There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

[Unpopular opinion] Linux is not a good choice for regular users

I’ve been using all major OSes for a long time. I have the most experience with Windows, I’ve been using it since Windows 95 and stopped at Windows 8. I’ve been using macOS for about a decade and Linux (in total) for about 5 years. I have started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I’ve been using Fedora as my daily driver. And honestly, I’m running out of patience.

Few days ago I ran into the gpu driver issue. Long story short, Steam games started to crash on directx issue. Games that were working few weeks ago. I admit, I was mocking around with GPU drivers in order to make Podman containers to access the GPU. But I did the fresh diver install and it didn’t solved the issue (also my GPU was not found despite all commands showed it was there). I don’t have much spare time and I would like to play a game, I used to play before, without spending hours/days fixing issue that didn’t exist last time I played it.

But it’s not only about games. I have two laptops, both running Fedora 40 KDE spin. Some time ago on one laptop the power widget stopped working. It shows “no power profiles found on a device”. But when I delete the widget and add it again, it works fine.

Other issue is with the general look and feel. There are many apps that don’t follow the OS look - lack of window borders/shadow, random icons that don’t match the system, flatpacks having issues accessing system configuration (e.g. vscodium not recognising zsh as a default shell).

Few more problems I had:

  • on GNOME, some extensions where crashing without any reason
  • some apps don’t respect desktop scaling
  • bluetooth randomly dropping connections
  • syncing files between devices is always a struggle
  • you never know what’s going to break when installing updates

If you want a Linux like experience use macOS, and if you want to play games, stick to Windows.

meldrik ,

You are not a regular user. My parents are regular users and they have been using Linux for years. They don’t know though. That’s a regular user.

UnfortunateShort ,

tldr: Linux can have driver issues and programs or updates might not work as expected. So anything you can expect from any major OS.

Meltrax , (edited )

You were fucking with your GPU drivers, lost access to your GPU, and you have concluded from that that “regular users” (who don’t know what a driver is or does) should not use Linux?

EDIT: Stick a “normal” user on a stable distro with a clean UI like Mint or Fedora, keep in mind they probably don’t know what a terminal is and will probably never use it, and they will be fine for almost all cases.

fart_pickle OP ,

As I said, I did a clean install and still all Steam games were failing on directx issue. Also, a “regular” user when switching to Linux will have to know what a GPU driver is in order to use it, event if it’s just for playing games. And the cherry on top - once I fixed the directx issue and I was able to play a game I wanted, the drivers update broke it. And despite spending days on fixing the issue, I got back to a square one.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

If they use windows they also know what a GPU driver is, if they use AMD that’s better on linux, they don’t need to know what a GPU driver is. Unless of course the “normal” user need a rocm driver.

andrewta ,

He listed just a few more things then that

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

I think Windows has a very poor track record for ui consistency as well. It feels like every Windows app wants to roll its own UI; Firefox, Discord, Steam etc. I know Discord and Steam also have those issues on Linux as well, but it feels like every Windows app wants to roll out it’s own window decorarions and theme.

Honestly, I’m pleased at how consistent most gtk based apps look.

slazer2au ,

Windows can’t even get their own UI right.

Look at the win10 control panel. Nearly a decade later and we still have to use the classic control panel to change settings.

vikingtons ,
@vikingtons@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been lucky enough to dumb guy my fedora install since 28, and it’s been pretty decent to me. Granted I’m not using nvidia graphics, and I feel like that could throw a big spanner in the works for regular users. It’s a big enough leap getting into the mindset of installing software from Distro repos rather than directly from the vendor.

I hope the newer nv open kernel modules don’t stay out of tree. Also hope that NVK will give users the ability to just plug and play with mesa drivers in the future.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •