Maybe if the ”Linux-curious” would stop using distros like Omarchy and other riced up Arch derivatives and instead try something like vanilla Debian or Fedora, they could spend more time using Linux and less time whining about how unstable ”Linux” is because you don’t understand what a rolling distro is.
Using Fedora for years, but not on workstation. Because of Adobe, the only reson that I stick with Windows LTSC IoT.
And no, Gimp is not alternative. Neither Affinity, bucause lack of linux support. Or Capture One. Only DaVinci resolve is competition to Premiere because of linux support.
The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me. For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence. This was with the install on a fast SSD. I tried a whole bunch of things and never figured out what the issue was. Then, one day, it just....went away.
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
>The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
> > The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
> That's not what the author said.
It is exactly what the author said. TFA makes a point that Windows' issues are well known and predictable. And the author would rather endure the daily nuisances infliced by Windows than fix the sporadic breakages that Linux might throw.
I have a computer science degree yet continue to use Windows. Is it because I have 30 years of experiece knowing what to ignore?j I do also use WSL for the command-line.
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
I switched to Linux again because on this PC Windows suddenly just doesn't run stable anymore. Even a complete reinstall didn't fix it, I assume it is some driver issue or something like that.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
Yeah, like key bindings in IntelliJ that might make sense on Windows or Macintosh, but conflict with Linux defaults. I switched to Linux couple of decades ago, but this second class treatment of Linux desktop is one of the reasons I'm still doing most of my work in the terminal.
I'm glad it wasn't just me... the nice thing about those mysterious issues on Linux is usually you can actually fix the issue. With Windows I needed a hacky solution just to move the stupid taskbar, or wait for Microsoft to fix it.
Even if Windows didn't have those weird things, there are a bunch of intended behavior things that make Windows a more frustrating experience than the occasional weird things a Linux system may do.
Haven’t used Windows in a while, but I remember hating the seemingly completely random “restarting in 5 minutes for a system update.” Usually at the least-opportune time
Seriously! On my windows desktop, I have to let the computer sit a minute after booting before i touch the keyboard otherwise it completely wigs out and becomes partially unresponsive due to some weird issue with the AMD chipset drivers. I can see my mouse move, i can move windows around, but nothing responds to clicks and i can't open anything.
Two thoughts (I was in the same situation, constantly trying desktop Linux then pinging back to Windows after hitting issues).
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
Similar to this, but NixOS. Having AI to help me through made this so much easier. I was sold on the idea of an 'IaC' config based machine, after a general push to move all of my processes towards full GitOps. Windows had been pretty good to me (running 4 years on the same laptop install), but it had started overheating with fans sounding like a vacuum cleaner and it was time to start over. The difference with NixOS is that sure there are issues and preferences to work through, but when I fix them, they get committed in config, and thats an investment in time rather than something that will be right until next time I have to do it. I was able to reproduce, and rebuild on a separate machine with minimal hassle (it's good to go through this process to be sure you've got it right) and that really was amazing to see. SSH keys, SMB share, monitor configurations, themes, apps, utilities - a fully set up dev machine, everything is just there. I've been planning changes on a Copilot integrated taskboard I built (https://www.agentkanban.io) and then handing them off to the agent, reviewing the changes in the VS Code git client and then apply, commit. Being able to see the number of commits makes me realise how much I was doing manually, every time I set up a new machine.
In my first years with NixOS, I really wanted to share my enthusiasm and joy with others. But I often got caught up explaining the mechanisms, the insights that it's built on. It took me a while to come around to realizing the heart of it: NixOS feels really good to use because it frees you from the uncertainty of a machine that suddenly changes underneath your feet. It gives you a system that is really easy to inspect and modify. It gives you the ability to move forward without fear. It's really liberating and relaxing in a certain way.
Historically, a sense of intimidation and the difficulty of onboarding blocked a lot of people from accessing these benefits. It's been cool to see how LLM agents have helped a lot of people get started and tap into the fun parts.
Using Linux is a learning experience. You will inevitably face and solve numerous problems over time, but every time you do, you come out of it understanding what's going on under the hood a little more.
