[shawnb576]

Every time I try this I go thru standard stages:

1. Ugh I want to run docker natively, Ubuntu looks good, I’ll do that 2. Install latest Ubuntu. It’s great! Love the shell. Hardware works. I can run Windows in Virtual Box for odd apps. 3. Why is my battery life so bad? Why won’t Bluetooth stay connected? 4. I am full Linux. I am living the creed! 5. I am so tired of constantly fixing something. Why is Spotify rendering weird. Why doesn’t mouse scroll work in Firefox. 6. I don’t have time for this. Back to Windows.

I think now that WSL has matured, it’s just hard to justify going back. Everything works and I get real Linux.

[m45t3r]

This comment is strange because the only OS that I never had serious issues with Bluetooth is Linux, specially after migrating to PipeWire.

Windows always had some strange driver that were hit or miss depending of the dongle.

However macOS is much worse: I have a Galaxy Buds 2 that works perfectly in all my devices (Android, Nintendo Switch, my notebooks running Linux, etc.), but with my work provided MacBook Pro it randomly disconnects one ear, or the audio gets completely garbled after a while. Other teammates report similar issues with their Bluetooth earbuds, from completely different manufacturers.

Even without the above issue, connecting/disconnecting the device opens Apple Music and there seems to be no way to disable this behavior unless you buy an Airpods or disable all other music shortcuts.

It kinda seems that Apple makes the Bluetooth experience horrible for everyone else just to sell more Airpods.

[mouzogu]

I think the issue is with bluetooth itself. i personally never use it, i find it very flaky at best.

[m45t3r]

It is definitively not. I mean, Bluetooth is unreliable, but what happens in most of my other devices is a small 1~2 seconds gap in the sound. On macOS it simply stops working until I reconnect my device.

[perryizgr8]

I've also had bad experiences with bluetooth on macbooks. For me the apple "magic" mouse becomes unusable if I also have any bluetooth headphone connected.

[sschueller]

I use manjaro a version of arch and I will never go back. Yes, sometimes things to don't but windows has issues as well.

I had it with this anti user direction we are going because you know "security reasons". Microsoft decides what is malware, they decide what we are allowed to install, they track everything you do and if you want to turn if off forget it. Everytime you update they try to force you to make a MS account, I don't need this crap in my life.

I'd rather spend an hour fixing something and knowing it's all under my control and my interests not some corporation's profit interests.

[phendrenad2]

I tried to use Linux but it was a death by a thousand paper cuts of bugs and glitches. I've never experienced Windows stopping me from running a program, maybe you're actually trying to run malware? It's a good idea to install an antivirus or at least windows defender so you can avoid these.

[antifa]

Windows after version 7 is essentially death by a thousand dark patterns, forced surprise updates, forgotten preferences, etc..

[phendrenad2]

Linux is death by a thousand bugs and glitches, I've never experienced a dark pattern in Windows.

[antifa]

Staying on windows 95 for the last two decades is an underrated move, I definitely agree with that.

[phendrenad2]

Windows 11, latest patch. What dark pattern am I not seeing?

[sschueller]

Try Virtualbox in combination with docker and WSL2, that was a disaster in Windows.

[phendrenad2]

How so?

[simonblack]

What a strange sequence.

For my own part, I have never used Windows as my day to day machine. I moved from MSDOS to a UNIX Desktop in 1992 then to a Linux Desktop in 2001. I don't know why others seem to have problems with UNIX/Linux Desktops.

My take is that the 'super-duper Windows users' must take the time and effort to 'UNLEARN their Windows Thinking' but they don't bother taking that first step. Consequently every problem for them is a nail that they must hit with their only tool, a hammer.

3. Why is my battery life so bad?

I bought a Lenovo P53 laptop last year. For quite a while I thought that my battery icon on the panel ('taskbar' for you Windows types) was faulty because my battery just seems to go on and on.

[nano9]

> 2. Install latest Ubuntu. [...] I am so tired of constantly fixing something.

Maybe don't use a deliberately worsened version of Debian.

[nxbp]

Do the settings once. Keep a copy of ~/ and /etc handy. Apply all settings in one go at will. Stop fiddling around, making a fuss about nothing and just keep on using it.

[phendrenad2]

How do you "just keep using" apps that are broken and need lots of fiddling to fix them, often repeatedly after every app update?

[kkfx]

Personally I'm using NixOS, sometimes a rebuild is broken, but that's not an issue since I can keep using the old ones in a snap... I'm not using Windows, my last one was XP in it's early days, but anytime for a reason or another I'm on it on someone else desktop the experience is so frustrating that I do not know how it's users can keep using it...

[phendrenad2]

NixOS is complicated to use, it's nice to say "everyone should learn nixos" but that's not realistic. It's easier to use Windows.

[kkfx]

It's debatable: it's easier a system that when it decide to upgrade can regularly lock you out in an "waiting" state for an unknown time until it hopefully finished without error then a system that you can re-deploy just with few lines of already written code?

It's easier a system that degrade while you use it, deriving to unknown states quickly or one you can rebuild and you normally do that upon any upgrade?

