Oh boy. I tried, really. WSL2 is good enough to test things and run docker, but as soon as you try to run X applications, remote in with ssh on your laptop, or try to use full power, the limitations become clear soon.
I tried, on the new job. I've dealt with windows for 6 months, but 2 weeks ago I was sick of it. There is always something not working right. If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, Windows 10 has training wheels and a hysterical helicopter mom screaming 'you're gonna fall!' all the time. Death by a 1000 papercuts. I've reformatted it and run kubuntu now. I will miss excel, and online outlook is not as good as the real thing, but these are sacrifices I am willing to make just to get rid of the whiney drug addict called windows 10.
I'm not going to say Linux is perfect. Plenty of dumb cuts in there too. But at least it treats me with respect, at least the KDE world does.
Ymmv, of course. The job is great enough to let each run his or her preferred OS. As a recent escapee from a hyper standardized environment, I am loving it
Strange take. WSL2 _is_ Linux, running in a hypervisor with proprietary APIs for acceleration [0]. You're not using an alternative to Linux, you're using Linux that's been vendor-locked to require Windows.
> it's not even close to as good as a full Linux desktop
I use "a full linux desktop" at work (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) and the desktop UI bugs and limitations are a nightmare. Give me Windows and WSL any day in comparison. At least there I know that basic stuff like clipboard and screen sharing/capture always works flawlessly, and windows don't magically get stuck to one aspect ratio and nost wasting my time trying to google fixes for snap/wayland/apt bugs.
Sure, some of these bugs I encountered could be Ubuntu, or Gnome, or Wayland, or pipewire issues, but as an employee, I don't have time to distro hop at work in search for the Linux experience with the least amount of jank or find out which component of this bazaar engineering efort is the one responsible for this jank.
Sure, I don't see ads in my Ubuntu install, but it's 2022 and the clipboard in Firefox in Ubuntu still stops working randomly, which causes me way more productivity loss than seeing a candy crush icon in the Win start menu. Firefox bug tracker says the clipboard issue fixed on their end whenever this bug gets reported and says it must be now a Wayland issue, while Wayland devs say this is a Firefox issue, meanwhile me and severa other Ubuntu users are complaining about our clipboards being broken in FF. FML, it's 2022 and I still can't have a working clipboard on Linux, one of the most used basic features on any OS. "Year of the Linux desktop." Yeah.
Not to mentions the lack of hibernate(not sleep) on Ubuntu. I spend almost an hour trying various tutorials and command line incantations that had the risk at bricking my OS, to get hibernate working, and no cigar, and I realized Ubuntu really, really wants you not to use hibernate at all cost. I never thought it would be missing a basic feature so simple as "dump entire RAM contents to SSD, then at power on, copy them back to RAM and resume". Sure, Linux boffins will tell me this is a limitation due to the use of Z-RAM compression or something, but me as an end user, I don't care which technical decision has lead to this limitation, as it doesn't fix my problem of not having hibernate.
It amazes me how much mind share Ubuntu still has with people. A lot of the Linux community has left Ubuntu over the past 5 years, especially since the Snaps were added.
LinuxMint is a vastly better experience today because it's focused on being the best for desktop users, while Ubuntu isn't any more.
>It amazes me how much mind share Ubuntu still has with people. A lot of the Linux community has left Ubuntu over the past 5 years, especially since the Snaps were added.
Not people, Ubtunu is what my company's IT departament provides everyone in the backend team use on our managed ThinkPads. I could protest, nuke it and spend time switching to Mint or something else based on 22.04 LTS that IT could also manage, but then I'm the one on the hook for any issues that arise with that one, and let's face it, it's Linux we're talking, no distro is ever bug free, they all show some jank once the honeymoon period is over depending on your hardware and software use cases.
Ubuntu is bizarrely terrible for being the main recommended distro. I have to assume they're heavily focused on the server space these days. It even shows ads when doing cli software updates these days! That's part of what people are trying to get away from in the first place!
I’ve never had problems with the clipboard or sharing. Unfortunately it sounds like you should use X for a few more years if you have no tolerance for issues.
Yes, X11 has virtually no bugs, but switching to X11 messes up touch pad gestures and gives me nauseating screen tearing when scrolling content, especially on my portrait oriented monitor. And no amount of googling command line incantations for xorg.conf or 20-intel.conf has fixed it (plus, a lot of the suggested answers were straight up wrong and would have bricked my display output if I just copied them from SO without knowing some Linux display driver basics), so back to Wayland and clipboard and screen capture/sharing issues.
This is in now way a good user experience.
Windows still beats Ubuntu hands down for me in terms of having less annoying issues that kill my productivity.
I tried, on the new job. I've dealt with windows for 6 months, but 2 weeks ago I was sick of it. There is always something not working right. If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, Windows 10 has training wheels and a hysterical helicopter mom screaming 'you're gonna fall!' all the time. Death by a 1000 papercuts. I've reformatted it and run kubuntu now. I will miss excel, and online outlook is not as good as the real thing, but these are sacrifices I am willing to make just to get rid of the whiney drug addict called windows 10.
I'm not going to say Linux is perfect. Plenty of dumb cuts in there too. But at least it treats me with respect, at least the KDE world does.
Ymmv, of course. The job is great enough to let each run his or her preferred OS. As a recent escapee from a hyper standardized environment, I am loving it