Asklemmy

Last time I tried diving headfirst into Linux, I got frustrated by having a problem and all the suggested solutions are all wildly different (from an outside perspective) series of editing settings or unusual terminal commands. I already knew how Windows worked well enough to do most things I wanted, but didn't have almost any understanding of how Linux operated so all of the opaque solutions offered without explanation of why or how it should fix the problem just added to my confusion. Couple that with having to sort through one or two dozen suggestions to find one that actually works, not knowing if even attempting any solutions would cause other issues later.

Because over time I realized Linux wastes a lot of my time on unimportant shit. Then I was given a Mac and eventually I realized that macOS has most of the upsides of Linux while being much more stable, less buggy and more pleasant to use. It just works®™

I don't regret ever using Linux tho, it's a great for learning new stuff and acquiring different kind of thinking. Everyone who's a programmer or in some adjacent field should use Linux at least for a while. It's easy to notice when someone never used it.

I've always loved using Linux, but sometimes I just need things to work; so that whatever I'm doing is quick/painless. But as much as I've switched back and forth, I keep getting pulled more into Linux, the more I learn about my (personal) technical problems

Sure, I can fix it on windows... but the more I delve into Linux, the more I begin to understand the underlying principles of all of it. And for a lot of things; the more I learn about Linux, the more I'm able to navigate across multiple OS's. Learning a little Linux has taught me a metric shit-ton about how computers "speak", and that knowledge has crossed over to a lot of different applications.

I still don't use Linux full-time. But I'm definitely starting to prefer it the more I learn. I hate fighting against locked-out bullshit on windows, when I "just need things to work". But I still like being spoon-fed sometimes, when I don't have time/patience... but I now much prefer taking the time to make my computer work for me. I've learned a shit ton about computers because of Linux

People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.

I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.

The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.

As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.

If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.

To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).

Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.

On my gaming PC: I had a lot of random boots to black screen. (Vega 56 GPU)

USB ports did not function at all with USB drives.

TF2 had terrible performance compared to windows.

There was no way to configure my sound card settings.

I still run Ubuntu + kodi on my HTPC, have done for about 10 years. Updating versions of either can often lead to time spent in the terminal. Usually nvidia gpu related. So far the issues have been overcome.

I really only want Linux for software dev work(docker mostly). Windows has wsl which has worked beautifully for me besides memory leaks a couple times a year. The issues I face with wal pale in comparison to my experience dealing with Nvidia drivers and gaming on Linux.

Why people gave up adulting?

I've been using Linux on my laptop for years; I use i3wm that makes using it way easier than anything Windows can provide; but on my desktop pc I have too many stuff installed that I can't be bothered to migrate all to Linux.

Hardware support. My laptop speakers and fingerprint reader don't work in Linux.

My daily driver is a Mac, so use Unix, mostly because I like the ecosystem and, as a designer, I’m tied to the adobe apps. This is what keeps me on the Mac side of things.

I do have a Linux server I use as a media server and other library storage running pop_os, which I really like. I also like how smoothly it interoperates with my Mac. I will say, though, a couple of decades of using Linux on my servers have taught me a lot about using UNIX on my Macs.

I haven’t given up on Linux. I have at least 5 Linux machines in the other room, including tablets, laptops, and servers.

There’s a few Mac’s in the mix too, but those are workstations.

Though I can sympathize with the complaints here in these comments. I brought a ryzen laptop home and installed a distribution on it. Sleep didn’t work. Tried 2 more distros, sleep still didn’t work. Now that laptop just sits there. My Chromebook gets more use than it. Having to shut it down and boot it back up every time wasn’t worth using it anymore when my pinebook pro does have the support you’d expect for functions you’d expect from a laptop.

I don't know that I fully qualify as "gave up using Linux", but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I'm definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it's not all doom and gloom.

For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).

I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn't work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren't exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.

Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there's much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I'm sticking with what works (even if it's FAR from perfect).

command line interface

I’m fine with it, but it’s cryptic and a deal breaker for many.

Hardware compatibility and, unrelated to the this, Adobe sw are the main reasons for me

I want to use SolidWorks. My kids want to play Fortnite and Valorant.

It's due to lack of support by mainstream developers. I can only hope the Steam deck takes off and continues to sell; once a critical mass of people are on the platform it'll only gain momentum. We're not there yet but this is the closest we've been in 30 years.

I love Linux. But I got so exasperated with system updates breaking X-Windows and dropping me into the console with no clue what to do, for some time I intentionally deferred the updates.

I wanted a stable daily driver, so in 2015 I switched from Linux to ChromeOS. Now I'm back to Linux with the Crostini container of ChromeOS and Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi 400.

Tried years and years ago and gave up. Was lazy, used to work on Windows servers at work and I was an Admin and didn't want to relearn a bunch of similar but different stuff. That was my mistake.

Tried again and some Distros broke stuff for me. Issue was that I did have to pick up another learning curve, so I just got to it.

Learned lots and then picked different Distros for different needs and computers. Daily drivers, I pick only solid, yet lean Distros, little tinkering and they have worked almost flawlessly for years on end. On some other machines, I dump stuff to tinker and learn some more, might break something but nothing is lost. If I break something on those, don't care. Now I run a server for fun with tons Apps for partner and I and all machines are on Linux. My TV runs off a small PC, too. No Google, or Apple, no ads on anything and server costs are dirt cheap. It would cost me hundreds upon hundreds a year to pay for 3rd party services for the same.

There are no shortcuts and in a way I wished I had stuck with it back then. But, I am happy where I am now.

Tbh most of the time I’m using my Wintendo, but Linux is better imo for dev. PyCharm is a nice IDE, and all the Linux tools I love like vim are there and fully functional.

I gave up because sound stopped working every time I rebooted.

My guess is also choosing the wrong distro and/or the stress of having to reconfigure your digital life.

Most people are coming from being on a PC/Mac for +10 years and so it feels inefficient for the first month or so until you get the hang of things. I legit had a checklist of +20 tweaks to make to my env to make it more to my liking. The joys and frustrations of choosing KDE as my intro DE almost drowned me but I made it to the other side.

Too much of a hassle. I don't wanna risk having my setup break when... Never, really. I want to use my machine and that's it.