Still, it can be dreadful to face even small issues when you only feel like using your computer and not fixing it. Having an LLM agent help with fixing issues is a lifesaver. Ask it what you don't understand, take note of the commands it uses or suggests while troubleshooting and fixing your issue, and you'll supercharge your learning and not get as hung up on the issues.
If someone doesn't care much to learn though, I'd say Linux is still tough to recommend.
> I subconsciously tell myself 'If I just used Linux, I could be like them!'.
Your intuition was right.
Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.
You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.
Linux friction is “unpredictable” but windows friction isn’t, because you have a lot of windows experience and not much in Linux. I don’t think you’d feel the same after a few months of Linux.
Only a little over 20 years of Linux experience here. A few years ago, I daily drove Windows for work after not touching it for a decade. There were way more unsolvable riddles in that year on Windows than in my lifetime of desktop Linux usage. And no one else at the company really knew how to dig into their Windows systems, either; the mysteries I solved were all things I had to solve myself.
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
Full time linux user for 8 years now. The knowledge base of discussion around Linux issues is vast and usually has the answers you need. Albeit with the variety of distros and their differences you must be mote scrutable in identifying what is applicable to your situation. Stick with mainstream like Ubuntu and you will have tons of community support and knowledge to search through.
Contrary anecdote: I've installed and used Linux, mainly Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) on a dozen or so computers in the last ten years, including several older MacBooks, a Surface Go for my son and an HP I special ordered without Windows. I come from a Mac background and use the terminal, but I've never need to do so to get them to work. Sure I've tweaked them, but only cosmetic things like locales and default fonts. For install and use I haven't done anything special. Old MacBooks need wi-fi drivers, which usually Ubuntu will find. Besides that everything has honestly just worked for me.
windows absolutely has unpredictable issues that are easily solved by just using linux. i spent months trying to figure out why windows would randomly wake from sleep in the middle of the night turn my monitor on and wake me up. no amount of tweaking settings or reading logs ever fixed it. it was simpler to just use a linux distro or shut windows down
Hate to be the one to drag AI into every conversation, but I recently switched to arch linux and it's been delightful -- largely because of Claude. I have leaned on Claude heavily to diagnose and resolve issues that I probably could have theoretically solved on my own, but which also probably would have made me switch back if I didn't have help to resolve them quickly.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
I'll keep knocking on wood, but as a Thinkpad user who has used fedora as a daily driver since Fedora 19, I've rarely had any issues with Linux. Battery lasts way longer than the Thinkpad I use for work (windows machine), and mine is older. I don't game though, so there's nothing that I've wanted on windows.
I have some issues with docking and audio with Arch. Maybe I am asking too much to have a docking station work perhaps. I still don't feel the need to go back to Windows however.
Why do people even use docking stations anymore? I've never used one but I have used plenty of KVM-type devices that just work over various standard usb/display ports. What's the appeal of using the specialized "docking" port?
This is a ThinkPad USB-C docking station. I think it is basically the same as what you are talking about but if not, the main convenience is that you can plug in one cable which provides power, 2 external displays and a mouse. Super great if / when it works but not reliable with Arch (not blaming the distro specifically, it could be kernel or anything in the stack).
The article is really poor in details about what exactly is OPs workflow in windows and Linux, so we are only left to wonder. But it seems to me that the unpredictably of Linux and therefore the predictability of windows is in part because friction in windows is known to him while Linux is not, and also in part because maybe by accident the way he uses windows play nicely with it. Maybe if the user didn't distro hop so often he would have been more familiar with the architecture of the system and these issues like fedora update system breaking down (surprising because bazzite is based on fedora and it's been rock solid for a while, can't help but think OP is doing something really wrong there, but APT in Ubuntu for instance does tend to break for no reason, so I'll throw him a bone). It's like giving up often on something and blaming the thing for its unfamiliarity.
Does windows bloat bother you? It bothers me. Ever tried doing a windows install from something like tiny10 and then use the system? Nothing works quite right.
