"The sad state of <minor desktop feature> on Linux"
Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.
Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.
I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS.
What killed me was:
- wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time required a reboot.
- substantially worse battery life
- clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment.
- buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs were different)
- no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use two or more different platforms as the client.
- the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well (for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth pissing him off.
So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).
Of course, if you want to use your existing X server it might not work as well, I haven’t tried it.
For most of the rest of your complaints, I use web apps for everything, even on OS X / Windows. Sad at the state of native apps on both Windows and Linux.
Linux is a lot easier on g-suite enterprises than in exchange/office ones. Considering how much of the latter's going online now, maybe it won't matter at all later.
If you want a system that can be customized heavily (for example you don't like using the mouse and want to use keyboard for everything), Linux is a godsent.
If you want perennial consistency in your work env, it's very helpful too. For example, I've been running the same setup for 12 years, bringing it over from the old laptop every time I got a new one.
In exchange for that convenience, I have to wrestle with wifi/ethernet settings once every few years (when I change my hardware); for me it's a small price to pay.
I think windows is not inherently worse though, it is probably great for how some programmers work or think, but to me Linux distros feel like a better match
Computers are tools, endpoints these days. I have been happy with Linux but then again my needs are not super-complex.
I have a recent freetype with a defaultish configuration and the results on my small by today's standards monitors are readable.