It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being free of a walled garden and adware platform.
NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not well supported. Knowing which is which before buying requires reading extensive documentation. Even Dell on their XPS 9310 fucked up Linux support so bad they dediced to quietly remove the option to buy Ubuntu laptop and communication about supporting Linux.
My personal laptop recovers all screen when waking up from sleep, my work laptop doesn't and I need to unplug and plug them again.
One thing that works awesomely well for me is Printer supports (scanners are another pair of hands though). Anywhere I tried, discovery works great out of the box, even for USB printers it works without having to download a driver from a strange website.
When using snap (default on Ubuntu) Firefox crashes often if it updates in background. Libre office is far from the Office experience, which I tend to forget as I use Google Workspace apps instead.
Having tried working on Windows, Linux and MacOS, I wouldn't move to another environment. The pros greatly outweigh the cons for my own use-case. But I will still keep a Windows for gaming and cannot recommend it to relatives.
Can't comment on the problems you have had. My own experience has been almost without issue for many years now, using Fedora. YMMV.
However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to re-install), I'm thinking more than twice before booting into Windows these days. I don't have much time for gaming anyway, and will probably just give up my audio plugins at some point.
gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.
currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.
the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.
Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.
Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.
Speak for yourself. That condescending attitude is disgustingly lame, and everyone is welcome to use linux, even the haters. It is free and open source, not free and open source (except for people that emptysongglass doesn't approve of)
Everything deserves criticism. Everything is imperfect. Calling out imperfections is not an insult to imperfect systems but a hope that the systems which can change in a way that we humans cannot would change for the better.
And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
And that's a good thing. Trying to convince people to use Linux has been likely the worst sort of thing to happen to its adoption. Chromebooks and Steam Deck promote Linux without arguing its virtues.
> It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux.
Grandparent explicitly stated that getting more users might actually be a worse thing for Linux. I agree. Parent going out of their way to criticize unsupported hardware makes their case.
> And it doesn't matter how upset you get for it, Linux's feelings have not been hurt by the criticisms it has received. Rather, many people have heard those criticisms and raised the flag and ran to the rescue and made linux better because of them.
No, I don't believe that to be the case, especially when it comes to bring-up on Nvidia. That blame sits squarely with Nvidia the corporation. And the people who can do something about it are the engineers sitting at Nvidia who haven't done anything about it for at least a decade. Rolling out the same old arguments for why Linux sucks because Nvidia is not productive.
For Snaps, there's a constellation of other distros available that don't ship Snaps. Shuttleworth doesn't want to listen to critique. He's been going his own way since the earliest days of Canonical. Have you seen their interview process? When he was called out publicly for the poor predictive power of screening using aptitude tests, he doubled down. That's been his way from the beginning. Critizing Snaps on Ubuntu as part of a broader argument on why Linux sucks is also not productive because the one person in charge of that decision does not want to make that decision.
I lack the patience to try and troubleshoot it most of the time and primarily use another machine. Usefulness is limited when I can't count on "simple" things like waking from sleep in working state, IME.
The out of the box experience on Ubuntu doesn’t even come close to modern macOS or Windows 11.
Sure, if all you need to do is use a web browser then you’d be fine with a Linux GUI most of the time.
But then a Chrome Book is better at that point.
P.S. Chromebook is Linux under the hood.
And I agree, you cant really have a back and forth about it, trying to score points. The requirements are too myriad these days.
Hence my Chromebook comment - because for someone that just needs a device that gives them access to a web browser environment and some apps, it's a good choice.
I was aware Chromebooks are Linux, which is good :-)
I do like Linux - and do use it as my desktop dev environment from time to time. When I feel like a change from macOS.
There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me.
Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.
/me shakes head in disbelief. How can one persons experience be so different to mine? Everything is faster / small under Linux - the file system, the graphics, the size of a base OS install with GUI and brower is literally 1/10th of Windows. Windows taking seconds to respond to a click on the start button (I presume so it can fetch the ads) was the final straw for me.
As for stability, I watched co-workers come in in the morning and find their dev environment was broken due an overnight Microsoft update, and just accept the 30 delay while they fixed it as routine, unavoidable, "it's just how things are". But for one, an update that broke things so badly he needed an OS reinstall to drive him to having a "fuck it, I'm going to Debian" moment. That is rare though.
Meanwhile, I've never experienced unwanted downtime from any Debian security patch. OS upgrades are a different matter, but they only happen once in two years, and you have at least another 2 years to get around to it. Or you can do it once every 4 years. Which isn't surprising. Debian is used by a lot of servers around the globe. Stable is the name of the game, uptimes in years aren't uncommon.
The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.