> I install a clean copy of Ubuntu on to my PC, start using it and then stop when I discover some serious bug
What do you do when you encounter a serious bug in your OS of choice?
What do you do when you encounter a serious bug in your OS of choice?
When I say serious bug I typically mean serious OS breaking bugs.
Some examples from these past years(these all happened different years):
1) After clean install, desktop crashes after first reboot and I am thrown into terminal. Result: Stop usage and move on.
2) After Clean install, I wish to copy some files to an fat32 USB drive(Sandisk purchased directly from them). I get some error while the file is being copied, the drive is unmounted and then when I go to another system running Windows to check if my file was copied, the drive is corrupted causing all my files to be lost. Result: Stop usage and move on.
3) After clean install, I go ahead and connect a second monitor. Now my desktop becomes a garbled mess on both screens. I disconnect screen and the desktop remains a garbled mess on the main screen. I force reboot and upon reboot now I have been dropped to the terminal. Result: Stop usage and move on.
These issues don't happen on Windows and Mac in my experience. Don't get me wrong, Windows is degrading in usability and Mac is as well (at a much slower pace) but they are not falling apart in these fundamental ways. The very foundations of Linux seem to be built on sand and that does not convey trust when you expect your system to be more than just a toy. This is a machine to get work done on and I depend on it. I cannot be dealing with silly issues like this.
1) sounds like a hardware issue or hardware compatibility issue. Unfortunately, while Linux does come with great and extensive hardware support out-of-the-box, you'd still benefit from choosing hardware that works well with Linux. Thinkpad T series (I usually use X1 Carbon, but as the highest end ultraportable it can introduce some Windows-specific firmware issues that they only resolve in a few months after release — they did that with Gen6 when they switched to new always-on-standby, but they introduced a BIOS option for Linux ~6 months later) is usually the best bet out of big manufacturers, and Linux-focused ones like System76 are a good choice too. So if you want to try out Linux next time, get Linux hardware that will work well with it first (or be ready to debug issues like the ones you mention).
These sort of issues happen even more on Windows if you clean install it on a wide variety of hardware (MacOS can't even be installed on your non-Apple system, I am guessing, so I'd say that it's even worse :). The benefit Windows has is that it comes pre-installed on those systems.
I've seen 2) frequently ~5 years ago myself: you had to really ensure that you unmounted FAT32 devices cleanly and waited for the system to announce that the drive was safe to remove: don't do that a few times, and filesystem will be messed up enough for Linux FAT32 driver to be able to cope (Microsoft, having developed FAT32 themselves, has an obvious advantage there). They don't seem to cause as much corruption anymore (only the file you were transferring might be corrupted), or maybe I learned to wait properly. Also, flash drives can degrade and cause all sorts of issues where it seems to work properly in other systems but causes silent corruption. If this was an old flash drive, that's the most likely issue: I've learned to go with only SanDisk Extreme flash drives because they have the best write endurance, but they are multiple times more expensive for the same capacity compared to other flash drives (including SanDisk ultra stuff).
3) is really weird, and external display connectivity has been a huge issue ~10 years ago, but I haven't seen any issues since (including in presentations on random projectors, multiple screen types and such): the only stuff that still annoys me is the default of setting up new screens as extended, chromeless display areas (I'd definitely default to "mirror screens"), but once a screen is set up, it saves the settings forever. Still, this is most obviously a driver issue (integrated Intel graphics is usually most stable, Nvidia most performant, but AMD should be becoming the best of both worlds in the last few years, though it's hard to get their GPUs).
And since you say these don't happen with Windows, just 10 days ago I had to reboot my X1 Carbon into Windows (that it came preinstalled with) to file some tax paperwork and I connected it to my Dell 4K TB3 display (which I dock to and undock from repeatedly on Linux without issue: all of this is pretty high end Windows equipment). On reboot, TB3 light remained on and it stopped charging and passing DisplayPort through (still worked as a USB hub, and rebooting back into Windows did not fix it). I was thinking I'd have to go to the service shop since my laptop is still under warranty, but as I was pulling my SSD out to prepare for that, I realised I could just disconnect the battery and see if that helps, and luckily, it did.
