Here is an example : take an Intel nuc : Ubuntu, everything works out of box. Win10 ? Let's download a WiFi driver on Intel site ! Let's hope you have Ethernet or a windows 10 supported wifi device. And no, the wifi dongle lying around is too old, windows 7 only...
Bought an Intel NUC, installed Ubuntu, no hardware-accelerated video decoding on Firefox and Chromium needed to be compiled manually with a patch.
This functionality works out of the box on Windows (not that I installed it, as Windows 10 is a dealbreaker to me so I ended up returning the NUC and choosing something else).
Have a thinkpad X1 Carbon Pro and have run fedora, ubuntu and Qubes OS on it at various points. Have Ubuntu on it now (as that's the distro my company wants everyone to use). In all of those distros the install has been completely trouble-free and everything works completely fine.
Also I don't use wayland and don't have the scaling perf problem that someone else was talking about.
Have an X1 Yoga here with Arch on it, it was painless.
Bought an X390 for my mom last year, tossed Ubuntu on it after putting in a larger NVMe. (she prefers to use a more 'mainstream' distro so she can follow tutorials to setup new dev environments for things she's tinkering with) Her Macbook Air is weighing down paper now.
My guess is the contrast in experience can come from difference in hardware. Drivers can be a big hassle for desktop if you're unlucky. Occasionally when I get new hardware that's not a laptop it can be frustrating with GPU or (curses) Bluetooth drivers. It's been improving a lot, though. Lenovo and Dell have really gotten better over the years.
Funnily enough, Windows is going to phase out drivers from Windows Update, so I can see the scales shift.
My pains with Linux rarely have to do with hardware. It is a gigantic complex incongruent mess of an operating system where software routinely requires hours of my time to make it work properly, google searches have a tendency to land you on 5 year old pages, which in Linux terms means they are now 3 major revisions out of date, and the community is full of condescending evangelists.
Maybe Linux would get wider adoption if its evangelists weren't so condescending? Maybe instead of assuming everyone who's had a bad experience with your OS must be missing something obvious, you should give the benefit of the doubt?
Until earlier this year I ran Lubuntu on 4/5 of the PCs I own. I've tried other distros but that one worked the best for me and it was still a giant pain in the ass. There's only 1 Linux PC left in my fleet now and it is mostly because I haven't turned it on in 6 months.
Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you. I don’t like Linux [on the desktop]. Most responses in geekier online communities do seem to be smug and/or assume you don’t know things.
That was happening in this thread too outside of you.
For reference, I too have spent a decent amount of time with Lubuntu. I doubt I’ll switch from Mac for foreseeable future.
My experiences with Debian have been pretty clean outside of needing to pre-prepare the binary blob package for the ethernet and wifi drivers on the slightly older laptop that I wanted to install it on. This was expected due to Debian's stance on non-free packages on the install media.
Pretty much any other modern distro install has gone 100% cleanly with no prep-work needed.
That pretty closely matches my experiences as well. The only exception is that my first experience with Linux on something other than a raspberry pi was an optimus laptop.
NVIDIA issues aside, I've never had any issues with using a desktop oriented distro as a desktop. Way fewer issues than I've had with Windows.
Installing software that isn't in your distro's repo, either because it is too new, too old, or was just never adopted by a maintainer, is usually a pain in the ass.
Software routinely requires tiresome google searches that largely land you in out of date non-documentation in order to get basic functionality (like say, drag and drop) working.
Getting help from the community is basically impossible because whatever you're trying to do you're "using the wrong software/distro" or "don't really want that".
Oh yeah, and any time you bring up these sort of things someone like you shows up to do their damnedest to dismiss these complaints. Often by comparing these problems to similar problems in Windows, as though that is somehow changes anything.
What is your example ?