Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

For your bullet points:

Yeah, GNOME can be flakey with extensions. Almost no regular users will install extensions though. Windows also has tons of bugs and issues that users just ignore because it's the "default"
Regular users won't care about desktop scaling. I've seen people using the blurriest, weirdest aspect ratios on Windows because they liked it that way
Bluetooth sucks on all hardware and with all software, to various degrees.
Syncing files is trivial with Syncthing
MacOS keeps breaking my coworker's setups with every update.

GPU issues can be hard, but that's not really Linux's fault. There's a reason this image exists of Linus giving nvidia the middle finger:

That being said, it's getting better. As of this year, nvidia has started putting some real effort into making things work with wayland.

EDIT: I've found nirvana with NixOS, speaking of GPU drivers. I just add a few lines to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and it goes off and ensures that the nvidia drivers are present. I also run lots of CUDA stuff on top of that and it all works about as seamlessly as possible.