[klabb3]

Genuinely curious to what makes it miserable. I mostly love my basic Ubuntu setup (and especially compared to the clown show that is modern Windows), and although I’m a software engineer I am neither particularly good at nor have any interest in tinkering with my Linux setup. It mostly just works (except for distribution of apps outside of the package manager - that sucks!). That said, I’m on desktop - I think anything with batteries and touch interfaces is often more buggy.

[qwerpy]

I wouldn't say miserable, but there are sharp edges that don't exist in Windows or MacOS. I've been steadily getting annoyed at Windows so I've started trialing my steam deck as a desktop replacement when I travel. It's mostly fine. But the lack of ability to set scroll wheel speed across the entire OS annoys me every time and after weeks of trying to find a solution, I've learned way more than I should need to about mouse drivers and Wayland and libinput, and I still don't have an acceptable solution to it. Many others have had this issue and each component blames the other for some idealistic reasons. The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

These edge cases are annoying to test and fix and you have to pay smart people to grind out the time to do it. You need program managers who coordinate across teams to drive a solution. This is why linux hasn't solved it after all these years. The smart people would rather work on cool new features.

[klabb3]

> The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

I do agree with this and share your pain, even though to me it's never been that bad. But you're right, it's a big blame game between linux, distros, gnome, wayland, etc, and the result is fragmentation. And a ton of users are left in the middle when mom and dad are fighting violently over age-old issues like dynamic linking and which window manager is the best. The fact that linux has a much more narrow scope than commercial OSs has some significant downsides.

Ironically, I get the sense that Torvalds agrees with this, it's just that he can't afford to increase the scope outside of the kernel, which is already a super-human effort. I got the sense he wishes everyone else can iron out their differences, while he (correctly, probably) assumes it's wiser tend to his garden than to get involved in other battles.