I want to motivate you to keep trying to switch to Linux

I do run Linux on the desktop. I also have a Windows 7 desktop machine for stuff that won't run on Linux, but it's usually off. I have some Linux subnotebooks. And I still think Linux on the desktop kind of sucks.

Linux always has GUI bugs that never gets fixed. The Ubuntu dashboard randomly stops finding applications. The cursor disappears after suspend/resume. Both of those have had open bug reports for years. This is considered part of the Linux experience. Microsoft and Apple usually fix that stuff, so they don't get criticized in the press.

With enough code bloat, all bugs are deep.

There's nothing I can do on a Mac that I can't do on Linux – except Apple ecosystem stuff like handoff – but it's generally more pleasant and polished with less faff, which has become more important to me as I've aged.

The closest thing to this I've found is Ubuntu's Unity, which makes some specific desktop tasks more intuitive than on other OSes. That experience should be expanded!

I don't want a Linux environment to be just as good as my Mac. I want it to be better. I'd gladly switch, I'm not tied to much of the Apple ecosystem (other than iCloud Keychain, and I can reset all of those passwords). But my platform choice has always been driven by experience, and I'll choose the best experience I can find. So far, my experience with every Linux distro I've tried has been to approximate, not improve.

It became a philosophy of linux that when you are trying to solve use case problem - you need to engage into lengthy scavenger hunt for fragmented bits and pieces of information and solutions to stich something together that hopefully works.

It's been ..? 30 years? Like that.

RTFM is not an answer to millions of WTF?'s

The single best way I have found to switch to Linux as a desktop user is to dual boot my main home computer with Windows 7 or 10 and Ubuntu and then run Windows 10 PRO on my HTPC (that's "Home Theater PC" in 2009 parlance) so that I can RDP to it from Ubuntu to use Excel and Powershell and then also have two laptops: A macbook air and then also a Dell that dual boots both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. I would say that 9/10th of the time I just go ahead and use the macbook air. But booting into Ubuntu gives me that "party like it's 1999" feeling still, like I am really sticking it to the man, especially every time I sudo apt-get upgrade. Yes, I use ubuntu on all of my servers except the one's at work, which are all CentOS. Don't even get me started on my phone and tablet either.

Computers turned out to be just about the most schizophrenic world imaginable honestly. You have to know a ton of languages and Operating Systems and literally every company is trying their darnedest to lock you in. Welcome to the future. We are all polyglot. Wouldn't it have been awesome if ATT wouldn't have been such profit hungry assholes in the 80's and we could all be sitting here using UNIX and not having to learn tomorrows hot new language and don't forget google is launching FUCHSIA soon, which is a new OS that will replace Android, Linux, Java and... oh whatever. I should start learning Go I think. Node can suck it by the way, although I am sure some dick is sitting there in college writing a Node OS right now and it will end up powering smart cars and moonbases and microwave ovens and be worth a zillion dollars. I am not smart enough for this.

For someone like myself who is fine with a slightly more technical desktop experience, using Linux gives me a setup I can shape to fit my requirements and then never have to think about ever again. It's very relaxing compared to using Windows because I don't have to deal with all the little annoyances e.g: Constantly forcing me to install updates; big UI changes between versions; vast quantities of bloatware.

However for the people who are strictly averse to the technical aspects of Linux (most people), I would never bother trying get them to switch. It's a pointless uphill battle which ends in frustration.

This issue right there is what has kept me out of Linux for more than ten years. If I have to run Windows or Mac anyway, then the additional overhead of a second OS just doesn't add any real value - instead it's another maintenance point and learning curve.

It's best to think of Linux as a professional utility. It runs my phone, my file server, my backups, but the only time I want to see it on desktop is when I need to do weird things with PDF:s - this is when bash and the libre pdf tools on Ubuntu provide the fastest solution usually.

Value wise - the computer is kinda useless unless used for value added work. What that value is, depends, but for me writing code and art is more valuable than tweaking with config files. The only times my Linux systems seem to work without inflicting heartburns to me is when it's been provided and configured by a commercial third party, running on hardware provided by the said third party.

So it seems to me for trouble free computing-as-a-utility experience one needs a complete system with commercial backing. This is anecdotal, of course.

