Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
As a newbie in this space, I had interactions with a few distros over the years and lately switched (hopefully) permanently.
My first experience was with Mint 10 years ago. Installing it would cause some GPU driver defect (AMD card) and would turn the whole login screen into an epileptic checkerboard pattern with no way of doing anything. It took me a few reinstalls and a ungodly amount of googling to find a solution which involved opening the terminal at boot process. You can only imagine how frustating that can be for a newcomer.
Later in time I had Ubuntu on my laptop which had a bug that wouldn’t spin up the CPU fan and it would simply overheat and shutdown. I had to take it to a technician to find out what was causing the random shutdowns.
A year ago I decided to try Debian on my desktop PC as many have praized it for it’s rock-wolid stability. It didn’t want to work on my PC. No internet connection and some weird bugs. Took me two-three days to get ti to work and I still don’t know what exactly fixed it as I have applied every possible solition I came across.
Much later, aka now, I decided to go with Bazzite on my desktop as many have claimed excelent support. I wanted to install the mimalloc because I play Factorio a lot and a few reddit posts claimed 20% UPS improvement over the stock scheduler. After downloading the source code and following the 4 very easy steps, cmake would throw some random eerors at me claiming some critical files were missing, although they were right there in the usr directory. Turns us Bazzite some some issue and Fedora 40 compiled the code in seconds without any issues.
Conclusion: Linux users, which are very tech savvy or work in that space, know what to do when things don’t work out, while the rest of us keeps googling and crying over error messages for things that seem trivial. You never seem to know if it’s you, the system or your hardware.
It’s something we’ll take for granted. With enough time and experience, you could fire off a one liner to fix a problem in less than a minute. For most people thst could take an hour, and they’d probably give up within 10 minutes