I empathize with the frustrations with Linux, and I certainly used to have them. But about 5 years ago I just... stopped having any issues at all. I switched to Debian around then, which may or may not fully explain the improvement. Point is, I've barely thought about or actively maintained or troubleshooted my operating system for several years now.
Absolutely agree with the OP! My first Linux installation was in 1993 when I hauled dozens of floppies from my Uni back home (X-Windows was like 15 floppies?). Even remember emailing to Linus about some issue and he responded. Ever since I _wanted_ to be using Linux but was always put off for all the reasons described in that post. I wanted a nice OS so I can do my school/work/hobbies but not constantly having to work on that OS, figure out dozens of config files, brick the system etc.
At this point WSL2 is more than filling this void. I even stopped using VMWare since WSL is that good.
I can't say I like Windows in any way, except perhaps nostalia for NT 3.51 or XP. I can however relate to 'modern Linux' experiences. I've tried using some new-fangled ones and instead of being delighted by the new hotness, just want my old Xubuntu the way I remember (but with good wifi, sound, sleep, hidpi, multimonitor support). My latest disappointment was KDE Plasma/Wayland--very modern in ways I don't appreciate. There was something simple I couldn't adjust (forget which) and tonnes of settings for things I don't care about at all.
The OS/Desktop is not the show, it's the stage/floor.
Yeah same but I'm out of options. I don't like Linux on the desktop but I like Windows' privacy stance and use-hostile behaviour less. My Mac isn't much better. What I really hate is being forced into this corner.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
What a quite absurd conclusion. If you want to use your camera then just use it and stop looking for excuses. I find people who moan about the OS UI are just nitpicking. Nothing is perfect and it's there to provide utility for the task at hand. Pick one and get on with life.
I gotta say, Fedora plus KDE - have not had any major issue, and certainly none as bad as desktop utility performance degradation on Windows 11. Probably a little more fragile feeling than Windows 10, but it honestly has felt basically same, which I wasn't expecting.
I'm learning that while Windows has a bad rap in some tech circles, its surprisingly still pretty well regarded. This past school year my daughter and niece both moved from Windows to Macs. A couple of weekends ago I asked them both how they liked it -- they seemed to transition well to the Mac. They both said the same thing -- Windows was better at basically everything except the Message app and iPhone mirroring, but those two things made the Mac totally worth it since, as they put it, phone beats laptop.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
I think Windows (and some, but not all, Linux window managers/DEs) are really kings of "general productivity" type work that macOS is really unintuitive about.
I daily drive a MBP now, and have since the M1 air released, but even this many years later I still think the more windows-y desktop metaphor is superior for any type of work that requires heavy multi-tasking (which I do as a sysadmin type role).
Apple tends to assume you are working inside one app at a time, on one workspace at a time. This is evident from the get go with how the OS treats apps & windows/documents as separate, and how Cmd+Tab only switches between apps, not app windows.
Without third party tools, it's a terrible OS for actually managing multiple windows and contexts and that throws people off because nearly everything else outside of mobile doesn't use that paradigm. Context switching is expensive on macOS, by design, but most general user's and office workers work involves heavy context switching, and frequently.
Of course people are going to generally prefer the thing they’ve already been using and are comfortable with, especially if they are forced to use something else entirely.
On the flip side, I run a Windows gaming laptop alongside my Mac. It is a constant source of rage to the point that I am genuinely shocked at how bad things are and regularly suspect that the people who choose to use it are the victims of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
I tried debian and found Ubuntu to be more stable, i.e., bugs are less annoying. Throughout the years I've been stuck with bug that would irritate but the linux experience is still miles ahead compared to windows. Not using terminal is a PITA that I just keep windows for whatever I really cannot run in Linux (the list is getting shorter).
With LLMs I've been able to tackle bugs to a level that either fix or lower down the annoyance level. It's still not perfect, but the tradeoff is in linux favor IMO.
