I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years.

1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me.

2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues that would take a whole afternoon of fighting are now just a couple back-and-forths with the LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini.

3) Valve and SteamOS. The large and mostly successful push by Valve to make Linux be the platform for gaming has cleared many Linux issues and hurdles on the way. I think this will have ripple effects in the industry. My prediction is that thanks to Valve and SteamOS we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years.

+1 on the UI thing.

I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system.

It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling.

Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week.

Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the kernel probably has hacks to support Office, and Explorer probably has hacks to support the kernel, etc.

The only other system I've felt this level of unity in is FreeBSD with its userland+kernel harmony.

Maybe I need to try a Linux desktop again as I haven't done it in ~10y but the other comment here about Fedora not feeling production ready doesn't inspire much hope...

Any ideas?

I used to argue in favor of Windows with basically the same argument. But honestly, using Windows nowadays seems to require even more hacking than Linux. Particularly if you don't have the newest hardware made to Microsoft's standards. Or don't want to deal with regular full-screen ads to update to Windows 11, or don't want Copilot jammed into every app.

I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.

Exactly.

I want to have a computer with stable vendor supported OS so _I can do my stuff_ not tweak some os level configs.

I _don’t_ want to spend my time playing an os systems programmer.

OS is a _component_. Like the wifi driver. I think it’s great some people love developing wifi drivers but personally I just want network that-just-works because there are billion other cool things you can do with a computer.

Similarly I want an OS that just works! Without asking me to do a anything! Because _i don’t really care_. (I mean i care it works but i expect the engineers actually developing an os offering to have a far better idea than myself what is a good stable default config for the system)

I miss win2k personally. the UI was decent, and I was able to install enough oss on it that it felt like I could do most of the things I did with linux, but with good font rendering. there were also, to my surprise, a couple of apps (winmerge and proxomitron) that felt like they should totally have been linux apps, but for which I have yet to see anything as good over on the linux side.

I am using Windows now for about 20 years after being a FreeBSD user. I switched to Linux actually to be able to interact with my work environment which was using Windows tools (both office but also embedded development tools at the time) and I think virtualization/emulation was a lot easier. After bricking my laptop multiple times while traveling, because I always feeled inclined to fiddle with everything in my OS even during meetings. Linux was the perfect distraction (also me having latent ADHD). I eventually switched to windows for my laptop, when I needed to focus on productivity. What was meant to be temporary was permanent. I actually have stayed a console user and still use a lot of cygwin, using also the posix compat stuff earlier and now using WSL. Lately I even learned to like Powershell a bit. Only the latest annoyance with trying to force me into the Microsoft cloud and the temporarily very instable UI (taskbar hangs with not updating clock made me miss meetings) makes me think about switching to a free OS again seriously.

It’s really unclear whether you have any Linux experience. Because it feels like someone who knows Windows very well, and spent some time with Linux here and there.

Me too! I daily-drive Windows as my personal, Mac for work stuff, and Linux for all server-like activity. And I have been for 20 years.

> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues

This is one of the points where people have vastly different experiences. I'm one of those that has fewer issues with Linux, and I definitely don't spend hours fixing problems. And this despite the fact that I use Arch, which is supposed to be an unstable distro. Why is that different users report so different experiences I don't know. I think that this might be partly due to perception: we tend to forgive more the OS we like. But your case doesn't seem to be just about perception. So I wonder how much the hardware could play a role here. I think Linux has quite good hardware support nowadays, but maybe I was just lucky so far.

I hear you, me personally I only use Fedora when it comes to Linux. It is easy to install, has everything I need. I keep everything default - maybe change wallpaper and install my apps and IDE. That is it. From this standpoint it is MUCH better than a Windows box for games, which always has some ads, long update, sometimes it breaks, a lot software is actually writing their config in "My Documents" folder which bugs me a lot AND I do not have to have Microsoft account (actually I don't need any account on that matter) to create a local account on my own computer. So yes, I would agree with inferiority argument almost completely. If Linux got a bit mainstream, the ecosystem and apps would follow very quickly I am sure. But Microsoft is trying hard to people try out Linux (which is good btw) so let's see. Myself, I am off to Fedora even for the games, I am done with Copilot and inability to have offline account.

>Windows does a better job of managing memory/swaps

Not sure I can buy that one

> anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience.

MS has made hacking out the BS harder and harder with each new version of Windows. Back in the Windows XP days, yes, I could avoid a lot of the BS on my home Windows computer (although I still had to deal with it at work because work computers are usually locked down so employees don't even have admin rights to them--if I have an issue with my work computer I have to put in a support ticket to the IT department). But even then there was enough friction on my Windows home computer to make me start using Linux at home. For a few years I was running both OSs at home, but even that got to be too difficult, and I simply stopped using the Windows computer at home, at least for my own use (see below). I've never looked back.

I do still have one Windows laptop at home, because some of the Python programs I write (I write them on the Linux computer) have to run on Windows, so I have to have a way of testing them. Even that is clunky compared to how easy it is to do things on my Linux computers. That laptop runs Windows 10, and if I am ever forced to upgrade it to Windows 11, I will probably just stop testing my programs on Windows (fortunately my livelihood does not depend on being able to do that), because Windows 11 is a nonstarter for me; the BS level has just gotten too high.

> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues.

As someone who has been running Linux at home for well over twenty years now, this has not been my experience. Back when I still had Windows computers at home, I spent more time dealing with issues with them than I have spent dealing with issues with my Linux computers at home.

I would make similar comments about the rest of your post.

Windows USED to have a polished UX. Is it still better than most Linux distros? Maybe.

But it has regressed so far from where it was 25 (or more) years ago that every day I'm still infuriated and depressed that I've had to return to it for work. The idiotic UI blunders alone must waste hours of my life per week.

Aside from the absolutely baffling functionality removals, there are the hateful petty ones. Great example: the removal of Remote Desktop. I erred in getting my parents Windows laptops, thinking they'd benefit from the familiarity. NOPE. And when they encounter some defective bullshit that stops them from doing what they're trying to do, they call me for help but I can't log in from 2400 miles away because MICROSOFT REMOVED THAT ABILITY. Disgraceful.

What about Macs, you use those?

the swap and vm tuning required on Linux to make it work even somewhat reasonably compared to Windows or macOS is batshit insane - or brain dead to quote Linus. you shouldn't need to do any of it and yet if you don't you risk hard locking your system when you run out of RAM - or even just write a lot to a disk - with zero warning.

Linux just isn't friendly to newcomers.

1. Lots of rough edges "yeah it almost works if you tweak it a little" yeah thank you but no.

2. CLI is better for doing the thing you want, but GUI is better for discovering what options you have in the first place. The fact that GUI is an afterthought on Linux says a lot.

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