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.
You were fucking with your GPU drivers, lost access to your GPU, and you have concluded from that that “regular users” (who don’t know what a driver is or does) should not use Linux?
EDIT: Stick a “normal” user on a stable distro with a clean UI like Mint or Fedora, keep in mind they probably don’t know what a terminal is and will probably never use it, and they will be fine for almost all cases.
Computers are not a good choice for “regular users”. Get them a locked-down iPhone and be done with it.
What you are describing is not a situation unique to Linux - or even Windows. “Software is hard and it sometimes breaks”. My Windows 11 laptop that I use for work and to which I have made exactly zero modifications sometimes doesn’t recognize when I’ve connected external speakers. And I can’t disable hyper-v despite following all of the instructions. This is a corporate provisioned and managed system and simple stuff just doesn’t work.
X% of all things have bugs. Your mistake is in thinking that the percentage that you’re seeing are somehow special or related to the particular OS you’re running at the time. The classic “the grass is greener” fallacy. This is pretty evidenced also by the fact that you’re a classic “distro hopper” whose always looking for the perfect system rather than taking the time to understand the problems and deal with them as they come.
I’d be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I’m going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that’s how we end up without The Right To Read
You are not a regular user. My parents are regular users and they have been using Linux for years. They don’t know though. That’s a regular user.
Is Linux perfect? No
Is windows better than linux? No
Is mac better than windows? No
Are your specific issues a reason normal users shouldnt use Linux? No
Yes, that, in fact, is an unpopular opinion here.
Fucks around with GPU drivers for some reason
Experiences GPU driver issues
“How can Linux do this to me??”
As I wrote, I did the clean install. Even if I didn’t do a thing with it, it would still break. As it did couple days ago.
“clean driver install”, which heavily suggests you installed nvidia drivers, probably from the website. That issue is entirely on you.
My favorite implication of these kinds of posts is that windows somehow doesn’t ever have driver issues.
I think Windows has a very poor track record for ui consistency as well. It feels like every Windows app wants to roll its own UI; Firefox, Discord, Steam etc. I know Discord and Steam also have those issues on Linux as well, but it feels like every Windows app wants to roll out it’s own window decorarions and theme.
Honestly, I’m pleased at how consistent most gtk based apps look.
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.nixand 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.
