helmet91 , 9 months ago

I don’t really get why some people cultivate FOSS so much that they refuse to install anything that even remotely contains proprietary parts. Of course I understand the advantages of FOSS, but I won’t go against proprietary software. I use whatever offers the best functionality, stability, usability for my tasks.

And that’s actually the exact reason why I use Linux.

MacOS is quite good too, but I cannot afford the hardware necessary for it, plus I hate Mac keyboard layout so freaking much. Yes, it’s possible to get used to it, but only if I exclusively use Mac. Since I’m switching between computers all the time, this is a deal breaker for me. Plus I enjoy the better customisability of Linux. And last but not least, although macOS UI is packed with clever solutions, I still find a KDE or a Gnome UI a little bit more usable.

As for Windows… where do I even begin lol… Let’s just say, it’s way too buggy, way too unreliable, way too much hassle for me. Back in the days, when I started using Linux (about 15 years ago), this wasn’t the case. Around that time Windows was a stable, reliable OS, which worked very well and it was convenient to use. I’m talking about XP and later 7. (Vista and 8 were the poor ones in the infamous good-bad-good-bad-… pattern.) Meanwhile on Linux it was sometimes quite hard to make some hardware work, and the applications weren’t very robust, sometimes they crashed, sometimes the whole OS crashed, and generally the whole thing felt like a hobby-OS.

But things changed over time. In the past decade I haven’t experienced any serious anomaly on Linux, all my hardware work out-of-the-box, and in maybe the past 5 years or even more, I absolutely haven’t experienced any issue at all, not even minor ones. Nothing. This thing is just super stable. You install it once, keep updating it, and it just runs perfectly forever. Windows went the opposite way: my graphics card, for example, stopped working, because Windows deleted the driver during an update, it’s a hassle to set up everything, it doesn’t just work out-of-the-box, it crashes sometimes, it’s pumped full of bloatware and ads.

And I generally find a UNIX-like system much more comfortable to use than Windows, especially for programming. Yes, there’s WSL on Windows - but that didn’t always work out well for me. I could go on and on and on all day, but long story short, the structure of Linux is more convenient and more comfortable to use for me.

So why I switched to Linux back then, you might ask. That time was different: I was experimenting with everything, and at first I used both Windows and Linux, former one being my main system. And as time went by, I slowly got more and more familiar with Linux, and I realized how convenient it was for my tasks. And at some point I stuck with it despite the occasional issues, which - as I mentioned - have gotten resolved long ago already.

I still use proprietary software. I use Steam, because that’s probably the biggest game library and it supports Linux. I use JetBrains developer tools.

There’s this Affinity suite that I would love to use, or even Corel software, but unfortunately both of them failed to provide a Linux version, and I refuse to purchase software that doesn’t run on Linux. Thus I’m stuck with Inkscape (awesome, but always crashes with bigger files), Gimp (I hate its UI so much), Darktable (kinda slow, plus some modules broke in the latest update, but otherwise awesome).

Luckily photo/graphics editing is less than 5% of the tasks I have, so the inconvenience of this area is negligible. For what I mostly use my computer, Linux is the best platform for me.