[technobabbler]

IMHO, as a user first and dev second, "things entirely controlled by 3rd parties" aren't a bug, they're a feature. That means someone else gets to jump through the hoops to make it work, not me. The vast majority of useful & fun things on a computer are made by corporate 3rd parties, not GNU & Linux volunteers.

Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.

MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".

I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.

[prmoustache]

"Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos."

I am not sure what you mean.

I have been a linux user for the last 25years and I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least, nor looking for obscure drivers.

A config file is the same as an option/settings menu, with the advantage that it is usually much better documented.

Nobody told you that you can watch netflix on Linux as well as running games, use office and powerful photo editing apps as well?

[technobabbler]

You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming).

I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.

All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?

The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.

Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.

My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...

[prmoustache]

Adobe softwares can be replaced by other tools and their licensing these day make it something you don't want regardless of the platform it would run on.

Office 365 works well enough on the web, calligra and libreoffice are compatible enough to make it a non issue. You can even upload and work on odf documents on office 365 these days.

I like having 4k in the living room and I have a chromecast for that but I'd rather not have my gf and kids play 4k content while I am working at home and they all have 1080p or lower laptop screen anyway. You don't miss retina if you never used it.

As for the rest of your experience, I guess it comes from poor buying skills. You don't buy a Dell to run MacOS on it. I purchase my laptops and hardware with linux compatibility in mind.

Saying Linux UI is a poor windows 7 ripoff is a lie. I am actually one of the - usually silent - happy gnome 3 user and I think it is a superior desktop UI to anything Microsoft and Apple have produced so far. You get a very focused window without any distraction from unneeded icons and information everywhere and everything can be piloted quickly with the keyboard but also work flawlessly with a touch screen in tablet mode when I flip my Lenovo Yoga.

[awilfox]

> You don't miss retina if you never used it.

This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?

> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.

I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.

None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).

The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.

[prmoustache]

> This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?

My fonts are fine thank you, and look much better than on the windows 10 that was provided to me initially by my employer.

Now let's take an example. My employer sent me 2 1080p external displays for work. What would Retina on my laptop provide if I don't benefit from it on my external displays? Yes sometimes it is better not experiencing better/nicer technology if you can't afford or if your emplyer can't afford to equip all your devices with it. Otherwise you just get frustrated.

I am not saying you should go back to CRTs and vintage techs. You like it or not, the market and world is not yet ready to provide affordable retina/4K/5K monitor/displays with decent refresh speed and latency in all sizes at prices anyone can afford.

> The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them.

Are you saying other OSes / apps ecosystems are bugfree? They are not. And the bug aren't necessarily fixed earlier than on free software.

For instance, Windows has been virtually unusable in a non US/english only context for decades and they have never cared fixing the default keyboard layouts.

On linux I don't have to memorize arbitrary ALT + 3 digits numbers to type common, daily used letters in my language, I just compose them easily from the default keys.

I can name countless of people swearing every day because their app has bug, eratic behavior, crashes, all OS and software license included.

[technobabbler]

I don't think it's fair to suggest that my use cases and priorities are less important than yours.

Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.

Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.

As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.

I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?

[prmoustache]

Never said you should be forced to use Linux.

I was just mentionning that the days of patching and recompiling kernel and drivers to have a usable computer are long gone.

I am not sure why everybody always mention Gimp as the only photo editing tool that work on linux. There are many other tools in the graphic edition/illustration and video production, including some proprietary ones.

TBH, I have no idea how Ubuntu default desktop UI was a few years ago. I vaguely know they tried going with their own ideas with Unity, a desktop that was loosely based on gnome but without using gnome shell.

Tastes are not universal anyway and I don't understand how you can stand a windows desktop if you are fine with a mac laptop. When I was given back a new laptop with windows on it by my employer, I tried to get used to it and like it. The font rendering is terrible, the ergonomic is bad, the virtual workspace aren't as seamless and quick to use, the software installation process is shitty, even with linux inspired tools such as chocolatey, making containers and virtual machines work with the cisco vpn was a major PITA and involved having powershell scripts being triggered in scheduled tasks by log events to get anything working. I reinstalled Fedora and was up to speed in a few minutes.

As you said, to each their own.

[awilfox]

> I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least

You're very lucky. I've had to apply patches manually for the majority of my Linux experience, to the point where I can literally recite you the package patch contribution instructions for Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Arch from memory.

[prmoustache]

Just buy hardware that is compatible from a start too.