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Comment by FragmentShader | Hacker News Reader

I have to pay my bills today, not whenever the professional software I use gets released on Linux. Also, the Linux experience is so miserable that if Windows were to die, I'd just switch to MacOS tbh.

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> Linux experience is so miserable

This is just not true. I switched back to linux recently https://punkx.org/jackdoe/linux-desktop.html and honestly the experience is amazing. I even did dist-upgrade and everything still works, including all my pytorch stuff.

Windows experience is hundreds of times worse.

MacOS is quite good, I would recommend it as well, but don't dismiss linux without trying.

Using debian (and with an upgrade to 12) with gnome feels very polished. I think I'd call it close to a "default" linux experience. That doesn't sound sexy but it means it's the happy path, thoroughly tested, no surprises. The closest thing I've had to an issue in 6 months is extrepo duplicating some repo keys, it was as easy to fix as deleting the file once.

Modern linux can be a boring and productive place if you want it to be.

When was the last time you tried it?

Genuinely curious to what makes it miserable. I mostly love my basic Ubuntu setup (and especially compared to the clown show that is modern Windows), and although I’m a software engineer I am neither particularly good at nor have any interest in tinkering with my Linux setup. It mostly just works (except for distribution of apps outside of the package manager - that sucks!). That said, I’m on desktop - I think anything with batteries and touch interfaces is often more buggy.

I wouldn't say miserable, but there are sharp edges that don't exist in Windows or MacOS. I've been steadily getting annoyed at Windows so I've started trialing my steam deck as a desktop replacement when I travel. It's mostly fine. But the lack of ability to set scroll wheel speed across the entire OS annoys me every time and after weeks of trying to find a solution, I've learned way more than I should need to about mouse drivers and Wayland and libinput, and I still don't have an acceptable solution to it. Many others have had this issue and each component blames the other for some idealistic reasons. The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

These edge cases are annoying to test and fix and you have to pay smart people to grind out the time to do it. You need program managers who coordinate across teams to drive a solution. This is why linux hasn't solved it after all these years. The smart people would rather work on cool new features.

> The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

I do agree with this and share your pain, even though to me it's never been that bad. But you're right, it's a big blame game between linux, distros, gnome, wayland, etc, and the result is fragmentation. And a ton of users are left in the middle when mom and dad are fighting violently over age-old issues like dynamic linking and which window manager is the best. The fact that linux has a much more narrow scope than commercial OSs has some significant downsides.

Ironically, I get the sense that Torvalds agrees with this, it's just that he can't afford to increase the scope outside of the kernel, which is already a super-human effort. I got the sense he wishes everyone else can iron out their differences, while he (correctly, probably) assumes it's wiser tend to his garden than to get involved in other battles.

And get confronted with Apple’s version of enshittification? The grass is not as green as it used to be in cupertino world.

I have a M1 laptop so I kinda suffered some aspects of MacOS. But, when I have a problem, it just feels like this:

Windows: Chances are the problem doesn't exist.

Linux: Spend 6 hours to fix it.

MacOS: Spend 50$ for software that fixes it.

Apple has a long ways to go before they get to Microsoft levels of enshittification. The News app has ads and premium-only content mixed into the content you do have access to. They know I don't pay for News so stop showing me the articles I can't read, please. I know that's the whole point. They want me to get annoyed and pay for it. And I think there are random nudges throughout the OS to pay for iCloud. But it's a far cry from the ads and clickbait and unwanted notifications and resetting user preferences (Edge browser, etc.) that Windows does.

excuses excuses

spoken like someone who hasn't used Linux in a decade. The experience is much better in Linux than the other OSes these days

If you need to use software in Windows for work that's one thing, but you probably don't need that software on every personal device and your opinion about using Linux is definitely just your opinion

Even if you do need Windows for your software, projects like Wine are making progress every day. There's only a few things I use that don't work out of the box, and for that I have a stripped down Windows VM.

Learning how to spin up a Windows VM in Linux was what finally gave me the courage to take the training wheels off and abandon Windows as my daily driver, after decades.

> The experience is much better in Linux than the other OSes these days

Until the next system update breaks Wayland or your GPU driver again.

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