    Logs are your friend, and above all others is the syslog which
    is at /var/log/syslog. You can either view it with the less
    command, or you can tail it and watch it scroll by as new entries
    get added.

And I hope it continues to be true. But I will stay with BSDs.

The options were using Windows Vista (and, later, Windows 8) on a cheap laptop or using Ubuntu on that cheap laptop after removing Windows Vista. An Apple laptop wasn't possible.

After that, I just stuck with using flavors of Ubuntu on laptops (even after buying a Macbook). Maybe the author should've pushed more "free" (as in, not $1000+) and less "freedom."

i. Doomsday scenario: Competing platforms do something awful like direct spying on users, making it unaffordable/inaccessible or generally taking terrible, permanent decisions. Then, a free/open source OS will become The only feasible option. The counter point to this is, competition ensures very few companies will take that route.

ii. Learning & contributing: As a developer, I can understand and improve any part of the stack. Counter point: This doesn't address non-developers, who are a majority in today's world.

A sizeable number of those people are fucking arseholes and you really shouldn't be pointing confused users towards them. At least you need to provide some training to those users about how to ask questions to reduce the risk of getting bitten. (This isn't unique to Linux.)

In my experience of using Ubuntu full time in the workplace for a decade or so nobody has seen me fix their problems with Linux world tools and thought 'must give Linux a go'. Instead they stick with what they know, on their PCs or Apple boxes.

I have never been evangelical about Linux, however, what I do is fix people's problems. Some of these can be very basic, for instance, how do you merge a big long list of email addresses and remove the duplicates in a spreadsheet program? Well, that is doable but if the task is part of a bigger task then you just want to get that done instantly, i.e. before the spreadsheet program loads... In linux world you can just do a 'sort -u' after concatenating your files with '>>'. Easy if you have muscle memory for 'vi', not easy if you have to hunt around for menus and stuff with a mouse in one of those 'graphical user interfaces' people speak so highly of.

So you can do this stuff before people's eyes, explaining what you are doing and keeping focused on the bigger task at hand, e.g. sending out a newsletter in the above example. But does anyone want to do it 'programmer' instead of 'user' style after being shown how much quicker and accurate the 'programmer' way is? Nope!!!

With anything to do with images there is a similar problem. Time consuming 'artwork' tasks such as cropping lots of images and compressing them for the web can be done one of two ways. As a 'user' one can open Photoshop and spend all day moving a mouse around doing things very much by eye. Or you can just do it near instantly with a simple script on a 'linux' box. In terms of speed this is the difference between taking a steam boat across the Atlantic or just getting on a plane, hours and days of work are saved. But would a 'graphic designer' think to do it linux style? Even if they could do it with homebrew style things? Nope, never. Doing it 'programmer style' could free them up from boring tasks so they could spend more time doing whatever it is that they are notionally passionate about. But they do not want to know.

In fact, even to get a frontend developer to open up a terminal window is a bit of an ask. There are people that use 'grep' and there are people that use 'gui' for everything.

I am not convinced that linux ports to Apple or PC environments are any good. My colleague uses 'MAMP' and that ties you in to doing things the GUI way, e.g. typing 'mysql -u me -pWhatever database < latest.sql' will give 'command not found'. Yes but you could add wherever MAMP hides stuff to the path and blah, but it is half baked. The speed of the thing is slow too, even if the linux version is on a legacy PC and the MAMP stack is running on some £1500 brand new machine. Don't get me started on developing a simple web page (e.g. Wordpress) on a Windows PC, in my mind it is as bad for kludges as the Mac dev environment.

I also have problems knowing what is really that good about these OSX/Windows programs that are vital to have. I can't open a 'Visio' drawing on my linux box but there is only one guy in the office with licensed Visio anyway, so it is not as if anyone else can open those things. I don't believe there is an open source tool for everything, give me a proper CAD or 3D modelling tool over some 'Blender' effort any day. But most stuff, linux is far superior as far as a toolchain that works.

The most amusing one at the moment for me is printing. My linux box just prints fine to those HP printers in the office that nobody ever seems able to print to. So whenever someone wants something printed urgently, it is me who does it for them. 'Look no drivers'!!!

