Archive.

You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.

Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.

However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!

  • bitcrafter@programming.dev
    71·
    4 days ago

    I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a “paper cuts”, I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

    Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

    I won’t say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

    I really do not think that these “paper cuts” are representative of peoples’ general experiences with Linux.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Every OS has paper cuts. You learn to live with them over time as you have no other choice. When you switch OS it cuts in different ways and they feel fresher then the old ones you had gotten used to over time. It does not matter if you switch from Windows to Linux, Linux to Windows or to or from MacOS. They all have papercuts.

      • bitcrafter@programming.dev
        1·
        3 days ago

        That’s completely fair!

        Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.