I installed Linux (an arch-based distro) last month. There have been some minor issues but nothing worse than what I experienced regularly on Windows recently. My computer feels fast again and when things randomly break I can at least get to the root cause and fix it myself.
I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at least I own my computer now.
I had been Windows user since Windows3.1. More than 3 decades straight. After a few years of working with Linux, installed Debian on home PC about a year ago and couldn't be more happier since then.
I briefly test-drove Windows 2, but have been a solid Windows user since 3.1 too.
I have been forced to use Windows 11 on a succession of work PCs, but I stayed 10 at home due to the lack of a movable task bar and the terrible right-click menu in 11.
When Microsoft started pushing hard against remaining on 10 this year, I made the switch - to MacOS. It was an easy decision, since I was finally able to get a MacBook for work, too, so no context-switching required. I run a copy of Win11 in a VM for apps that need it, but find that I rarely have to spin it up.
As a product manager, I cannot image the decision-making behind building a product update so shitty that you drive away 35-year customers.
I've been trying out different distros, but still using windows 10 ltsc as my main OS. I've got 2 additional partitions containing popos with cosmic and kde fedora that I've narrowed it down to, but both need just a little more bugfixing to to become perfect for me. LTSC is still supported for a while, but if my computer stopped working, I feel like macOS would be a no-brainer for most people.
> My computer feels fast again
A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.
In my last job my Windows box was unbelievably slow at compilation. Windows Defender was burning 70% of the CPU on watching GCC I guess.
Using Linux in a VM compiled three times faster.
I don't know how people tolerate it.
I think part of it is that creating a process is cheap in Unix-style OSs, and expensive in Windows. Windows doesn't want you to exec gcc, cpp, ld, etc. over and over again. It wants you to run an IDE that does it all in one process.
How many IDEs run it all in one process? As far as I know they still call lots of processes.
Visual Studios creates worker threads used for compiling C# that are reused for builds. This can be seen in task manager. Ran into a bug were the VS compiler would only work properly for one build and require VS to be restarted.
Visual Studios is like Windows, each version just seems to be getting worse with more bugs.
Visual Studio calls just one (msbuild) for almost all of the compilation process, perhaps half a dozen processes at most. Certainly not hundreds to thousands, as typically seen under Linux.
I was a Windows Insiders user for a long time... When I was bumped to Windows 11 it borked (didn't have tpm enabled) and had to do a full re-install... a few months later, I saw an ad in the start menu search results... that was it. I switched my primary drive over to my Linux install and largely haven't looked back.
Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.
I was a fan, user, then developer from the DOS days-pre Windows 3.0–to Windows 10 without a single gap.
When they threatened Windows 10 EOL last year (?), that’s when I took a day to do a clean install of Mint and port my games and LLM tinkering over.
Because I knew MS was doubling-down on the user-hostile experience.
I thought I’d miss Windows but Steam, Wine, and Radeon made it delightful.
Windows is now only on my company-issued laptop. I predict that will also go away, as Windows 11 has introduced backdoors to circumvent company controls and install their BS.
When things randomly break in my Linux install, I fire up Claude
Are you saying that any Linux install you've tried in let's say, the past decade, has actually failed for you? I've not seen that and I've put it on many dissimilar machines with success. I use Ubuntu, and now Kubuntu, perhaps you could name the distro that gave you issues?
Ehh, nothing so strong as "failed". For example in Cinnamon I will occasionally install an app that doesn't have a tray icon. Or if I install an app using a chromium based browser, it doesn't have an icon associated with it. So then I tell claude to fix it. It goes out to the internet and finds a suitable icon and will set it up for me.
Or trying to get Steam to work, which is wildly better than it used to be thanks to proton, but still not quite a perfect experience. For example there's a menu compatibility setting you have to enable for some menus to work, and other menus don't work when you have hover-click enabled in the accessibility settings of Cinnamon. Those weren't fixed by Claude CLI like the icons example, but definitely identified through chats with Claude.
The only "fail" states I get into are when I'm doing homelab power user stuff, setting up ownCloud, configuring Caddy, proxmox, etc. I don't blame Linux for that though.
All in all, I would say Linux is absolutely in a state I would install on my parents' computer without fear like I would've had in perhaps 2010.
Not sure why people are downvoting this. LLMs have made Linux far more accessible than before.
I highly doubt this. As someone who is pretty active in a lot of beginner linux communities its becoming the case that a lot issues are caused by users following LLM instructions and creating issues where there were none.
Example someone will want to configure something and the LLM will give them advice from the wrong distro thats 5 years out of date. If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins. Instead they go down a rabbit hole where an LLM feeds them worse and worse advice trying to fix the mountain of issues its building up.
Don't doubt.
Tried Linux around 5 years ago - took many issues, had to learn various commands.
Tried again a few months ago and used various llms to configure everything well, troubleshoot etc
Eg when waking from standby and your mouse isn't working, do you want to troubleshoot and learn various commands over an hour or ask an llm and fix it within a few minutes?
When creating an on demand voice to text app for Linux do I learn various commands and dependencies etc that may take one/many days or use an llm to make it within 30 min?
No brainer
> If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins.
Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.
You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.
Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.
I search all the time. If I trusted the AI response i'd be coming away with the wrong answer more often than not. Why would that be a better outcome than spending an extra 30s to get reliable information? Perplexity IS a simple search engine. Its far simpler than google's engine.
It definitely depends but it's useful for me. In general I find AI pretty useful when you can do a guided search in which you are personally able to discard bad paths quickly before they start polluting the context too much. I have pretty beginner linux skills but I'm quite technical overall and have a decent BS detector, so it's been useful for me.