Linux/*BSD may still be that awkward friend who sometimes misreads your intentions and causes awkward moments or knocks glasses over, but at least tries to respect you (snapd excepted). Windows these days doesn't seem to respect you.
There's a difference in my mind between struggling to make your computer do something (because nobody made it easy yet) and struggling to make your computer do something (because a marketing team decided to try to stop you). Resolving the first scenario feels like working for myself, the other feels like fighting an adversary.
I try to not use products that don't respect me. That's fundamentally what keeps me almost exclusively on FOSS. Better alignment of incentives for what I'm trying to do.
I use Linux (Ubuntu Mate) at home and Windows 11 at work (care giving at someone's home, helping him do minimal things).
Linux is like a friend, not even awkward at this point.
Windows is like a drunk at a bar, who, half an hour ago, was just talking too loudly but now has started groping you.
In ten years, I can imagine Windows trying to override literally anything someone does on their machine, including the text they type, if MS can imagine profits. Nothing is off the table, why should it be. Nothing stops this.
Do you want to upgrade your OS? Why not? C'mon, it's free! Please? Please upgrade your OS? Oh hey! I upgraded your OS while you were sleeping, no need to thank me.
This resonates with me, as someone who switched to Linux awhile back for similar reasons. Having an overtly adversarial relationship with the company who makes a major tool of mine is not a pleasant experience.
In addition to the points you raised, it always feels possible to fix something with Linux. It might an annoying PITA problem, but I can probably figure it out if I care enough to. With Windows (or Mac) when I encounter a problem with the OS, I never know if it's fixable or something the parent company insists on forcing on users.
> it always feels possible to fix something with Linux. It might an annoying PITA problem, but I can probably figure it out if I care enough to. With Windows (or Mac) when I encounter a problem with the OS, I never know if it's fixable or something the parent company insists on forcing on users.
This is such an important point imo. It characterizes an essential aspect of why using GNU/Linux just feels good to me, and why I feel boxed in on the big two proprietary desktops these days.
On Linux, the problems feel like my mess, my unfinished chores. They might be annoying, but they're not an invasion.
After long enough it gets tiring battling people who's intent is ultimately maximum wealth extraction, rather than simply producing a good piece of software.
The intent behind most FOSS projects is just about the software, and sometimes we disagree on what and how (but that's why we have choices)... and some things are a bit creaky and come from different ages and don't fit perfectly together, but with a bit of fiddling and understanding you can gradually accumulate things that do what you want - and so it becomes more comfortable over time, not less, because they don't try to betray you at every turn.
Apt-news made me finally leave Ubuntu after over a decade. I went to Debian and Arch depending.
Seeing ‘apt update’ shill r/Linux was the last straw after forcing-snap, forcing-Amazon ads, Wayland vs Mir, etc. I should have left years ago. Canonical, are you listening? Stop.
People complain about snap and unity (and wayland, systemd, gnome 3) all the time instead; some of those are harder to avoid any particular distribution.
I put Linux on my mom's laptop when it needed a good refurbish for this exact reason and IT support requests from her dropped to basically zero, even for seemingly platform-agnostic stuff like printing. Did everything she needed, I could update it for her over ssh, and just chugged along perfectly reliably since she isn't a poweruser that's poking at every part of her distro.
Precisely. I get frustrated with computer interfaces that are hard to use all the time. But at least then it’s just the program which is stupid; I don’t have to get mad at anyone. But to have to deal with things that are actively working against me due to deliberate design decisions? That’s outright infuriating.
Bluetooth support on windows 10 is by far the worst of any operating system in the last decade. It's an absolute joke.
Bluetooth and wifi honestly do "just work" these days. There are some old or weird radios that don't have good drivers, but that's a problem money will solve. Just buy a radio known to work.
I can't say I've done much printing or scanning in the last few years, but it's basically fine these days. It's annoying as hell, but printers are always annoying, in any situation.
All of these were common problems several years ago, but they're pretty much solved these days. The real sticking point now is GPU drivers, and less commonly audio drivers. Linux is generally quite usable for a large number of people these days.
I also use Ubuntu and have no problems with printers and scanners and bluetooth. As annoying as Ubuntu is it does work out of the box for everything I've thrown at it
There are still a lot of wireless chipsets out there that suck ASS. If you want to get good support, just get whatever hardware most kernel developers use
I learnt my lesson 20 years ago when WiFi was a thing at first, that if you buy cheap crappy no-name WiFi cards, nothing is going to support them right, not even the manufacturer's drivers.
Bluetooth on Linux works better than windows. Windows' Bluetooth implementation is the worst on the market, by a lot.
Bluetooth really does work flawlessly on Linux. I've even got a few cheap and nasty Chinese Bluetooth adapters that don't work on windows, but work fine under Linux.
I try to not use products that don't respect me. That's fundamentally what keeps me almost exclusively on FOSS. Better alignment of incentives for what I'm trying to do.
It's worth noting that MS used to be far less hostile towards the user, and FOSS is not necessarily going to align with your incentives either[1]. To see what MS software was like before they became user-hostile, you can go to archive.org and get a download of Windows XP or older, along with some other MS software of the time, and try it in a VM.
[1] Notable examples being Ubuntu trying adware, the whole controversy surrounding systemd, and the direction Firefox is heading.
This beautifully sums up my experience with windows and Linux. Fighting my misbehaving Linux computer feels productive. Fighting windows just makes me angry and tired.
Yeah Linux is hard, but at least it isn't hard on purpose.
Windows has always been like that though. I remember switching to Linux full time back when XP was first released because I hated the direction Microsoft were going. The complaints people make now aren’t any different from the complaints I was making 20+ years ago.
Even snapd is mostly just an Ubuntu issue, you can always switch distros (though obviously Ubuntu is the most visible distortion so it’s actions have a lot of weight).
I see these things as being disrespectful about snapd (happy to be proven wrong):
- apt install firefox and other packages actually install via snap on Ubuntu. My intent was to install via apt. It should prompt me instead of silently using a different tool with different implications. For example, my firefox profile was silently copied to another folder with zero notification, causing issues with my tooling.
- they're only now adding the ability to pause updates (an experimental feature!), after aggressively pushing snapd for years. Work arounds included telling the OS the Internet connection is metered, which sounds familiar. https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--...
I feel disrespected when a tool imposes its own schedule on me and fights to enforce it. I appreciate that they added the Hold feature, but I feel the way we got it was due to continual, years long community push back. Reasonable defaults are fine. Let me edit them without fighting me.
- proprietary server implementation, only canonical gets to run one or modify behavior. Distros can't run their own. I get that this might reduce fragmentation. To me the disrespect comes from not giving me a choice.
To me it's fine to aggressively push a tech. What I take issue with is the apparent intent to reduce end user control. If my impression is wrong, I'll recant. At least snapd seems to have slowly improved, my nfs mounts actually work in most snap apps now...
There's a difference in my mind between struggling to make your computer do something (because nobody made it easy yet) and struggling to make your computer do something (because a marketing team decided to try to stop you). Resolving the first scenario feels like working for myself, the other feels like fighting an adversary.
I try to not use products that don't respect me. That's fundamentally what keeps me almost exclusively on FOSS. Better alignment of incentives for what I'm trying to do.