IMVHO Nix language is horrific, yes, that's a big issue and I dream Guix for that witch unfortunately it's not mature enough for my needs, but what NixOS offer:

- custom image to deploy just a simple .nix + oneliner away

- reproducibility

makes it far easier than any other system we have these days. Consider that the fact most people decide to make acrobatics on a blade simply ignoring the fact their system once installed, typically in a manual way, derive and degrade, keeping manually managing it fixing issues as they appear without even a real "backup plan" (at maximum having backups of personal data, witch are useless without the working OS) does means "easy" as "hey, it's easy not thinking, living day-to-day no matter what", yes it might be easy, until shit happen, when (not if) happen... Such easiness demand a potentially very big and up-front unknown price.

Thanks to NixOS I've upgraded many time my home infra, smoothly, I have everything up to date and everything can survive hw changes, crashes etc without much manual work in a reproducible manner. Oh, and that without wasting a gazillion of resources for things like ks and their obscenely long YAML-based setups, containers that are loooooong to rebuild to a point many simply do it once in a while etc.

Windows might sound simple for some because of ignorance: they already know it and only it, they get it pre-installed, when something happen they call for third party support etc, but that's not easiness that's habit+offloading problems to others. An easy recipe for disasters and hi opex + regular capex with much randomness.

In "complete" (desktop) terms classic systems were meant to last a decade of comfortable usage*, they were products with a significant value, mastered by the user/buyer of them; now systems last mostly only few years just to sell new and even more crappy hw, stating "hey, do not worry your data are secured on our servers, just pay us what we told you to pay, at our condition since you depend on us for anything".

[mariusor]

The answers to all your "whys" is: because vendors don't support linux as a first class citizen. It's as simple as that. And why don't they? Because people don't use their wallets enough to support the ones that do.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> I think now that WSL has matured

Again with the WSL. It's just a VM with preconfigured integration, and without the ability to tweak it to taste. I much prefer to run VirtualBox or VMWare, and we've been able to do this for a long, long time.

[syntheweave]

I've taken the dive to running Linux again recently. Not on all my machines, just on the older gaming laptop which I set up with a bigger SSD and Ubuntu Studio. I realized that I was right on the precipice of actually having an entirely open media creation app stack I could see myself using(Blender, Inkscape, Krita, plus Syncthing to move data from other devices), and therefore could have a media making box running Linux - so I booted up on a freshly flashed USB, tested my tablet, it worked. All the hardware has worked, although the laptop keyboard is doing the "shift and pageup acts like numpad 9" thing, which I haven't looked into yet - but isn't too important since I am gonna use external keebs. Then add in that Renoise works and supports plugins - maybe not all the commercial plugins, but in exchange you get hundreds of LV2 plugins with no separate install process, and I was sold on the concept. In this limited role, I wouldn't run into problems related to software I wasn't using, and therefore it wouldn't develop into that general frustration with Linux as an all-purpose desktop.

There are still flaws - the keyboard thing, and then Pulseaudio and JACK not getting along well so if I want to listen to a reference on YouTube while Renoise is open, I have to fiddle with the JACK session management to plug one into the other - but even that one has been addressed with the Ubuntu Studio UI having a feature just for that use case. And I have two installs of some of the media apps because I have a version from snap plus a version from apt. It's like, yeah, still rough edges, but these are comparable rough edges to what I see on contemporary Windows, and I'm in a better position to fix them.

I've actually been helping to troubleshoot a Windows issue for my mom while I set this up: "sometimes only the right side of my earphones (her term) plays sound, it's been happening for months". At first we thought this was a connection issue and after determining that the headphones were not faulty, replaced the speakers she plugs into(which she likes using because of the physical volume knob). Then it still happened afterwards and I finally caught on to the idea that it was software, and after poking around saw that there was preinstalled audio enhancement crap on top of the Realtek driver doing auto detection when the jack is plugged in - just poking around with the software, it started working, perhaps because doing that updated a config file somewhere. Perhaps it originally started because of a Windows update. It's all mystery meat, so who knows. For now I've advised her to turn the speakers off and then on again if it happens, but I might look into removing the bloatware too. I did have her temporarily on Linux at one point just running off a USB stick when the OS drive on her old machine failed. She loved it, all she ever did was watch YouTube and check email and it was perfect for months. Then Dad got her a new computer, and she's now a bit resistant to using Linux again because of her Word documents. But she also hates that Word has cloud features(even though she does nothing to properly archive her documents and is an obvious candidate to benefit from cloud sync). Perhaps I will broach the question of using a Word alternative if the computer issues keep up.

Bottom line, I do still think of Linux desktops as a tinkering space, but increasingly a viable one in a professional setting if you aren't working against a fixed standard(like an artist that needs Adobe CC or a grandma that needs Word) and can use tinkering to your advantage to hack out a custom workflow.

[mouzogu]

yeah i don't think linux is really a consumer OS. even ubuntu.

i tried ubuntu recently after about 5 years and it seems to have become much slower too.