This brings back all this nostalgia. I used to be all linux everywhere I could. The CD linux loaders on random machines work would make me use with work. Linux distros you'd get in a book from Borders. :) Loved it all. But then I had to edit video and images in a 24 hour film festival. And the pain. It just couldn't work constitently. Had to find someone with a mac to get it done. I know these days are so different with better image and video editors and many years of improvements. But still kind of shy from adopting linux again as a daily driver. Too stuck on Apple and OSX now
I kinda switched to Linux when I realized that Microsoft had fractured the control panel into different areas in "Settings" and there was almost no pattern in how to get to the various system settings and diagnostic tools that had become ingrained in muscle memory for me over the course of 15-odd years.
I decided I'd rather start from scratch on Linux than Windows for reasons of Microsoft's various decisions and direction. Windows essentially pushed me away by saying my prior experience was no longer useful.
It's a decision I'm frequently reminded of how good it was.
That is true regarding prior experience. It feels better learning such well known canonical tools that have (and very likely will continue to) stand the test of time.
"¿Por qué no los dos?" A lot of the issues that he has seems to be running on hardware that Linux doesn't currently support well. Used 1 liter PCs that are old enough to have solid support under Linux but still fast enough to do serious work are $200-400 and can be accessed remotely from Windows by VNC or RDP.
To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
> I don't want to use this thing, it sucks. Also, I don't want to change it one bit.
People really dislike change, it's the same thing about some freak thing that happens like twice that you heard of, like shark attacks, but still drive their ton and half vehicles for thousands of hours a year. People accepted those issues as part of the thing, they blame Linux in general when an application doesn't work, but never blame Windows in general when the OS doesn't work.
I really want to use linux but for me its the software. Games I play use anticheat that doesn't work. Software I use for 3d printing doesn't work without hours of workarounds. VR is poorly supported if at all. Usually every year I'll try linux, use it for a month or so, then be forced back to windows after running into a hard block, with the dozen ads forced down my throat welcoming me back. Hopefully one day I can commit to it.
You can just use Windows and run your required Linux distro inside WSL2. That's exactly my setup—I'm a heavy user of both, as I need both systems daily.
In my experience, I've seen this get messy having to have some apps on the windows filesystem and reading and writing back and forth to the WSL layer for various files. It works, it's just a degraded experience compared to what I have seen going all in on either side.
You get the hardware/driver support of Windows, things like GPU/drive/network/window sharing in the out of the box config, and there are very few graphical apps for Linux which
don't run graphically in Windows in the first place (but the reverse is not as true).
I loved it for my work laptop but then Apple Silicon MacBooks came along and forced a main OS due to the hardware (though nowadays Asahi is pretty good on the older ones). I suppose on a home use case you get big multiplayer game DRM support as well (different people will consider that a plus or minus).
WINE via Crossover Linux has become very good. Also webapp versions of Office apps are mostly there and respectable if used in mixed environments.
WSL is okay but you are better going full Linux as host. Linux Mint is a good platform for most. Stable, keeping modern kernels updated, but not crazy bleeding-edge wastes of time.
You don't have to quit Windows but you can quit being hostage to Windows.
Libreoffice is also pretty good these days if you need to edit office files, impress has the most compat issues but they are rare even there. In many ways it is more capable than office ime.
> Windows friction is predictable. [...] These things are annoying, but they're known. I can dismiss them, turn them off, and move on. Barely 10 seconds is lost.
> Linux friction is unpredictable. [..] The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
The good news is this is largely a matter of experience: if you can push through and get used to doing root cause analysis on Linux, you'll find that desktop Linux issues tend to become transparent and easy to fix. If you stick to distros that support rollbacks, you also win back the option to defer anything that feels likely to be a time sink until either you have time/patience/interest, or someone else has fixed the issue and sent their fix upstream.
The bad news is that it's an experience issue: if you want to get to the other side of it, you have to invest in building the skill. The age old tongue-in-cheek advice is actually still good: install Gentoo. (Install Arch if you want a diet version of the experience.) The desktop Linux userland is indeed Lego, and if you go through the process of piecing it together instead of grabbing a preassembled kit, even just once, you will build a new troubleshooting muscle that serves you well for a long time. Can you find the energy for that? Can you make the time? Probably, but it won't be effortless. Maybe you'll even need to dual-boot, or have two computers for a while.
