> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

As a user of Linux as my main desktop OS for more than 20 years, a user of Linux far longer than that, and a promoter of FOSS before that was a term, this has always been the question. Most of the world does not care. I suspect that is more true today than ever before. There are now adults that grew up in the age of social media that have no idea how local computing works.

Not to be negative but the "obstacles" to adopting Linux were never actually obstacles most of the time. Fifteen years ago my mother started using Linux as her main OS with no training. I gave her the login information, but never had a chance to show her how to use it, and she just figured it out on her own. Everything just worked, including exchanging MS Office documents for work.

Desktop Windows still has rough edges. Desktop MacOS still has rough edges. Desktop Linux still has rough edges. Pick your poison.

Niche professional software may lack native Windows support or require workarounds.

Windows has a strong grip in enterprise environments where it is desirable to remove desktop control from users.

You have things like FreeIPA and Samba making weak offers beyond directory services in that direction. You have things like OpenTofu and Ansible making partial efforts in that direction. But you don't have an integrated goto standard solution for giving Linux desktop control to the enterprise. So Windows continues its grip in the enterprise. (If I'm wrong, please post a correction here. I'll be grateful for the education.)

For companies less obsessed with taking control away from users, Windows has less of a grip.

I think you are thinking about it way too hard. Windows 11 is a dog. Constant hardware problems, slow, and frustrating UX. Is any desktop linux perfect? No, but its better than w11 right now.

This is an clarifying perspective. In particular, I think this sheds light on understanding the various perspectives in the thread:

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather: Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

We make choices, become passionate about some, and wear values we feel strongly about on our shoulder. What we witness here, I believe, is a conflation of two things:

A: Linux as a value: Representing open source software, rejecting bad corporate behavior, and as a philosophy for software ownership

B: Linux as a collection of related operating systems, as practical software.

I think trying to understand each person's perspective, and if it can be categorized as one or the other makes sense of this article, similar ones, and discussion. Someone in Category B evaluating operating systems as tools should not be viewed by someone in Category A as an affront to their identity. It may just be different use cases; different hardware; different priorities; different variants and versions of operating systems used.

MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux.

I have been running desktop Linux for a very long time, but I actually agree. There's a lot of rough edges. I do think a lot of these problems do go away if you are a bit proactive in choosing compatible hardware. I bought my mother in law a laptop for Christmas, and I put Linux Mint on there [1]. There were no issues getting it working on Mint with Cinnamon, but that's in no small part because I double checked all the common hardware (wi-fi, GPU, trackpad, etc) to make sure it worked fine in Linux and it did.

If you don't do your homework, it's definitely a crapshoot with hardware compatibility, and of course that sucks if you're telling people that they should "switch to Linux" on their existing hardware, since they might have a bad experience.

That said, it is weird that people seem to have total amnesia for the rough edges of Windows, and I'm not convinced that Windows has fewer rough edges than Linux. I've grown a pretty strong hatred for Windows Update, and the System Restore and Automatic Repair tools that never work. Oh, and I really think that NTFS is showing its age now and wish that Microsoft would either restart effort on ReFS or port over ZFS to run on root.

[1] Before you give me shit for this, if anything breaks I agreed to be the one to fix it, and I find that generally I can solve these kinds of problems by just using tmate and logging into their command line which AFAIK doesn't have a direct easy analog in Windows.

> hardware support isn’t always perfect

It's not perfect on windows either. Crashes, non working sleep on almost any windows laptop... at least compared to what Apple can do.

>niche professional software may lack native support

Microsoft Office is not "niche professional software"

> … desktop Linux still has rough edges …

My personal pet peeve is the GTK/Qt divide. Theming has an extra step, as you have to pick a matching theme for the other toolkit apps you inevitably end up using.

KDE/Qt has excellent scaling support, but GTK apps (OrcaSlicer for example) end up having blurry text or messed up text labels if you run a non-integer scaling resolution.

The Wayland transition almost seems akin to the IPv6 debacle. Support is there, but it’s half-baked in half the cases. I crave RDP remote access, but this is currently not possible with KRDP as it does not work with Wayland sessions. Wine is just getting there, but only with scary messages that say that it’s an experimental feature.

You overestimate the level of investment the average person can and will make for these freedoms. People buy Kindles because they work (and are heavily marketed), they buy Apple because they simply work, and will keep preferring windows to Linux until Linux offer a easier barrier to entry.

Microsoft will (almost already has) loose its advantage to Apple before it loses to Linux.

> Do we want our fundamental computing environment to be ultimately under our control, or controlled by private interests with their own incentives?

The reality is a lot more nuanced than that. Should one live in a forest, devoid of any city services and company of other individuals, so that one may be under "own control"? This is the essential value proposition with Linux and it's no wonder many prefer the comforting institution of proprietary prisons^Wsystems.

