Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
At this point, Linux or even any given distro isn’t the problem. The problem is the software library.
I call it GIMP syndrome. There’s a lot of capable and powerful apps in the FOSS ecosystem and most of them have some kind of critical functionality gap or the UX of an Oregon Trail era disease. A lot of them, with the notable exception of GIMP, are actually working on it now.
IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.
We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.
For me it’s I can make Linux do this when I see another system perform well, in contrast with they took my vertical taskbar in windows 11 and I have to gut the system to get it back
I do have to remind myself that I’m still used to living in a world where Linux enjoyed immunity to most “consumer” malware just because it wasn’t a popular desktop. Ultimately Linux is not more secure than any other system unless someone put in the work to make it that way.
Unix is definitely a less headache than Windows at this point.
Recent Linux convert here. Had some small background with it due to use at work (through WSL, unfortunately 😅). When Windows became too overbearing and intrusive for my own taste, decided to take a plunge and created a dual-boot setup with Bazzite (of course on my private machine). It was honestly refreshing to see stuff run with the same (or sometimes even better) performance.
This short anecdote now leads me to the conclusion; is it as good as we think it is?
Imo: hell fuckin’ yeah. It gets the job done and respects me as an end-user (with the trade-off of “some manual work might be required”).
Also, as a side-note: I live in the EU; I grew tired with an overbearing, salesman/rapist-like mentality of MS (and Windows, by extension) while reaping benefits of some modicum of privacy regulations. I cannot even begin to fathom how fucked the situation is where ppl don’t have these protections to rely on.
