I didn’t go back to Windows, at least not directly.
I was enjoying Linux on my old lap, but then I managed to get a MacBook Pro 2014 in that year and ditched Linux for macOS they are very alike although macOS is way more closed…
Then I discovered you can’t go full macOS either, that’s why I BootCamp as well with W10 installed, I barely touch it but it’s still there for simple things like running .bat scripts, having a no lame NTFS support, and some light Steam gaming and local government software gore.
I can’t use Fusion 360 on Linux, so I dual boot windows. But that’s the only time I ever go back. I don’t even run a bootloader with options and you’d never know Windows is on my machine unless you interrupted the boot process and checked boot drives. Getting into Windows is a manual process on my system.
Last time I tried Linux was about 10 years ago. I installed multiple different combinations until I found one I liked (I forget which though). I was attending university at the time (chemistry) and had it dual booting so I could switch back to Windows as needed. I really tried, but everything on the Linux side was just so buggy or complicated.
I was using Open Office or something similar, mainly for spreadsheets, and I just kept needing to switch back to Windows so I could spend my time getting the actual work done, rather than trying to figure out how to make the computer work. It was so long ago that I don't remember the details, but I vaguely remember it repeatedly freezing up on me for relatively simple spreadsheet tasks.. the kind of stuff they teach in beginners or maaaaybe intermediate Excel tutorials with 10-50 rows of data.
Eventually, I gave up on trying to do any of my work in Linux and figured I'd come back to it when I had some free time. When I finally had some free time, I decided to wipe the current Linux install and try something else. I had gone through the installation process so many times before that I thought I remembered the steps. Well, I didn't, and I managed to delete something super critical and couldn't even boot to Windows anymore. After much trial and error, some kind internet stranger offered to help walk me through it.. the only problem was that they were only familiar with Arch (?), so that was the distro we were going to use to get me back up and running. We got it fixed so that my computer dual boots, but I have to supervise the boot process every time since the default boot is Arch, and I'm just not ready to deal with that.
I've casually looked a few times to see if I can figure out how to change the boot order, but I'm too scared I'll end up worse off, so I've just left well enough alone since then.
I have an Android phone and rooting it is always the first thing I do, so it hasn't scared me off tinkering altogether, but I hardly touch a PC outside of work anymore, so there's just no motivation to try again.
I started using Linux desktops at work around 5 or 6 years ago, and even since then, the experience has improved greatly.
I’ve been on various distros with KDE over the past couple of years, but from what I’ve seen in passing, Gnome “just works” really well with most distros that use it. KDE requires some tweaking occasionally, but since 5.27, it’s been rock solid for me, and the KDE team seems really dedicated to making Plasma 6 stable and easy to use.
You might want to fire up a VM or throw Ubuntu on an old laptop and see how it feels. It really has gotten a lot better for the average user, and something like Mint, imo, is really easy to pick up and just use.
Personally, I really like customization, and I work as a DevOps engineer (formerly linux sysadmin), so I don’t mind getting really deep into the OS if necessary. But I don’t think you have to if you want to have a good experience.
For me it’s mostly been visual stuff.
There are native packages, Appimages, Flatpaks, Snaps. Native packages are GTK or Qt-based, so you could potentially have five different visual styles at the same time. Everything can be fixed, except for Appimages, but it requires some degree of tinkering which isn’t always guaranteed to work. For instance, I was looking for a feed reader and tried Fluent Reader: it is an Appimage based on Fluent Design, so it looks completely out of place if you don’t customize your desktop to make it look like Windows. Then I tried Akgregator: I picked the Flatpak version, and it was a complete mess even when using Flatseal (some backgrounds black, others white). Also, without proper configuration, the cursor theme may change according to the aforementioned app categories.
One last thing you may not like are icons. Most distributions come with some custom icon theme, which of course cannot reasonably apply to all applications out there: those that are not supported need to provide their own icon, which could look very bad depending on the desktop environment. For example, on Cinnamon they were very jagged, like their resolution was too high. This probably also depends on the application.
Another thing I usually notice is how slow the mouse wheel works in some apps, like Appimages for instance. And in general there’s no way to change the amount of lines scrolled per wheel click at OS level, while apps rarely give you the option to customize it. Firefox does though, and for me this mean I had to run Bitwarden, Telegram, WhatsApp, a feed reader all inside Firefox. Thanks but no thanks.
I’d say no particular changes are necessary to use Linux full time, you should just turn a blind eye to this stuff.
P.S. Also, everything looks way too large w.r.t. Windows. I tried Thunderbird on both systems, and for some reason the delete icon is 50% bigger on Linux (using the same density option)
Tried out a few times in the 90s and early 2000s and the biggest barrier was lack of support for video cards and other hardware that I needed for gaming. It was also more complex to set up at that time, and windows was both easier to work with and resolving issues was easier to figure out.
In all cases I was dual booting and after a while just stopped trying with Linux because the other option was easier, not because I disliked Linux.