Despite these positives (linux to my mind is much better for solving normal problems like getting stuff printed out), there is nobody wanting a linux box like mine. They all stick to what they know (as do I in my special way).

To take a dietary analogy, it is much better to be a quiet vegetarian rather than one of those annoying vegans who has to tell you about it every time they fart. A quiet vegetarian has no moral superiority, does not make people feel bad about the death of the planet and animal suffering, just has a personal choice that works for them and expects nobody to change their life long habits.

~~~~~

This article didn't really motivate me to try to switch to Linux. In my reading, it was just a bit of fluff about looking at /var/log/syslog and searching for 'proper and relevant' error messages. That's definitely not enough for a non-tech-savvy common person.

There was a time when I used to think that software will improve in stability and quality over time, but I've realized that things are so complex, so diverse and driven by so many people that we've actually gone far away from "it just works" on _every_ _single_ _platform_ (this is about common people, not tech savvy people who can edit config files, look at system logs, debug applications, fix bugs, build from source, etc.). It doesn't matter if you like Windows more or OS X (macOS) more or Linux more - none of them are really great enough for common people to use without being annoyed or downright disrupted in accomplishing what they want to. It's only an ever changing ranking of who's doing worse at any point in time.

Coming to Linux, I find the following as deficiencies in the distributions and the applications that prevent people from adopting it on their computers more (this list is a generalization across most distributions, and I know some distributions may be vastly better than others):

1. Hardware drivers (video and network being important ones that people rely on) - this has improved tremendously in the last decade or so, but it still is kind of a coin toss when it comes to saying "ok, I have this laptop and I'm going to install Linux on it" and being confident that it would work.

2. Not including proprietary codecs and stuff that people actually want. Nobody wants to hunt down a codec pack or spend a lot of time just to watch a video they've downloaded. I'm not belittling the fight for free software and freedom, but we have to accept what people are tending toward even if we know they're probably on a destructive or unproductive path.

3. The UI - this is a huge deal, really. Most Linux distributions and applications still use some really ugly fonts and ugly looking GUI elements. It's as if we're still stuck in 1995 admiring Windows '95 as the best thing that's happened to GUIs. I see a similar issue with LibreOffice (which I use), where the UI is primitive looking and difficult to use (especially for those who come from using MS Office - standard menus or ribbon interface doesn't matter). Most people around the world who now own computers are starting to have nicer screens (at least closer to HD or HD). Things start looking even more uglier on those systems.

4. If you want 2016 to be "the year of desktop Linux" [1], you have to start by admitting that this cause was lost long ago and adapt to the better presentation, practices and behaviors seen in other OSes, however primitive, deficient or restrictive those may look to you from different perspectives. Copying ideas, polish and UI paradigms is not a bad thing because most people want to get their work done and not have to learn something new as a stepping stone to getting things done (recall the Windows 8.0 fiasco over the Start button not being there and people not knowing how to shutdown their systems?). There has been a lot of progress here as well over the years on the Linux side, but the polish is definitely not there (in a comparative sense) or comes at cost (not monetarily) that end users don't want to deal with.

5. The update coin toss - this is becoming quite common and a well noticed problem on Windows and OS X as well, but you never know what an update will do to your system and if you'd even be able to boot it up (this could be related to drivers too, but why would a common user even care about who's responsible for what and where the blame should lie if something no longer works?).

With all these complaints, what can we collectively do? Beyond corporate sponsorships, I believe tech people should donate more money and ideas to the FLOSS (free/libre open source software) ecosystem. Many people who have been working on these systems for decades or years are doing it from an ideological standpoint, and in my opinion, getting more people and resources to improve things does need more money to start with. Think of it as a recurring contribution to humanity, because we all know that even if Linux doesn't rule the desktop, it does rule mobile and servers - things that we all use in some form or the other everyday.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+year+of+desktop+linux

That's when Linux desktops and desktop apps will start to look good and modern.

Also the only time I should ever see anything that looks like console output is when I run a console. Windows and OSX don't start loading with a "matrix like" blast of fast scrolling super technical load status messages, that sort of stuff says (with a megaphone) to users "GO AWAY, THIS USER EXPERIENCE IS NOT FOR YOU!".