10 years ago and decided to come back to see if things have improved.
It’s 90% there, but there are still too many bugs and quirks that think I I’m going to go back to Windows.
I started my reintroduction to Linux using Mint. Mint is pretty good, but the UX design was terrible and the “start menu” would lose its relative aspect ratio and my 4k monitor would display a 400x200 pixel start menu. Also, when trying to install apps using flatpak, the results was convoluted. I am trying to install tailscale. Why are there so many results? Which one do I need? Maybe this one?.. Nope, not that. How do I uninstall it? Installing apps was a chore and I couldn’t get anything to run correctly.
Switched over to Pop OS which is what I’m using to post this. Oh man, its so much better than Mint. Apps install like I expect from a Windows machine and uninstall the same way. Just 2 options for Tailscale with descriptions on which one fits me better.
But there are so many quirks. The multitouch trackpad is great. The 4 finger workspace swap is amazing. 2 finger “back” button works great too. Except it doesn’t translate to anything else. Firefox/Chome/Edge doesn’t recognize the back gestures. So, I spent 30 minutes looking for a solution which led me to touchegg, which is available in the Pop Store. But after trying to install it, it freezes my computer. No worries, try again. Freeze again. Arg… that’s annoying. Whatever, my mouse back button works. I’ll live without the touchpad feature.
Install all my productivity programs (zoom, slack, office, etc) for some reason it takes forever to install these and there is a constant lag between installs that persists across all apps. Where is the progress on all the apps I selected to install? Why must I research the app to see if its done or frozen. Whatever, I only need to do this once.
I start working on my new system and I don’t really notice much of a difference between working on my Win11 machine vs Pop OS since most of my work is on a browser. After a few hours of working, I walk away for a few hours. I come back and the system is sleeping. I push the keyboard and mouse to wake it up and it’s not waking up. The power button doesn’t work either. I hard reset the system and lose some work that wasn’t on the browser. I’m super annoyed now. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fix my sleep issue and have yet to figure it out.
I’m running these OSs on a Dell Precision i7 with an NVIDIA dedicated card and 32gb of ram. Should I give up or is there another distro that is more turnkey?
You’re going into the small annoyances that make Linux unproductive and not suitable for desktop - at least when you want to get some job done. People will proceed to downvote you and tell you to try 1000x different distros and the end result will be essentially the same…
Because I’m no exception to this rule, I will advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system.
Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:
(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).
If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow with performance. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.
Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.
It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.
To explain you @TCB13@lemmy.world why you are being ridiculed here, the WINE itself stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”.
It’s a compatibility layer, but for all things and purposes a non-technical person might as well think about it as an emulator - it makes stuff run where it normally wouldn’t.
Go ahead, enjoy your two minutes of fame.
Wine provides an API that is compatible with the ones found on Windows. Loosely speaking that’s an emulator, not the kind of emulation you’re thinking about but it is still trying to re-create an environment where applications written for Windows can run.
I have been working on Windows, macOS and Linux. And I never learned more than working with Linux, as I am a programmer, every debugging tool or programming tool (unless for apple) works perfectly and natively, as docker that runs natively without real emulators like WSL that gives you more issues with your contained apps and developments.
About DE, MacOS DE sucks, you can’t even grid Windows… Windows DE is much better but still, their shell sucks, terminals sucks, lack of customization of your windows (I’m using KDE I love it and is the best for programming as I have much more control of each windows like pin above others windows and simple features like those that makes KDE perfectly for work, Plasma 6 even faster, less resources…).
What you said isn’t the truth, is just your own and personal perspective. Other people perspectives: https://duncanlock.net/blog/2022/04/06/using-windows-after-15-years-on-linux/
If you’re a real programmer you wouldn’t worry about snapping windows to a grid because you’d just have a single terminal open and running tmux.
/s kinda
Haha, that’s funny but as a real programmer working for a shitty company that forces me to work on a shitty Apple I can tell you I can’t just use tmux, I need web browser/s (Jira, Git site for collaborations with team, for reading documentation), MS teams, Keepass or similar, etc… But if they allowed me, I might try to just use Emacs as an OS itself, then I wouldn’t worry about Apple or Windows.
What I said is the perspective of any other professional out there (with lots of examples) besides web developers. By the same logic what you said isn’t also true - it is just your own perspective as a developer.
Developers are just a percentage of potential Linux users, and some of them can’t even use it because of the tools they require. Regular people have other needs and don’t want to spend a week fixing something when they can get it out of the box somewhere else.
Eg. for a manager or some other office worker the slight incompatibly between MS Office and Libre Office isn’t tolerable because it has a negative impact on their productivity in the same way that KDE feature xyz delivers a better experience for programming. See? Just because it isn’t your perspective doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
MS not being able to run on Linux is a problem with Microsoft, not Linux. Still you can do it paying to crossover, the owners of Wine, they do and offer it, just report them every time Microsoft tries to break the compatibility.
