I've been using linux as a daily driver since the start of the year.
There's still a long ways to go before things "just work". It's about equivalent to windows right now in terms of frustrations, it's just that frustrations are more along the lines of "this is a bit wonky" instead of "this is malicious / was their intended behavior". It's gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but it's still far off from what a typical user would need.
I'd love to see either Valve or Nvidia really put in effort into creating their own hardware/software integration on a level that Apple does. I think it'd go a long way to legitimizing it.
Thank you for saying something I've been saying for awhile: Linux definitely has jank, but I'm not convinced it's more janky than Windows.
I think people are so used to Windows' awfulness that they kind of forget about how much bullshit is associated with it. Linux has bullshit too, though it's getting better, but when people talk about Linux jank they're always smuggling in an implication of Windows having less jank, which I don't concede at all.
Ah the time old classic. Go into the registry and change these 3 keys that seeming have zero relation to the problem at hand and restart your machine TWICE then its fixed.
Out of the box most popular distros require less tweaking and hammering into shape than a windows 11 install and that is a very important "feature"
After I replaced my last windows install a few years ago... Checking windows 11 on a friend's PC a few weeks ago was a nightmare. I considered myself a power user back in the day and I really struggled. So now I do have perspective from the other end and it fits the picture - windows is also jank it is just familiar jank for most people.
There is another point too. The trend with Linux is up and improving slowly over decades. And for windows it seems to be the reverse and faster.
I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.
I've had wifi drivers not work with fresh installs of Windows as well, so that's hardly a unique Linux thing. I've also had to reboot Windows into special modes because apparently a driver from a Broadcom WiFi card was "unsigned", so I had to disable the check for that.
I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.
I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).
Meanwhile I haven’t had a wireless issue on Linux since 2010 or so.
> fedora spin
Installing the equivalent of OS "slop" isn't Linux's fault... For better or worse the choice that is afforded by OSS licenses means that many of those choices will be bad.
I've been using Linux on the desktop off-and-on for 20 years. I used OSX for awhile 2008-2015 when they clearly had the best hardware, and the OS was pretty nice. I've been using KDE since then, and I recently installed Bazzite (Fedora+KDE-based) on my sans-windows gaming PC. I also started a new job this year, where I have to use the company-provided MBP for compliance reasons, after having not used MacOS since 2015. So all this is pretty fresh in my mind, and I'll say that 2025+ KDE is by far the best out-of-box experience for power users. It mostly just works, and anything you want to tweak is easy to find in the settings. Setting up modern MacOS with things like more keyboard shortcuts for window management, focus-follows-mouse or even remembering where windows where after waking up from sleep requires you to buy an app or pay a subscription.
Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search. If it doesn't do what you want, there's certainly a setting or config or free app you can install that does.
MacOS may break less often, but when it does you're mostly out of luck. It may do what you want more often, but if it doesn't you have to buy an app, if its even possible at all.
> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.
And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.
I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.
For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.
Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.
For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)
With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.
Have also been using Bazzite since march on my home desktop and you are spot on. I think the main reason for average person linux being difficult these days are laptops with weird hardware configurations.
I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.
Me too, I was a 30 year Windows developer and Electronics Engineer so I went pretty conservative with Kubuntu LTS and it's been a pretty slick experience. Gemini has been great tech support for all the CLI stuff and getting all of my weirder hardware projects interfaced (100% success rate to date). Just considering whether to delete my windows partition to put my MP3's on, as realistically I'm not going to get any more Windows Programming gigs.
Yeah, for example a bunch of my system updates began showing scary error notes because somehow there is a header inconsistency between the amdgpu driver and the kernel.
I'm not regretting my choice, but it's also something where the average user can't just call Linux Support and get a "run X and it'll fix it" solution.
One can call Windows support? And get help?
Arguably there are more support options for Windows because it's got fewer derivatives than Linux, and was historically more common on desktop.
Do typical users care that much about a bit of jank, though? All the “typical users” I know are on spyware infested Windows laptops and just interpret the horrible shabbiness of the whole experience as being normal.
This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.
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