But I promise it's an issue of familiarity, intuition, and skill. You absolutely can cultivate those things.
My experience too: "Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make)."
I'm not a windows user anymore, haven't been for a decade or so, but it wasn't until a couple months that I finished the switch when I moved from windows to bazzite in my gaming rig.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
It is largely what one is used to but for me windows was always this unknowable black box, sure, you could get good at it but there was always so much, no source, many interlinked subsystems. when things work it is not so bad. when they don't... Linux was a lot better, especially if you use a more minimal distro, But even it is this huge confusing mess. What really clicked for me was when I tried openbsd, it was the first time I felt like I had a system I really understood. I started with a router, now I am one of those wierdos who use it on the desktop. I would not actually recommend it to anyone, like I said it is largely what you are used to. but for me linux always felt more knowable than windows.
>asking me to decide whether to increase the limit
I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.
I think the battle linux vs windows showcases how, in the long run, free software tends to win. In 50+ years, windows will be a footnote in the history of technology, in 100+ years, linux will still be going strong as a multi-generational human endeavor started by a young nerd in the early 90's.
It's not really applicable nowadays as you can just ask any agent to solve most linux issues for you, it's literally 1 prompt away and you can snapshot your FS to be safe prior and lock it down to avoid agent mistake.
Everything got better except for icon themes and the introduction of avahi, pulseaudio and systemd. Icon themes peaked with KDE3 where they had subtle animations and the Tango project which had very recognizable colorful icons.
I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.
I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.
There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.
The distro-hopping and vanilla installs are the problem imo -- with Linux it is possible to strip your system down to the basic functionality so that you can actually understand everything what's going on and not be surprised. What is so refreshing is to realize that you don't need to pull in some baroque package you don't understand because the part of it you want is just 3 lines of bash and one line in a config file or whatever. But to get there you have to learn how to use the tools.
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
The article is a bit hand-wavey. I won't deny their issue, they had it, but of course people here will have their opinion about the tradeoffs. For me CachyOS working near flawlessly on multiple machines. It's truly free with no forced ads or telemetry or product integrations.
If Windows works for a person or they need it for certain software that's fine. For me, I'm living a Linux-default life for the first time and it's nice.
In Windows, problems are felt universally... everyone and their mother is having the same problem and googling surfaces it easily.
It's the fragmentation in linux that will always make it tough for "normies". Distro differences is obvious first thing, but the two big ones are desktop environments (gnome/kde/etc) and app package formats (flatpak/snap). These add friction and more problems (I heard you like packaging: here's another package format and big ass repository for you. And portals? really?).
I just keep to a simple desktop in fedora using rpm/dnf and build from source if I have to. Yes, I know that's not an answer for normies, but there's not going be simple answers.
I had a similar experience some years ago. On-off with Linux/macOS, but it was clear that I only had to take the pain long enough to overcome the urge to switch back to my good old macOS.
And what can I say: It worked. There are still aspects I'm missing (Preview app, Mail) and other Aspects I really hate (Printing on my Canon MB5150 just does not work) but I stayed. I found workarounds and solutions, fought my way through the distro-jungle and I'm glad I made it.
All in all I think it is more a know-how Problem, than a Problem with the system itself.
However, if you don't have this time, it's understandable but how much time goes into experimenting every year and then switching back?
This was my experience with linux the first times I used it years ago when I lived in a different state, but I tried it last year and it's night and day.
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
I've never experienced what the writer has, and it would be interesting to know more about their system setup to diagnose the alleged network slowness. Package manager is a network app, so it sounds to me like there is something strange going on system-wide. Perhaps the writer has a new-enough network card from a vendor that doesn't have driver support?
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
I've actually experienced this, but I don't know if it's related.
In my case, installing linux on a laptop and while everything was fine, there was an unexplained network delay. What ultimately fixed it (and I really don't know why) is I had to fix the time on my system clock to the right date/time and then got ntp setup and working correctly. My system clock was far in the past. I THINK (but don't know) that the root cause was in certificate validation. Perhaps hiccups because the certs were issued in the future?