In short, dealing with hardware is hard (which all your issues seem to be), and all of the operating systems have different quirks. As above, I had a pretty terrible issue with an expensive Windows laptop and Windows-supporting screen ($3000 + $1200) which worked without issue under Linux for more than a year. Apple has a huge advantage because they control the hardware they ship with, Windows is generally worse on arbitrary hardware but has the benefit of being pre-installed and "pre-debugged", and Linux is better than Windows but has to be clean installed (I am pretty confident that if you took random 20 laptops off the market today and attempted to clean install both Windows and Linux on them, you'd get a fully working Linux system more easily; MacOS easily loses out on such a benchmark).
With Linux the issues are fundamental to how the OS is designed and maintained. Several of these issues were fixed only to come back one or two releases in the future. These sort of terrible regressions don't inspire confidence.
You have listed excuse after excuse to justify these failures when in reality both other OSes have had these functions worked out over 10+ years ago.
1) I have heard this excuse before that I should stick to official Linux hardware. I have had issues with Thinkpads as well and some of these issues happened on a Thinkpad. I have also been hesitant to jump onboard System76 or Purism because their systems just look like junk and in 2021 when we have stunning Mac laptops with beautiful trackpads and retina displays and me entering my 30s I just don't have the stomach to spend hundreds of dollars on laptops that look like they came out of the mid to late 2000s. In the case of System76 they are rebadged Clevo systems from what I understand(could be wrong about this). So in reality I am paying for QA for this year of distro with no specific guarantee that I won't start hitting the same issues a few years down the road when the regressions start to come. There is no garuntee that System76/Purism will fix some small regression in a multi year old system. They suffer from the fact that the community will move on without them and so they have to maintain support. Mac systems have been supported for 7+ years. I have a 2012 Macbook Air that still runs pretty decent with no regressions on the latest MacOS (well second latest since they finally discontinued it giving it ~9 years of support).
2) I have never had any doubt as to Windows's ability to correctly write data to a USB drive ever since I started using this functionality back in Windows XP!
No I specifically mentioned that I bought Sandisk and direct from them to remove this commonly used excuse where Linux people blame everything but the OS itself. The flash drive is fine. Windows has written to it successfully without ever throwing an issue. MacOS has written to it multiple times without issue. The flash drive is not at fault!
I want you to stop for a moment. Picture yourself as the user. You have come to expect over the years that when you copy a file to a USB mass storage device, the file is correctly written. You don't do file integrity checks or other silly stuff. You just copy your files to the drive, unmount it and then move on. Now imagine you are trying linux out and you follow the same mindset. You copy files over and then unmount and move on. The horror and shock of losing precious data will definitely put permanent anxiety and distrust into the User's mind that will be very difficult to restore. If you cannot trust copy and paste then what can you trust? The OS is fundamentally flawed because these copy and paste operations in the GUI are basically abstracting command line operations that may or may not fail silently. This is garbage design compared to MacOS and Windows. When these other OS'es fail, sure they don't show you the error most of the time but the GUI is strongly tied to the operations that are occurring and so when they fail, you know they have failed. You're not in limbo because you are looking at a GUI that is not correctly tracking what the underlying command line application is doing.
3) All I know is that I have never had display issues in Windows and it is not even a thought on MacOS. In fact MacOS handles multi display so beautifully because it scales things perfectly. This is better than even Windows because while Windows always gets multi-monitor working without fuss, things like font rendering leave a lot to be desired. MacOS give you everything: Stable muti-monitor support, beautiful scaling and excellent font rendering across displays with different resolutions. Linux is not even in the same ballpark because you don't really know if the display you hook up will even start up properly and then when you need to do config changes you are stuck doing some stupid stuff like installing xrandr. You cannot expect to plug in the damn display and move on with your life. I recently hooked up a 640x480 CRT along with a 4K display to mac and to my surprise, it handled scaling across these wildly different displays perfectly. I couldn't believe it! I have gotten so confident in the Mac ecosystem that I don't even doubt it anymore. It just works and that freedom allows me to remove that cognitive load off of my mind.
I am happy to see you strongly disagree while making such a wild assumption even after I said it was factory pre-installed system.
I'm not using any "frankenstein Windows environment": this is factory installed and up-to-date Windows installation on a recent high end Windows laptop.
You are dismissing my experience in a worse way than you are saying your experiences are being dismissed. It's also not hard to find evidence of Windows messing up flash drives online too.
If all you can do is discuss in bad faith, there is no reason to discuss further.