[incrudible]

The problem with Linux is that there is no legitimate place to direct your rage at. It is free, nobody owes you anything and every installation is different. When Windows is awful, virtually everyone is being sympathetic. When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

[Uupis]

I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.

[cgio]

You could argue that, with Windows there is a legitimate place to direct your rage at, but the action of directing your rage does not actually have any effect on improving your experience. With Win and Mac, no one cares, because they already have their customers locked in and tight, they will accept any experience degradation. With Linux, you are not a customer so no customer complaints, but still arguably much better support.

[incrudible]

> "Arguably much better support"

If you come at it like a sinner asking for penance, the englightened may come to guide, but that's not what I'm talking about. If you to rage, these same people will become inquistors. Rage isn't all about solving a problem, it's about catharsis. It's not so much about technical support, it's about emotional support. A bad design decision (like the GNOME desktop redesign) is not a technical problem. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[freedomben]

Agreed. And also, if there's something you don't like or a project going in a direction you don't agree with, there is virtually guaranteed to be other people out there that feel the same that are building something different

[devsda]

> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

There are also people who often claim that their installation of Linux always crashes after every single update, their favourite commodity hardware that's a decade old still doesnt work out of the box on Linux etc etc.

The truth is somewhere in between and its a lot closer to the positive experience these days compared to the old days.

[dweinus]

When Windows is awful, everyone is sympathetic except for their support. They are beyond useless.

Ubuntu with support is totally a thing, not sure if it is good or not.

Windows 11 Home: $139/license Ubuntu with support: $150/yr

[Telaneo]

> When Linux is awful, there is a genre of people that made using Linux an integral part of their identity, that will explain to you how your frustrations are really your own personal failures.

On the one hand, yes, this is not a nice thing to have happen. The frustrations shouldn't happen to begin with, and then people shouldn't be using the reverse Uno card on you just for that.

On the other hand, Linux has a lot fewer of these frustrations (in my experience), and a lot of frustrations are being fixed with time, since you're likely not the only one who is frustrated by it.

On the third hand, the situation being shit for obvious human reasons, not enough dev time, disagreements about the way forward, as is the case with Linux development, is a much, much nicer thing to have your problems caused by, rather than the source of Windows being shit, that is, someone wasn't happy with their dashboard this morning and decided to make that your problem today.

[thewebguyd]

You can always buy someone to direct your rage at if you are a business and wanting to deploy Linux though. Red Hat, Suse, Canonical will all happily sell you support contracts and guarantees.

[atoav]

Idk. My main frustration with Linux has nothing to do with the OS itself. Linux is pretty good actually. My main frustration has to do with software that doesn't run on Linux that I have to use occasionally. So things that force me not to use Linux. But that has gotten much better over the years.

And meanwhile my Windows and MacOS experience has gotten much worse. So I feel pretty good with using Linux as my daily driver for the past 6 years.

[tempsaasexample]

I installed Linux Mint Mate on my parents home computer and they have less issues than they ever had with windows 10-11

[anjel]

Whats to rage about w/ Linux?

Like Apple used to warrant, it just works.

[chongli]

A lot of rage over systemd from what I recall.

I raged a lot when my Arch machine would break after an update and I'd have to do config file surgery on a machine that no longer wanted to boot into a graphical desktop. I've never had that sort of thing happen on Mac or Windows.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything. Whenever I've hit a problem with an Arch machine (I think it's only twice), it was written quite clearly in the update notes along with the fix.

It's actually surprising just how stable Arch Linux can be considering that it's typically using the newest code for everything. If you really want Arch and stability, maybe using something like SteamOS would be better - Arch, but designed to be stable.

[incrudible]

> Well, that's definitely on you. Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything.

"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now."

[ndsipa_pomu]

Well, it is known as a bleeding edge distro

I don't know, apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at all.

[DANmode]

> Arch do warn people to actually read the changelogs if you're going to update/upgrade everything

I used to daily Arch, and I read landers/docs/community pages as a hobby, basically.

I’ve never seen this.

I’m not doubting you, to be clear - I just really want to see it! lol

Link?

[ndsipa_pomu]

It's a while since I used Arch (apart from my Steam Deck, but that's a bit different as it's curated and has a read only root filesystem by default), so I've had a look around and I think I meant reading the "Latest News" at https://archlinux.org/

e.g.

> NVIDIA 590 driver drops Pascal and lower support; main packages switch to Open Kernel Modules

> 2025-12-20

> With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open.

> Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment.

> Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

> Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.

> Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

> Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

Personally, I used to just run an upgrade and then go look for known problems if pacman threw an error. Of course, the recommendation is to have a good backup before running the upgrade and just roll it back if it has issues (then read the notes).

Edit: The warning is shown on the system maintenance page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance

> 3.1 Read before upgrading the system

> Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.

[chongli]

It was on me, that's why I stopped using Arch. I wanted a computer, a tool for getting work done, not a hobby to tinker with.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Yeah, I stopped using it myself as I didn't really need a bleeding edge system. It's actually surprising just how reliable Arch is - I think if you want to run it in production system, you don't bother doing a system upgrade without testing it first.

I do like the Arch wiki though - probably the best source of information on Linux tools etc.

[pm3003]

sudo pacman -Syu. -> Secure boot config broken, OS won't boot (Manjaro this summer with some Intel firmware update). No HDMI sound on nvidia for some distros until recently. Getting the Wifi to work ootb on Mint is not always easy..

[baobun]

> Manjaro

That's your problem right there. EndeavourOS is also a beginner-friendly Arch derivative but less breaky.

> Wifi to work ootb

I definitely feel you on that one, it's just the luck of the draw sometimes... If you haven't considered it, in some laptops the wifi module is a replacable mPCIe or m2 module and if that's the case, more compatible replacements shouldn't be hard to find for cheap or salvaged from broken laptops.