The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.
Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user
I’ve used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn’t work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).
Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro’s name )
About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.
They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.
They broke my desktop.
Again.
I’ve been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.
UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn’t usable.
Why??
Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.
You can’t:
Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can’t get that to work on it.
They won’t add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.
So, if the only machine you’ve got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.
( “Haskell Programming From First Principles” requires Stack )
I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux…
can’t remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something … it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby … so…
the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn’t fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND…
Ubuntu wouldn’t fix it, because they insisted it was upstream’s problem, even-though they wouldn’t include a maintained version of Ruby.
Fuck idiocy.
On & on & on.
Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the “religion” of the various Linuxen.
I’m old, & tired of being beaten-on by “friends” and “allies”.
Abusers are abusers.
IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,
THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.
Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they’ve got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.
I’d want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell’s correctness & Julia’s ruthless-efficiency ).
Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?
Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can’t have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps…
This “improvement” forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or … not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.
War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for … fashion & class-status??
The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.
It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn’t going to bother them.
Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated “strategy” consistently solves the wrong problem.
Same as breaking people’s wifi solves the wrong problem.
WTF “loyalty” for a distro can ANYone have,
… once one has been “punched-in-the-face” by them, enough times??
I’ve read OpenBSD’s statement that “lack of a manpage IS A BUG”.
That IS PROPER.
They GET it.
There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:
Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.
Test-1st.
As somebody pointed-out, of all the “agile” methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas … the rest, like Scrum, don’t…
That difference-in-religion, XP’s objectivity MATTERS.
Any “improvement” which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don’t get the “improvement” in.
Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?
I wouldn’t permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.
I wouldn’t permit breaking of people’s network-access to be an official update’s component.
MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.
That needs to be SOME distro’s spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done…
I want low-vision people being able to use it.
I want blind-readers working in it.
I want deaf people having full function through it.
I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.
I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi’s stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it’s wonderful ).
Anyways, you’re seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.
I won’t willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but … they’re “too big” to make accountable?? etc. )
But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.
Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one’s distro.
DON’T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.
KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays … wtf??
Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??
That isn’t a “feature”, that is “fashionable” mental-illness.
And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.
/grouch
just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who’s tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.
_ /\ _
I thought Debian addresses most of your complaints. And LMDE is a good option for people that want a different flavor of it.
I’m using regular Mint, but plan of switching to LMDE in the future, when it’s no longer an experimental option. Their Cinnamon desktop is very polished, accessible and sensible. I was surprised I didn’t need to configure and hardware - wifi, Webcam, Bluetooth keyboard, mouse and headset… It was all detected and configured properly. I chose Btrfs and the installer set up a subvolume for /home and sensible backup policies.
A lot of recent controversial decisions in Linux desktop environment space made sense if you see who’s the driving force behind them, which is the big corps who want to make Linux works better for their use case, but not necessarily YOUR use case.
Gave up because of hardware issues. Laptops had fan problems with it on, the grub wouldn’t install right, a lot of the good distros would show up as black before or after installation. My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot. Most of these computers should work very well with Linux but they never did for me. Back then it was a matter of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot.
My favorite part about the internet is when someone else somehow has the exact same completely obscure issue that I’ve had
Performance and reliability when gaming is my only reason for keeping Windows installed.
Steam and everything else have already exceeded my wildest expectations in Linux, however I am somebody who wants to come home from work, fire up a game and have it work perfectly with the best settings and framerates I can manage. I don’t have the time nor patience to troubleshoot why some update just broke the game in some way after I’ve spent the last 10 hours dealing with other people’s problems.
Yeah I’m still on Windows for the same reason. I seem to be a Linux gaming bug magnet, but I just keep having issues on basically any Linux PC that I try to game on. It’s getting better, but still not reliable enough for me. I have a Steam Deck now, which is super cool. But even there I had my fair share of bugs. I tried installing some software in desktop mode which instantly crashed the store (this was on first boot after a fresh install and update). I’ve also had my fair share of full Deck crashes during games already, especially after updates. Overall it’s very cool that it all works, but I don’t want to end up in a situation where I have to debug a game for 30 minutes (or more) instead of just playing the game. And that happens just a bit too often to me.
Man I relate to this so hard.
I’ve been using Linux on my laptop for years; I use i3wm that makes using it way easier than anything Windows can provide; but on my desktop pc I have too many stuff installed that I can’t be bothered to migrate all to Linux.
