Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

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Spent about 12mo on Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) and there were just too many issues.

Ubuntu had weird quirks that almost always turned out to be related to my using a snap package. Of course I wasted countless hours getting to the point where I realised that was the issue.

Mint stopped booting once for unknown reasons on modern hardware and I had to reinstall. Another time I wasted half my day trying to get my whatever-the-distro-calls-taskbar to reappear when it decided to disappear. Debian was stable but every time I had an issue I had to battle through advice that was too new to apply.

Linux is great at making me feel like I’m crazy - I must have wasted 2 hours trying to figure out how to get an app image to run nicely from the whatever-the-distro-calls-a-start-button. Everything seemed so complex and backwards compared to Windows. I have to configure the icon myself?! This was automatic in Windows 3.1. I wasted so much time thinking I was missing a better way only to realise, nope, this is the way. It was bizarre that everybody was happy to run a random 3rd party GitHub app to solve this. Unbelievable that in 2025 downloading an app and getting an icon to start it involved so much complexity (appimage vs flatpak vs snap vs gz vs sh… who the hell has time to figure this out?!).

Eventually I decided I’d had enough and don’t want to spend the rest of my life messing around like I’m a teenager with all the time in the world, and switched everything over to Apple, which is working out great.

OTOH I recently started a new position and was given both a win11 laptop and a win11 cloud desktop and the experience after having used Fedora at pro level for the last 10 years is frustrating.

Virtual Desktop is broken. You can't quickly move a window both on a different screen and virtual desktop at the same time. You need to do it in 2 steps. There are some type of windows (like auth ones) that will appear on all virtual desktop regardless of your wishes.

Windows updates that don't go through with obscure, non informative, codes. When you use a search engine for it, you are led to Microsoft Community with absolutely zero solutions. Sometimes after a random amount of days failing and random reboots, they end up going through.

Hitting win key and trying to search for an app or document randomly freeze. The popup menu appears but you can't type anything. Badically if you don't put apps icons in your taskbar you are never sure you will be able to start it without opening a terminal and starting it from powershell.

There are various stupid stuff, like why can't I create a symlink in my own user directory without being an administrator?

I can't put the taskbar wherever I want. I am fairly sure that last time I used a windows 10 years or so ago I could have the taskbar at the top or on the side. In win2000 and XP too.

UI is super slow all the time.

Peoole complain about appimage/flatpal/snap, this is worse on windows where you have random exe installer, winget, chocolatey, scoop and the windows store. Worse even when winget you seem to still have to go through the interactive installer. If I am using the command line, that's because I want a modern package installation and the app ready, not having to click next n times.

It also took my IT 2 weeks to solve an issue where whatever security tool they are using was complaining that my brand new computer was infringing a number of security policies and my access to some resources online would be limited.

And I am forgetting a lot of other frustrations but basically it feels like you are fighting the OS all the time and an insane amount of time is lost doing so. It doesn't help that I am not allowed to install WSL.

And yet, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is perpetually coming/here.

The impression I have is that YotLD windows migration evangelism is honest so long as you don't go off the beaten track, but as soon as you do it gets hairy quick and that's where I find some of the evangelists dishonest by omission. It's fine if you just use a browser, or software as provided by a repository, or your steam games work and you don't need/want to mod/tinker with them. Otherwise you might be dropping someone recently transplanted into unfamiliar territory and they haven't build up a new knowledge base yet.

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