I currently regularly use 4 desktop/laptop computers: a T480 running Kubuntu, an L420 running Xubuntu, a Dell work laptop running Kubuntu, and a custom gaming desktop running Windows 10.

I have spent dramatically more time delving into OS nonsense to solve issues on the Windows machine, from "ghost" controller inputs making WPF applications unusable to audio devices randomly disappearing to some weird HDCP interaction causing my display to turn off when Disney Plus is loaded in Firefox.

I do not have nearly the same amount of trouble with my Linux machines; nor does my boyfriend, who is not a technical professional and uses Xubuntu exclusively.

Yes, Linux on the desktop can require tinkering, but it's not always the case. With the right hardware choices and some thoughtful setup, it can be remarkably stable.

I would have agreed with you a long time ago, but nowadays my Linux machine is the lowest setup cost and lowest maintenance cost I have.

I don't have a Mac, but Windows has become quite needy and bloated. While Linux has become easier to install, harder to mess up and less jarring with interface changes in the last decade.

Totally out of context quote:

Linus Torvalds when asked on a Real World Technologies forum whether he would buy an Apple Silicon laptop, he responded with:

I’d absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux. I have fairly fond memories of the 11” Macbook Air (I think 4,1) that I used about a decade ago (but moved away from because it took Apple too long to fix the screen - and by the time they did, I’d moved on to better laptops, and Apple had moved on to make Linux less convenient). Apple may run Linux in their cloud, but their laptops don’t. I’ve been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don’t have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don’t want to help.

I maintain 4 Ubuntu laptops for my family. Never had much of an issue. Granted, I picked Thinkpads with an eye towards them being fairly compatible with Linux to start with so there is a planning element to ease future issues for us. When a new LTS version rolls around, I wait a bit and then upgrade them all and everything seems to work. It's been like that for 10 years almost now.

Unfortunately I am forced to use macos (and windows) and work from time to time and yeah I can agree with the author. GNU/Linux (openSUSE with KDE Plasma desktop) definitely requires a lot less tinkering to get it to work and respect your privacy and the likes. Especially if you do any software development and engineering or scientificy work. And windows/macos are just getting worse while GNU/Linux is just getting better so the advantage gap for GNU/Linux keeps growing as time goes on.

I find the lack of updated views on computers astonishing?

I work with a lot of different people with a lot of different operating systems.

Today, for most people and their needs, Linux is an EASIER operating system to deal with than Mac Os OR Windows.

As much as I would love to credit the amazingness of Linux, it's mostly because a lot of people can do everything they need in a browser + a few basic apps.

Heh, dunno. Once you get used to Linux moving to a new Linux box is easy. Some people use ansible, puppet, git, nix, docker, or even just a list of packages to install.

On apple there's no package management for the entire system, sure you can add brew (or others). Then a ugly patch work of plugins (many are mentioned on this thread) to get alt-tab, better window management, etc. Sadly seems like apple's opinionated view of the desktop battles with plugins, so often the options/decisions are different for each major apple release.

I find it easy to believe linux users spend more time fighting apple's decisions then if they could just have a universal package manager and control over the window manager and have fast/easy access to containers.

Hell I likely waste minutes a day fighting cut/paste on OSX. If you use apple native apps, iterm2, and xquartz seems like the state diagram for cut/paste is way too complex for me to remember.

At least for a linux user, Apple's cut/paste seems horribly broken and limited. I'm used to copying images and documents into thunderbird for attachments, into web UIs to upload, and general things act as I expect. On apple for whatever reason I end up saving it to a file, then finding it with the finder, then uploading it by naming the dir/file. I'm rather puzzled, since NextStep seemed to have gotten drag and drop to work perfectly, not sure what Apple did to break that.

This is a quote of Linus explaining why he doesn't have the time to move to a new computing platform on a new architecture.

This is not a question of "setup macos takes effort X vs setup linux (on M2 laptop) takes effort Y" this is a question of "doing nothing (keep existing system) is no effort while setting up a new system (new hardware, new architecture, etc) is major effort"

I find it takes much more time to disable all the junk Apple puts in your way and find fixes for all the stuff their designers don't find elegant than it does to install all the junk that doesn't work out of the box with any decent linux distro.

I took that as an, I don't have time to learn a new platform so I stick with what works for me, which is valid.

> “I don’t have time to tinker with my computer so I will run Linux on it…”

> I find the lack of self awareness astonishing.

You don't understand the context. That is a comment from Linus, and he is going to run Linux on his laptop. So the comment is referring to either using a laptop that is reasonably well supported by Linux with no changes, or using the Apple one which at the time was not well supported. So he would have to tinker to get it working.

Mind you, it's not really true that Linux = tinkering these days. I just got a new laptop with Windows on it. I thought I'll give it a try since I haven't used it for a few years.

Hyper-V was pretty clunky inflexible but it worked. The console / graphics driver for the VMs is horrible and clunky, no apparent way to change that, probably some obscure registry option or 3rd party thing I'd have to download.

After installing and setting up a few VMs, I was informed (for about the 15th time since booting) that Windows had something it needed to restart for. Upon return, all hyper-v images and snapshots were gone or corrupted. It wouldn't even start until I messed around with the filesystem. Until then the entire manager refused to start because some snapshots were corrupted or something. No option to ignore, delete, or try to recover them.

Okay that's a pain in the butt, I'll start out just using ssh to get to some systems elsewhere. Hallelujah, ssh client is finally provided out of the box. Turns out the shell is the biggest piece of garbage and makes it impossible to do much over ssh.

The internet browser is horribly slow and unresponsive. Guess I'll have to install something sane. I give up.

I pick it up a couple days later and decide to have another try. The thing chews battery when it's suspended, it almost ran flat after a couple of days. No doubt I'd have to go in and tinker with settings or get a 3rd party thing to do it for me to improve that.

Start trying to install another VM. The input system gets stuck thinking the down arrow key or pg down is being held. Then goes unresponsive.

Corruption, data loss, crashes, at least a dozen reboots after about 2 solid days of using it (and achieving less than nothing) and that was with Windows mostly-installed already. Not to mention a poor out of the box environment for doing anything.

I'm sure after installing a bunch of stuff on it and changing a bunch of settings it could be made to work okay. By contrast I ended up installing a Linux distro on it in about 30 minutes, one reboot, and that comes with editors and compilers and git and a reasonable web browser. Nothing had to be changed except screen brightness and track pad sensitivity.

For me, for the work I do on my laptop, Linux works great out of the box and Windows seems to require a lot of tinkering. So a lot of it comes down to what you're doing with it I think. Windows is great for running games and Microsoft software I'm sure.