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?
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
Sorry I have to tell you this but no one relays on fucked up format rendering. MS Office last I checked doesn’t even let you export to the open source formats.
Let’s be honest here Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word haven’t had any real innovation for the past 5 years. The only reason why people still use it is because of familiarity & it’s mandatory for certain jobs. If it wasn’t for that they’d already be abandoneware. Shit they kinda already are because of Office 365, which subsequently is also ass from the complete lack of innovation.
That’s the thing, people do.
Exactly, people do use and rely on MS Office for rendering. MS Office is the most used implementation out there, because 99% of the corporate world uses it for documents and that makes it the biggest and most used implementation. This is the reason why it is the bug that became the feature and we can’t just ignore it.
To be fair, even Apple on their basic iWork / Pages knows that they should prioritize rendering like Word does and not like the standard says they should do. From experience I can tell you that opening a Word document in Pages usually gives you a rendering that is way more close to Word than with Writer.
This has nothing to do with innovation, to be fair what else innovation do you require in a text document? What Microsoft is doing is working on integration between multiple products and services (some of them AI tools), and that’s where there’s innovation right now, not in the way a image is placed on a document.
No they don’t. They rely on rendering the proprietary formats because that’s the only thing they ever export too.
You’d be surprised just how much innovation they could be doing. There’s so many quality of life improvements in competing Office Suits that MS Office completely lacks.
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