> I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore.
Until Microslop OS decided on its own that you haven't had a reboot in a while and since we're at it some of the drivers you desperately need suddenly are not kosher anymore.
When stuff breaks I prefer something I'm actually allowed to repair. That's just me.
I switched to bazzite-dx for my personal computer ~6 months ago.
i7-13700K / 5070 Ti / 32GB DDR4 / 5120x1440 240Hz HDR
It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.
It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).
Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.
The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."
Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.
Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.
As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.
Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.
> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.
100% agree. The two examples are garden-variety computer problems and not articulated with any degree of precision for someone who claims to have attempted to troubleshoot them. It's either AI-generated or the author has only elementary Linux know-how (which is cool, but we don't need to take their wholesale dismissal of an entire ecosystem quite as seriously).
this resonates with my experience. once every 3 years I try linux as primary OS for my home PC, I do small stuff with C/python, browse web and play factorio. I use linux in VM on my job daily, so I am not a beginner, but gosh, linux sucks. Everything breaks constantly even when doing NOTHING. Nothing ever works installing first try, you always end up googling stupid error message and stumble upon 250 other idiots that try to solve same issue. after trying 5 solutions, one (or combo) will hopefully work.
Then, you can hang-up entire system by a stupid python script or your own buggy program and I miss unkillable always working task manager that can recover almost every hanger (and just stfu about reisub) without needing to restart the whole system and killing my FKIN FLOW! ugh. I just use WSL2 for rare cases where I need my unix build tools and forever abandoned the idea of switching to linux. Life is too short wasting it on googling some nonsense shit that just have to fucking work.
And no, Gimp is not alternative. Neither Affinity, bucause lack of linux support. Or Capture One. Only DaVinci resolve is competition to Premiere because of linux support.
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
> That's not what the author said.
It is exactly what the author said. TFA makes a point that Windows' issues are well known and predictable. And the author would rather endure the daily nuisances infliced by Windows than fix the sporadic breakages that Linux might throw.
Apart from the ones that are completely 100% usage-blocking.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
[1] For example, there is some ridiculous problem with wayland and notifications on GNOME at least, see this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/work_items/358?... which has to be disabled with an extension unless you want to go insane
Historically, a sense of intimidation and the difficulty of onboarding blocked a lot of people from accessing these benefits. It's been cool to see how LLM agents have helped a lot of people get started and tap into the fun parts.
Still, it can be dreadful to face even small issues when you only feel like using your computer and not fixing it. Having an LLM agent help with fixing issues is a lifesaver. Ask it what you don't understand, take note of the commands it uses or suggests while troubleshooting and fixing your issue, and you'll supercharge your learning and not get as hung up on the issues.
If someone doesn't care much to learn though, I'd say Linux is still tough to recommend.
Do you think that Windows *isn't* a learning experience?
Your intuition was right.
Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.
You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.
IME Windows people actually do root cause analysis on the behavior of their systems somewhere between rarely and never. There's a high background level of mystery and superstition on Windows that even highly technical computing professionals on Windows are habituated to. In contrast, that's something that just a few years of daily Linux usage made not only unnecessary for me, but unacceptable to me.
Every time I return to Windows I'm a little bit optimistic... and then it becomes clear to me that I've forgotten how bad it can actually be.
This shit still happens today.
Twice in 1 year I've had my bootloader entry just disappear after a reboot. No idea what happened. Wasn't tied to any particular update either.
If I were non-technical, it would ruin my week.
(Yes, I know arch linux is not what you want if you're a "I just want something that works" person switching from windows. That's not me, I'm more of a "I want all the control and responsibility guy". I just don't have four hours to spend figuring out how to get hardware video acceleration working in vlc by trial and error the first time I try to play a video. Twenty minutes though? OK. I'll even learn something in the process.)
Does windows bloat bother you? It bothers me. Ever tried doing a windows install from something like tiny10 and then use the system? Nothing works quite right.
The rest of my argument as to why windows is less predictable than Linux is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150812
At this point WSL2 is more than filling this void. I even stopped using VMWare since WSL is that good.