The best way I’ve seen it put is as such “why would I bother with a list of workarounds and janky, barely supported tools, just to get on par with out of the box windows”. Because like it or not, windows is a piss easy OS to get running on, and Microsoft puts a huge amount of work into making compatability a non-issue. If it was made for windows, it probably still works so long as your hardware hasn’t broken it, regardless of how old. Linux just can’t match the sheer amount of stuff that works on windows. And Linux subsystem means you don’t even need a dedicated Linux boot for things.
So all in all, Linux just doesn’t stack up that well as a daily driver. Sure, I have various systems that run it, and they work great, but that’s because I don’t ever use them beyond narrow purposes.
Honestly, my experience was the opposite. When I had issues with windows, which I had a lot. Reinstalling was often the last and only solution. On Linux, when I had an issue, it was a little learning experience and running 1 command. I guess reinstalling is easier… So maybe not the opposite.
I’ve never personally run into an issue that required a reinstall that wasn’t related to drive corruption. Basically everything has been just a quick restart and the problem vanishes
I’ve not had to redo windows since 10. 7 was the last time I had an issue that caused a redo which in turn made me go to Linux for a year or two before I had to go back to windows for Visual Studio for work. Been on windows since from 10-11 and I’ve never needed a redo anymore.
Interesting… I think I quit windows shortly after skipping 8 to go 10. So I might haven’t given windows 10 a fair chance
On my gaming PC: I had a lot of random boots to black screen. (Vega 56 GPU)
USB ports did not function at all with USB drives.
TF2 had terrible performance compared to windows.
There was no way to configure my sound card settings.
I still run Ubuntu + kodi on my HTPC, have done for about 10 years. Updating versions of either can often lead to time spent in the terminal. Usually nvidia gpu related. So far the issues have been overcome.
I have incompatible hardware.
I really only want Linux for software dev work(docker mostly). Windows has wsl which has worked beautifully for me besides memory leaks a couple times a year. The issues I face with wal pale in comparison to my experience dealing with Nvidia drivers and gaming on Linux.
Yeah same. I got enough Linux for when I need it, and overall sitting on Windows is just… easier. Gaming compatibility, app compatibility, less fiddling with the system. Plus I can more readily help friends and family because my OS looks the same as what they have.
I was on Linux before, but the lack of hardware compatibility at the time (this was nearly 20 years ago) turned me off back then. I tried again on my gaming PC about 2 years ago, and quickly realized gaming on Linux is far better than it used to be. It’s still pretty dire. But I kinda knew that in advance and this was more to dabble with it briefly and see how much actually works.
besides memory leaks
Have you tried auto memory reclaim yet?
I’ll give this a try, thanks!
I am dual booting because I bought a nice OLED monitor with HDR and Linux doesn’t support it yet. For certain games with nicer graphics, HDR is really beautiful.
The moment Linux support HDR, I nuke windows for good.
KDE Plasma 6 supports HDR now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/12/hdr-support-for-kde-plasma-6-seems-to-be-shaping-up-nicely/
I am aware that this is coming, but it’s still not fully completed. But I’m about to ditch windows any cause I just plain prefer linux
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Last time I tried diving headfirst into Linux, I got frustrated by having a problem and all the suggested solutions are all wildly different (from an outside perspective) series of editing settings or unusual terminal commands. I already knew how Windows worked well enough to do most things I wanted, but didn’t have almost any understanding of how Linux operated so all of the opaque solutions offered without explanation of why or how it should fix the problem just added to my confusion. Couple that with having to sort through one or two dozen suggestions to find one that actually works, not knowing if even attempting any solutions would cause other issues later.
If you ever want to try again I’d suggest pulling up chatgpt to ask questions. It’s not failsafe, but it helped me a ton and I come from a predominantly windows background. (Edited to add: I ended up sticking with Pop_OS! And I LOVE it. I game a ton and have very little issues with proton on steam)
Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.
These often require workarounds via the terminal – if we’re lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it’s terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that’s why I’m typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won’t ever quite decouple from Linux.
But it’s important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That’s the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can’t do. It’s what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn’t have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they’ve moved to servers too anyway.
Honestly I spend more time fighting weird bugs, performance issues and crashes with xcode than I do with any IDE under arch, including when I mained hyprland for like 6 months. And in this case, there usually was a way to actually fix or work around the issue.