That’s just what I tell you and what you are replying to. I know posts of people saying they prefer Linux, and they aren’t into tech or programming, just are used to it already. You got used to Windows because it’s the first OS you get when you buy a new laptop.
Before me using Linux 100%, sometimes I thought some issues I had on Linux was because of Linux, when I switched back to Windows, I realized I don’t only have the same issues but even more to fit the DE or tools, the system is heavier in many aspects. The system update both on Windows and Apple sucks… there are many reasons I dislike Windows and Apple. Now I like the Fedora stability and Arch Linux repo builds and deps. I can play the games I truly like and even much more than what I really want to play, so I see Windows or Mac a stupid option I can really not understand why people use them, and yes, this is 100% my personal own perspective.
Also, iptables rocks.
No, it isn’t a problem of MS nor of Linux. It a problem for people who’ve to be productive on those solutions and that’s why Linux isn’t a good fit for them.
Yes, normally people that use that machine for light web surfing on the weekends and dealing with a few personal things that require a document and a bullet list once every year.
You can’t expect to waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format and/or the subsequent productivity losses - it just takes you making a few slides for your boss while using LibreOffice and once he opens the document you’ve misaligned items, game over. :)
No, it doesn’t. nftables is the only sane and sensible thing that was built considering modern networking and scalability concerns not hacked and dragged along for decades.
Lol, it’s related, MS breaks the compatibility with Linux on purpose, so why would Linux community care if Microsoft decides to not be able to run on a Linux? Because it’s clearly on purpose, just do your own research, as I did. Linux community can try to adapt to Microsoft document styles, but if you want to work with Microsoft Office tools, don’t expect having support to work with them on Linux… the reason is obvious, that would kill Microsoft, the same they do with the video game monopoly, trying to buy all the companies to keep the monopoly.
Whatever, Linux firewall rocks.
You mean the Open Source formats that literally every thing else can render just fine and are absolutely trivial to implement but for some reason isn’t properly implemented into Microsoft Office.
We get it, indie dev Microsoft can’t spare the manpower to implement it the correct way.
Yes, I mean those formats.
It doesn’t really matter if the specs says one thing and the “indie MS dev” does another. Since MS Office was the first and most common and adopted solution it kinda sets what is the standard. When LibreOffice refuses to copy the way Word displays a simple bullet list because Word isn’t following the spec then the problem isn’t with Word, the problem is in Writer.
This is like those bugs that people rely on. Even if you can argue there’s a few lines of code that aren’t doing what was technically correct as soon as you’ve people depending on that “wrong” behavior for some task it suddenly became a feature and the right way to do things.
When Google docs and everything else can handle the formats properly then it’s clearly a MS office issue.
“Since my spouse was famous first they’re allowed to beat me, there not normally like this I swear, really they’re a nice guy, it’s my fault anyway, I deserve it”
“If it’s a bug that people rely on, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” - Linus Torvalds
Leaving out your copypasta list, did Debian really got better for newbie desktop users? I’ve read it not long time ago somewhere that it got better for desktop use, is that true? What’s your rig, configs and use cases?
I mean, I just want shit to work and I don’t have any complaints, unlike I had with other distros. HP EliteBook 840 G5 (i7 model) running since Debian 11, then upgraded to 12. Debian 12 fresh install on a HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini as well everything working right after installation (including the special keyboard keys). My main desktop i7-6800K / Asus X99-M WS/SE also had it for a while and it worked fine but due to work and small compatibility annoyances I moved to Windows. At some point I was running it on an old MacBook, the setup was harder and I had to fix a couple of thing but it worked better than macOS - at least it had a recent browser :P
The rest of the machines where I run Debian are Supermicro servers (or AMD boxes running headless) so they aren’t useful for this conversation.
Use case for those machines is web, email, VSCode for embedded development, SSH into other machines, networking related jobs and typing stuff sometimes.
I see people from time to time complaining about Debian, but frankly I don’t get it. Unlike Arch it has an installer, even a GUI, comes with sensible defaults. Installation can be done by pressing next at every step (without changing anything) and as long as you aren’t running on AliExpress hardware or some shady brand from 10 years ago things usually work fine.
Bullshit, keys are not the same as licenses. A license costs ~150 Euros.
He also is not calculating the value of his privacy…
What does that mean for Windows though?
Just crack it https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts don’t pay any more euros to Microsoft please…
Obviously :P
I … bought an official digital Windows license back then before I even thought about Desktop Linux. Now I feel dirty …
Just to piss Microsoft off, I used the activation script for my GPU passthrough Tiny11 VM instead of simply signing into my account. ;)
When you don’t have to spend weeks tweaking a system to have something that works… that’s considered cheap. Money doesn’t exist by itself, if you need a machine to work today, Windows is cheap. Even if you make 20€/hour in a day of work your Windows license will be payed of… the other alternative is spending weeks not being able to work because you’ve to configure things :)