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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

When I switched to Linux in university, it was as an idle curiosity and the pleasure of knowing my OS was FOSS. I knew I was sacrificing a bit of practicality, but like the person that works on their vintage motorcycle in the garage, the hassle was part of the fun.

I would often run Windows on a second machine or at work though, I felt equally productive in both Linux and Windows.

Fast-forward a decade and the Linux desktop situation has improved and the Windows situation has gotten worse, such that switching to Windows 11 is a total non-starter for me.

I dual-boot Windows 10 w/ Ubuntu because of the odd game or two that is beyond Proton's reach, but that happens less and less each day. I'd be willing to bet that I won't need that Windows partition at all soon.

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I'd really like to see Linux desktop become a popular platform for games and game development. Proton is great, but Windows is still too mainstream.

Same thing happened to me. 10 years ago using Linux on the Desktop was tricky but worth it for me. Now it's almost the opposite, my Linux desktop feels smooth and unobtrusive compared to Windows, and rarely has any problems!

I'm not sure how much the Linux situation has improved really. I used to use Linux in the early 2000s when I was a student and had time to burn. Quickly switched back to Windows/Mac when I got a job and needed stuff to "just work".

However recently I started working for a company that provides Linux laptops. I was curious how much things had improved in 20 years. My conclusion is: not much.

Here are some of the issues I've had:

* Linux memory management is still really bad. On OOM it kills a completely random process and 90% of the time for me that means it hard-reboots my laptop. Maybe this is partly because they didn't set it up with any swap for some reason, but I'm unsure that would help (in 2003 it didn't; the system would just grind to an unresponsive halt... but we didn't have SSDs then).

* If you set a WiFi network to automatically connect to a VPN, then delete that VPN, it means the WiFi connection will always just instantly fail with no error message. Even dmesg didn't help. You can imagine how fun that was to figure out.

* For some reason half of the network settings are not in the network settings. They're in some third party app you have to run from the console. It isn't even linked via an "advanced" button in the gnome settings.

* Gnome's desktop notifications are hilariously subtle. We're talking dark grey window that disappears if you touch it with the mouse and there's no notification history. I ended up fixing the colour to make it red by hacking some CSS. It was a simple 27 step process. Couldn't fix the other issues though.

* Somewhat hilariously if you click a truncated link in a notification, the URL it takes you to will also be truncated!

* Screen capture doesn't work in Wayland. Not that I regularly need to share my screen with coworkers or anything... Fortunately switching to X was easy and doesn't seem to have any downsides at all.

* I haven't done this but multiple coworkers have accidentally uninstalled Gnome while trying to upgrade Python. HN mentality will be to blame them but that is the unthinking response.

* It takes ages to wake up. I sometimes have to absolutely mash escape for about 10 seconds.

* Battery life is of course hilarious.

Never had issues like this with Mac or Windows (though I haven't used Windows laptops really).

Note that most of those are GNOME issues. GNOME is hilariously bad. Most of your issues are simply not a problem in other desktop environments:)

I've had many of these things happen to me barring the Gnome and Wayland bugs since I don't use them.

I still would hardly say that not much has changed, nor that the Desktop experience on many popular distros is bad.

It's also important to note that while the UX problems between Windows and Linux aren't the same in number and nature, the root of these problems are relevant imho.

With Linux distros, it's just lack of resources. They can address them with enough man hours.

With Windows, many of the user-hostile aspects of the UX are part of the product map, and I don't anticipate that getting any better.

I'm long on Linux on the desktop, which I know is a punch-line, but it's working for plenty of people of various technical stripes.

I can't comment on your experience, but I can describe mine.

Back in 2003 I tried to install a Linux distro on my personal machine (Mandrake if memory serves) and it was an atrocious experience. Couldn't even get my mouse to work.

Sometime around 2015 I decided to give it a second chance. I worked for a company where we could work on Linux machines and I decided to give it ago. Ubuntu this time around. I had a pleasant experience, for development it proved to be a solid option, but I couldn't switch my personal machine to Linux because I would lose access to my gaming library.

Earlier this year I decided to give another go. Replaced Windows with Linux Mint, and couldn't be happier. It's an absolute joy to use, and thanks to Proton, I can play the vast majority of my PC games there. Most work right off the bat through Steam or Lutris. Some required minor tinkering.

I had none the issues you described.

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