The OS/Desktop is not the show, it's the stage/floor.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
The massively wide variety of desktop options makes your opinion difficult to assess. Which have you tried?
Been trying for 30 years.
Missing : good old debian :)
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
I daily drive a MBP now, and have since the M1 air released, but even this many years later I still think the more windows-y desktop metaphor is superior for any type of work that requires heavy multi-tasking (which I do as a sysadmin type role).
Apple tends to assume you are working inside one app at a time, on one workspace at a time. This is evident from the get go with how the OS treats apps & windows/documents as separate, and how Cmd+Tab only switches between apps, not app windows.
Without third party tools, it's a terrible OS for actually managing multiple windows and contexts and that throws people off because nearly everything else outside of mobile doesn't use that paradigm. Context switching is expensive on macOS, by design, but most general user's and office workers work involves heavy context switching, and frequently.
On the flip side, I run a Windows gaming laptop alongside my Mac. It is a constant source of rage to the point that I am genuinely shocked at how bad things are and regularly suspect that the people who choose to use it are the victims of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
With LLMs I've been able to tackle bugs to a level that either fix or lower down the annoyance level. It's still not perfect, but the tradeoff is in linux favor IMO.
I decided I'd rather start from scratch on Linux than Windows for reasons of Microsoft's various decisions and direction. Windows essentially pushed me away by saying my prior experience was no longer useful.
It's a decision I'm frequently reminded of how good it was.
To forestall the inevitable, yes, that's extra cost. Well, the person says the want to use Linux more. Do they want it badly enough to put money behind it?
People really dislike change, it's the same thing about some freak thing that happens like twice that you heard of, like shark attacks, but still drive their ton and half vehicles for thousands of hours a year. People accepted those issues as part of the thing, they blame Linux in general when an application doesn't work, but never blame Windows in general when the OS doesn't work.
I loved it for my work laptop but then Apple Silicon MacBooks came along and forced a main OS due to the hardware (though nowadays Asahi is pretty good on the older ones). I suppose on a home use case you get big multiplayer game DRM support as well (different people will consider that a plus or minus).
WSL is okay but you are better going full Linux as host. Linux Mint is a good platform for most. Stable, keeping modern kernels updated, but not crazy bleeding-edge wastes of time.
You don't have to quit Windows but you can quit being hostage to Windows.
> Linux friction is unpredictable. [..] The friction isn't necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
The good news is this is largely a matter of experience: if you can push through and get used to doing root cause analysis on Linux, you'll find that desktop Linux issues tend to become transparent and easy to fix. If you stick to distros that support rollbacks, you also win back the option to defer anything that feels likely to be a time sink until either you have time/patience/interest, or someone else has fixed the issue and sent their fix upstream.
The bad news is that it's an experience issue: if you want to get to the other side of it, you have to invest in building the skill. The age old tongue-in-cheek advice is actually still good: install Gentoo. (Install Arch if you want a diet version of the experience.) The desktop Linux userland is indeed Lego, and if you go through the process of piecing it together instead of grabbing a preassembled kit, even just once, you will build a new troubleshooting muscle that serves you well for a long time. Can you find the energy for that? Can you make the time? Probably, but it won't be effortless. Maybe you'll even need to dual-boot, or have two computers for a while.
But I promise it's an issue of familiarity, intuition, and skill. You absolutely can cultivate those things.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
I think once every 2-5 years I get a new Linux computer, hit the inotify.max_user_watches thing, do a search, run a command once, and then never think about that particular problem on that machine again.
As many complaints as I have about Apple and MacOS and iOS, their products hit a niche and commoditized it.
Everything else can be re-created yourself on Linux except for that.
linux can be a massive time sink at times unfortunately
I'm honestly surprised why it's taking the rest such a long time.
I still run my boxen with X.org (an upgrade from XFree86) and ALSA. The latter was already a thing in 2001.
I've helped those who just wanted to get online with Debian, SuSE and Ubuntu. In one case PCLinuxOS was best because the hardware was very old.