Will these issues with Linux ever be overcome?

I want to switch but I just don't feel confident yet, and I wonder how long the "yet" will remain.

Some desktop versions of GNU/Linux have rough edges. Self-important grognards think everyone should "git gud" and install Arch or waste a weekend waiting for Gentoo to compile in order to optimize the install. This article along with this one (https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desk...) go on about using an Arch-based distro rather than a Debian-based distro.

Clearly there will be challenges, minor or major.

The failure of these articles is the authors aren't going for distros that "just work". Want to undercut Microsoft's user base, grow GNU/Linux, and herald the year of Linux on desktop that's been promised for decades? Keep it simple.

Majority of people going online with their computers are browsing the web, doomscrolling, and engaging on social media. They're not pentesting with Rust, running an instance of a LLM, or setting up a webserver for giggles.

Keep it simple.

But pushing Arch and other beardy distros with these kinds of articles reeks of gatekeeping as if only "smart" people are allowed to engage online and control their experience. Everyone else should suck it up with Microsoft having Copilot phone home since they don't deserve to know better. And I don't care how much preamble they give about Debian-based and beginner distros, they're just wagging their dicks to easily-awed proles and relishing imagined egoboos from other neo-Stallmans.

Fusion360 is the one tool I wish had better wine support

> desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases

Windows is shit from the total management viewpoint: what it means to own and operate Windows over the long haul.

windows is okay when there is some program on it that works well and that you like, and you're interacting with that while avoiding Windows.

If Windows were the dominant platform and Windows were trying to eke out share, it wouldn't stand a chance.

Yeah but folks around here like to stick their heads in the sand when reminded that this is a very real and concerning barrier to adoption of desktop Linux. It could happen 1000 times and they’ll still scream that it’s either user error or even worse “it works on my machine”.

Until the Linux community stops pretending and accepts that these are real issues and they need addressing, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop.

Nobody cares about what runs under the hood (I mean the real market, not the dozen of us nerds), as long as it looks and plays nice. Market already uses linux both in the form of android but also as a server OS. For both of these the financial incentive was there for someone to write the drivers, make the UI user friendly (android users never have to open a terminal), create sales channels.

Desktop and laptop market is weird because no hardware vendor wants to compete with MS. The only one who does (apple), owns both the hardware and software as well as sales channels, so they are not affected by MS’s deals.

> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps

For people who are trying to get their work done now, in the present, this doesn’t change anything. We all know that Linux could technically run the same productivity apps and games if every company put enough investment money toward it. However even some of the apps I use which had a Linux version have announced that they’re sunsetting Linux compatibility due to low demand.

For all of the people whose work lives inside of text editors, web browsers, and terminals switching to Linux is easy. I think these threads become biased toward people who fit that description who don’t understand why everyone can’t just switch over.

> Viewed through the lens of digital autonomy and citizenship, the question isn’t simply “Is Linux perfect?” but rather:

That feels like a strawman argument. Most people don’t choose their OS on ideological grounds. The reasons people don’t use Linux isn’t because it’s not “perfect”. People use Windows because it works, it’s familiar, and their software runs on it. All of these calls to make OS choice about ideological wars isn’t convincing or even relevant to people who haven’t already switched to Linux.

I would argue that hardware support in Linux is superior to any other operating system on the planet.

> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.

Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.

The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).

So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.

I'll be glad if someone tells that I'm wrong but doesn't current windows 11 present even more of the same challenges? Last I tried, old driver compatibility in newer windowses was not fantastic, Wine slowly is becoming more compatible with legacy windows programs than the windows itself, forced updates are dealbreaker for many usecases. And need for workaroubds and poking around has reached Windows XP levels.

I mean, there are two ways to make Linux better alternative than Windows, and currently the main effort is coming from Microsoft...

>desktop Linux still has rough edges for some use cases, hardware support isn’t always perfect, and niche professional software may lack native support or require workarounds

Personally, I believe the REAL problem is the rough edges WITH Linux.

Hardware support? You can blame manufacturers for not supporting Linux. Software support? Same.

But if you use a Linux software made for Linux by Linux users and it just feels inconvenient, non-intuitive, buggy, and mentally painful to use, you're going to think that Linux is full of bad software. Because it doesn't matter if you use X11 or Wayland under the hood, you try to drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop or vice-versa and that only works in some DEs. You try to drag and drop an image from Chrome to the file manager, and that doesn't always work. You try to click the close button and sometimes there is a few pixels of padding at the top so you can't close the window on first try.

This isn't Nvidia's fault, or Adobe's fault, or Microsoft's fault. It's just Linux.

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