I’ve been using all major OSes for a long time. I have the most experience with Windows, I’ve been using it since Windows 95 and stopped at Windows 8. I’ve been using macOS for about a decade and Linux (in total) for about 5 years. I have started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I’ve been using Fedora as my daily driver. And honestly, I’m running out of patience.
Few days ago I ran into the gpu driver issue. Long story short, Steam games started to crash on directx issue. Games that were working few weeks ago. I admit, I was mocking around with GPU drivers in order to make Podman containers to access the GPU. But I did the fresh diver install and it didn’t solved the issue (also my GPU was not found despite all commands showed it was there). I don’t have much spare time and I would like to play a game, I used to play before, without spending hours/days fixing issue that didn’t exist last time I played it.
But it’s not only about games. I have two laptops, both running Fedora 40 KDE spin. Some time ago on one laptop the power widget stopped working. It shows “no power profiles found on a device”. But when I delete the widget and add it again, it works fine.
Other issue is with the general look and feel. There are many apps that don’t follow the OS look - lack of window borders/shadow, random icons that don’t match the system, flatpacks having issues accessing system configuration (e.g. vscodium not recognising zsh as a default shell).
Few more problems I had:
- on GNOME, some extensions where crashing without any reason
- some apps don’t respect desktop scaling
- bluetooth randomly dropping connections
- syncing files between devices is always a struggle
- you never know what’s going to break when installing updates
If you want a Linux like experience use macOS, and if you want to play games, stick to Windows.
I am looking through these issues and I cannot say that I can relate on almost any of these. Sorry to hear you have been having so many issues!
I do plenty of gaming and cannot think of a time where I have had GPU driver issues (despite the fact that I have Nvidia graphics on 3 out of 4 of my systems, which is supposedly more problematic).
My bluetooth works fine, and it has been literally years since an update broke something, bluetooth or otherwise (which I cannot say the same for Windows on my work computer).
I use KDE connect, SFTP, and SMB servers and I have never had any issues transferring files between Windows, Android, and Linux. What do you mean about that? (seeing other replies, it sounds like you are using iOS. That sounds like that may be an Apple problem and not a Linux problem, because Apple tend to be terrible about playing nice with other ecosystems)
The scaling is the one point I can sort of relate on. I think there is still some work to be done regarding DPI and scaling on Linux, but it’s not enough of an issue to make me want to switch operating systems.
As for GNOME issues and window decorations, that sounds like a GNOME problem. GNOME does things very differently to all of the other DEs and forces programs to manually define their own window decorations rather than allowing standard default icons like other DEs, so my understanding is that GNOME in particular tends to be a source of constant headaches for Linux developers.
And I’m not some sysadmin or CS major. If I have a problem, I do a web search. If I can’t find it there, I make a forum thread. I don’t post a rant saying that Linux is a bad OS, lol.
Also, on your SMB server you need to add a specific configuration to play nice with OS X…
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Better_with_Mac_OS_X
So yeah that’s on OP not reading through the documentation.
Your comment is a perfect Linux answer - it works on my computer :) And I don’t mean it as an insult. The problem here is that Linux, despite of all its advantages, is not for a global consumer.
Yes, but my larger point is that you are doing the same thing, but in the negative. You are taking your specific problems and then putting forward the conclusion that they are the reasons why “regular” Linux users should not use Linux, as though these were universal problems. I am saying that I do not have those issues and that they are far from universal.
Yes, the modular nature of Linux is both a blessing and a curse. There is legitimate debate to be had on that. But that is not how your post frames the issue.
As stated above, not all of these things are even Linux problems. I would say that if iOS refuses to play nice with Linux but every other ecosystem works fine, the blame lies with Apple, not with Linux. It is not Linux’s job to fix the interoperability problems of other ecosystems. The GNOME problems are related to a specific subset of Linux users, and even before today I would have said that I would not recommend GNOME to new users because of how nonstandard it can be.
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So we know these things work on one person’s computer (theirs) but not on another’s (yours). Such anecdotal experiences are not a reasonable basis on which to judge any OS, positively or negatively.