I’ve found Linux easier and a much better user experience than windows 10 or 11.

If you use a straightforward distro that doesn’t let you do stupid stuff (like Bazzite or Fedora Kinoite or any other atomic distro), Linux becomes easy.

The nice thing is that Linux is always improving and Windows is always in retrograde. The more users Linux has, the faster it will improve. If the current state of Linux is acceptable enough for you as a user, then it should be possible to get your foot in the door and ride the wave upwards. If not, wait for the wave to reach your comfort level. People always say <CURRENT_YEAR> is the year of the Linux desktop but IMO the real year of the Linux desktop was like 4 or 5 years ago now, and hopefully that captured momentum will keep going until critical mass is achieved (optimistically, I think we're basically already there).

It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.

Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son’s laptop, because that’s what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs… and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.

It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.

It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.

Linux IS a lot of work to keep up with. But it’s also way better to use after that work is done. And won’t be enshittified against your will with every update, unlike Windows.

I got a new laptop with Windows 11 at work yesterday. This is the first time I’ve used 11. I must say, it’s not really that bad. Once you cut out all the enshittification, which our IT department does, it’s pretty decent. I would never dream of putting it in any of my own machines, of course.

I never understood why windows updates take so long.

I can format and reinstall a linux distro in 10 minutes. I can update everything after that reinstall in 5 minutes.

On the same machine a windows update takes almost an hour. A format and reinstall can take several hours.

What is windows doing that takes so much longer?

Ive been having a good time with PopOS/Linux made for a specific machine. Its my daily driver.

I know its cheating a bit, but having something completely supported is so nice when I just want to sit down and compute. Ive had the same system76 machine for 6 years now and its still VERY fast. No issues with drivers (cause they fully support it) and made of generic parts.

The bloatware alone pushed me off. I am actually making a new build just to not deal with Nvidia anymore also.

I use an easy out of the box linux so its not much work even before comparing to windows. This is why my advice for people talking about dual booting to install linux on their old laptop if they still have it as I find linux on your last machine is faster than windows on your current. It also makes it easier to always have linux available for people used to windows who need to use the linux enough to realize how nice it is nowadays.

I was raised in the xp/windows 7 era. I switched to Arch Linux this year and have never been more satisfied with my computer. If i get stuck, the wiki and other nerds are happy to come to the rescue.

switching away from linux is the experience that most cements our love for linux.

you start to notice all the garbage you had to put up with all along.

Your Windows install breaks because Microsoft fucked it up.
My Linux install breaks because I fucked it up.

We are not the same.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/f226f52c-59a8-452b-85ed-8de1a631f133.webp">

I think windows users would still use windows even if windows broke into their house and raped their grandma. I can already hear their justifications.

Sure is. I have to change my display driver from one version to another, to be able to play different games. Otherwise, some games freeze my system within few seconds of launching the game (also happens during local video full-screen playback). The linux guys will tell me, “oh, it’s just because your distro install was corrupt”, or “definitely a hardware issue”, “PSU failing / GPU failing”, etc. but no, that’s just how linux works. there will always be some system configurations that are bound to have these problems. this is similar to linux users “choosing” not to play the games that don’t work on linux distributions.

I was troubleshooting some audio hardware and decided that I should try it on windows, to make sure it was hardware and not software. So I tried to download an install disc image that I could put on my thumb drive and it was surprisingly hard, then I got driver failures, then I lost count of all the boxes I had to uncheck, then finally after like 2 hours I was greeted by ads on my desktop. Just a really bad experience overall. I cannot fathom why anyone uses that piece of crap.

Anyway so I figured out it was a Linux problem because of course it was just plug-and-play on Windows, and I found my misconfiguration and fixed it in 10 seconds, and I thought about the tech literacy of the average person, and realized that is why people use windows. They don’t care about shit except least resistance. That was the first time I’ve booted windows since 2020 though, so here’s hoping it was the last time.

I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

is it? After I set up my distro, I basically don’t use the cli anymore, I already have .sh files ready for everything I need.

I know it’s not ideal for a common user, but I’ve been using my distro (endeavour OS) for almost 2 years without problems or tiresome routines.

Today on my win11 work system, the windows menu stopped producing output when I typed into it and webpages stopped loading. Had to perform a full system restart to get it to work again.

Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC + StartAllBack, and having none of those problems. 🤷

I build cross platform desktop software professionally.

Because of this I have to use and pretty deeply understand the inner workings of every OS.

I can state as absolute fact that every major operating system including Linux is an absolute pile of hot garbage.

The difference is that macOS and windows are garbage on purpose. There were deliberate decisions to enshitify them for profit. They spent time and money making the OS worse on purpose.

On Linux most of the shitty parts were designed with good intentions but just kinda suck (Wayland for example).

Your complaining about linux in the title and windows in the post

It is a LOT of work indeed! In fact I even commented on that hours ago in lemmy.ml/post/36231170/21124115

… but as you mention the alternative is ALSO a lot of work PLUS frustrations.

So between learned helplessness and tiring empowerment the choice remains obvious.

FWIW whenever it feels like it’s “too much” I reminder myself how I browse through obscure man pages decades ago… to still find them useful today! It’s crazy that so long after learning about tools like more or grep is useful on :

• a desktop
• a console (SteamDeck)
• a mobile phone (which basically didn’t exist back then)
• a VR headset (yes, via termux)
• the “cloud” (as in fine it’s just a server)

depends what you do, tbh. If you try to get a 3D program (that works well in Windows) to work on Linux, or try to get a game running as smooth as it is on Windows, then you are in for a lot of work.

But if your usage involves: simple web browser / email, codes, file operations. Then Linux is just plug and play, even much simpler than Windows. No ads, no constant updates nagging.

Linux just leaves you alone, if you mess some thing up it is you fault. On my Win 11 laptop, I got logged off by the damn OS just for it to display a popup with something bullshit like “Sign in to OneDrive to protect your PC”