There's one Ubuntu LTS install at a place I visit which has been running for 7 years now. I've upgraded it twice with no fuzz.
If Windows works for a person or they need it for certain software that's fine. For me, I'm living a Linux-default life for the first time and it's nice.
It's the fragmentation in linux that will always make it tough for "normies". Distro differences is obvious first thing, but the two big ones are desktop environments (gnome/kde/etc) and app package formats (flatpak/snap). These add friction and more problems (I heard you like packaging: here's another package format and big ass repository for you. And portals? really?).
I just keep to a simple desktop in fedora using rpm/dnf and build from source if I have to. Yes, I know that's not an answer for normies, but there's not going be simple answers.
And what can I say: It worked. There are still aspects I'm missing (Preview app, Mail) and other Aspects I really hate (Printing on my Canon MB5150 just does not work) but I stayed. I found workarounds and solutions, fought my way through the distro-jungle and I'm glad I made it.
All in all I think it is more a know-how Problem, than a Problem with the system itself.
However, if you don't have this time, it's understandable but how much time goes into experimenting every year and then switching back?
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
https://docs.zeropolis.net/doku.php/tech:cachyos
In my case, installing linux on a laptop and while everything was fine, there was an unexplained network delay. What ultimately fixed it (and I really don't know why) is I had to fix the time on my system clock to the right date/time and then got ntp setup and working correctly. My system clock was far in the past. I THINK (but don't know) that the root cause was in certificate validation. Perhaps hiccups because the certs were issued in the future?
> I need my machine to work. I can't spend an afternoon tweaking my computer anymore.
Until Microslop OS decided on its own that you haven't had a reboot in a while and since we're at it some of the drivers you desperately need suddenly are not kosher anymore.
When stuff breaks I prefer something I'm actually allowed to repair. That's just me.
It's been perfect for me. The included Bazaar app store is very impressive compared to something like the apple app store. It reignited the lost joy of opening up the app store to find something new and interesting. A wonderful contrast to current meta of app stores just being a front to push expensive SaaS products, with platform operators taking their slice at gunpoint on the payment processing side.
It also includes a lot of development related packages by default, so you don't need to worry much about layering your basic tools with rpm-ostree. I generally found that most things I wanted as a developer and gamer were already installed or easily installed. The default KDE software is all good too. Perfectly functional utility software for viewing media, calculator, paint, remote desktop, text editor, filelight (so fast. way better than windirstat).
Flatpak is a treasure. With Flatseal you can view and manage application-system permissions with a level of granularity I have not seen in other systems. And most importantly Flatpak gives application developers a powerful common target to create a Linux bundle that will work on ~every~ distro. Downloading and installing my common apps like discord/.was extremely fast.
The singular deficiency I've seen is games that require anti-cheat. I'm not a heavy competitive gamer, so I simply do not play those games. I still keep a small windows partition around, should I fancy a game of league of legends, but I haven't booted it in at least two months. Last time I did all I could think was "holy shit. it really is this bad. it wasn't my imagination."
Nvidia drivers have been rapidly improving recently. HDR support in KDE 6.6 is really good. Better than windows actually. I have less HDR related problems on Linux now than I did on windows 11.
Old game compatibility is OUTSTANDING. On Windows I literally could not play CivCity: Rome with my ultrawide. With no windowed mode option, this 1280x1024 game was stretched across my entire screen and I couldn't stop it. On Linux the gamescope tool provides a custom isolated graphics context to any game you designate at your desired resolution/refresh rate. I can simply add "gamescope -W 1280 -H 1024 -r 60 -e -- %command%" to my steam properties for CivCity: Rome. And I get a properly sized window in borderless mode running at the correct frame rate for the game. Mouse jitters are fixed. Resolution size is fixed. Game runs perfectly.
As a longtime dabbler, the Linux ecosystem has made crazy progress in the last few years in bringing about the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop". For me, that year was 2026. At this point I don't see why I would ever go back.
Fedora + KDE feels like coming home to windows 7. Anything else, YMMV.
Okay, that does sound pretty dang nice for older games.
"update tool was bricked"? What?