The problem with using or advocating Linux

I've had (and discussed) issues like this all the time. Generally, things work. But every time I try using Linux as a desktop OS, there's some things that push me back to Windows, because it's just so much more cohesive (and that's not saying much).

Yes, these problems exist on every platform. But with Windows, there's a vested interest by the company to make sure everyone can use it and things don't break. If things to break, there's a vested interest in making sure it's both easy and most importantly possible for an end-user or even a low level field support technician to fix it.

I've never had Windows fail to load the window manager. On Linux it's all too often that an update will make my first input to a newly booted system be "startx", or sometimes even dpkg --reconfigure xorg. It's not a fundamental issue with Linux, which make it more irritating. It's possible to make it work better than Windows, but there's so much fracturing and in-fighting about what the fix is that it just hasn't happened yet. A million eyes on the code might in theory make sure bugs go away, but it seems that the better route so far is a million dollars and one person overseeing development. Look at the huge leap in desktop Linux that Ubuntu gave us, and also look at how much flak they got for doing so.

These are exactly the reasons why I run Windows on my home machine (Linux at work though, I do need to get stuff done).

That said, I was out to lunch this weekend with a friend, and she was frustrated because her new (Windows 8) laptop wouldn't play DVDs - I know it's because Microsoft doesn't ship the codecs anymore, and that I could fix it in 10 minutes by installing VLC, but she's not tech-literate enough to do that, so maybe Windows isn't entirely so far ahead.

So I'm typing this on a name brand Windows Machine, certainly "over the hill" in both hardware and software.

Its sound worked when it was new, then stopped working. Booting Linux (Suse of a certain older vintage), and sound just works. I'm sure I could spend more time futzing about about with it and it would work, but I've given up after about a day.

Pleas, please, please I am begging the Windows community as a whole and the HP community in particular; get your act together. Really, this is embarrassing.

I use (and enjoy) Mint, but have to agree wholeheartedly with this post. In some ways, it's close to something which I could recommend to non-technical friends and family. But not yet. I hope that future releases will focus more on things like working seamlessly with the hardware, and less on enhancements to the window manager.

Apple and Microsoft (software vendors) have large teams to make sure things are compatible with certain hardware. Apple, HP, Sony, etc (hardware vendors) have teams to make sure things are compatible with OSX and Windows. You can't expect to slap a random distro on a random computer and expect 100% of everything to work without some tweaking. If you want to use a Linux and have everything work without tweaks, buy from a manufacturer that does for Linux what a HP would do for Windows, make sure it all works before it goes out the door. Try System 76 or one of the others.

I used Ubuntu (then briefly Mint and Debian) for years.

Being tired of issues like this is why I moved to OSX.

I dual-booted Ubuntu for a time, but there was always some niggling issue that prevented me from ever fully switching over. I come back and give it another shot every few years and it's always the same situation.

I am also a Mint user, and I have run into this (and similar) bugs.