Haven't tried recently because windows 10 and 11 have been rock stable for me and Windows Defender plus Firefox and ublock origin have made it safe to use windows. While I thought about giving it a go again recently, I just don't have a reason to switch when things are going to well and I don't have time anymore to just fiddle with it due to other priorities.
I do keep an eye out though in case I do a media server or something as that would be a good use case for another go.
I used Linux for maybe 15 years and I have to say I absolutely love it. I even attended Fedora Flock conference, I was really into all the FOSS world. But at some point I guess I got really tired of editing text files on a command line and googling to solve specific problems or just plain OS settings.
I can’t say that I don’t miss it though and especially more now than ever the itch is there and I am curious to install and use Linux again, so I dunno…
Admittedly, it's been a long time since I did anything with linux, but I have done some. I'm not a developer, I don't know how to write any code. I know some DOS scripting and now some powershell. If I need to do anything slightly different with linux, it would require me to learn a whole new scripting language, and all of the documentation I've seen for anything linux seems to be written for an audience of people who already really know what they're doing in linux and just need a specific reference material.
I've had mainly Windows machines all my life, I have been forced by necessity to figure out how to do what I need on those. I imagine if I'd had linux machines since ... 1995? I would feel as comfortable with linux now. But the barrier to entry to even having a linux machine, let alone making it do what I needed it to do, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, was way higher than it was for Windows. It arguably still is.
I hate the CLI and every time I had an issue every manual or forum or user would give me the solution using the CLI.
Also gaming. There is lots that runs fine on Linux now, but there is also lots which does not. Especially gaming peripherals like my Fanatec wheel and pedals.
I got tired of everything taking so much effort. I was almost always able to eventually wrangle what I wanted out of the OS, but every change I wanted to make and thing I wanted to try needed so much searching and learning. I wanted stuff that just worked, even if it was "dumber."
That, and some parts of the community I ran into were really prickly. One that was especially memorable: I was asking for help on a big-ish project with a lot of followers and helpers and didn't expect the lead dev to answer my question, but when he did, he felt the need to make a snide as hell comment about how I have no business being there if I'm going to forget to start a service. On top of the exhaustion I was already feeling, I had a massive moment of "okay my guy, I guess I'll just fucking leave then."
Anyway, it just feels better being a poweruser on windows. I know enough to keep it clean, safe, and slim (like using powershell to disable the bits they don't expose to a settings UI, for example) -- to truly admin my machine -- without having to work so hard for it day in and day out.
Yikes, that is why I hate tech forums. Too many times I’ve asked an informed question I’m unable to find via search and the first replier basically says “hey go FUCK yourself.”
I was trying to run my own personal-use instance of LiveJournal back 20 years ago when it was open source (and not owned by Russia). Just to see if I could, as is the spirit of a tinkerer.
There was a handful of paid staff as well as a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers, so I expected one of them to answer a low-priority newbie support request, not.. what I got.
Unfortunately, those kinds of interactions are inevitable when the developer/user relationship is so close. And it goes both ways. I saw a thread just yesterday where a user reported an issue on github, a second user said they saw it too. Later the first user posted a workaround to the issue, and the second user came back with “took you long enough”, and that was the end of the exchange.
Some people in the world are just dicks, but that doesn’t mean we should reject interacting with everyone. Similarly, a community of user-maintained software is going to have some asshats, but that doesn’t mean we should hand our computing freedom over to one or two corporations. Just my two cents.
Some people in the world are just dicks, but that doesn’t mean we should reject interacting with everyone.
Corollary: Your personal aversion to corporations doesn't mean users have have any motivation or obligation to keep trying when we're getting pushback from both the software and those who maintain it.
Anyway, I'm not sure how you got that I reject interacting with everyone after my experience, but extrapolating my statement to that kind of extreme phrasing sure doesn't fill me with confidence about future interactions, either.
Hey there, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m not discounting anything you’re saying, I agree that it’s definitely a very real phenomenon, and didn’t intend to provoke a defensive response. I didn’t say that you were “rejecting interacting with everyone”, on the contrary, I’m saying that in the physical world you deal with people who act like dicks, but you specifically DON’T reject interacting with everyone. I’m drawing a parallel between that behavior in the physical world with how I believe we should also behave in the digital one.
I also did not say that I have any personal aversion to corporations, I owe most of my daily comforts to corporations, so I would be a hypocrite to say as much. But if I had said that “I don’t think we should stick our hands in blenders” that doesn’t mean I have a personal aversion to blenders.
I still can't really agree that the comparison holds; we try harder in real life because the bar for being a dick is (usually) higher. On the internet, when all it takes is a few easy sentences to be a dick to a faceless stranger whose reaction we don't have to see... to me, the response should be equally fluid, else we get bogged down being the only one putting in the effort and taking a constant beating to our self-esteem when we wonder why no one is bothering to hear us.
However, I appreciate you being chill about clearing up what you meant. I did initially miss the comparison you were going for and feel like I was getting cereal box therapy about not cutting people off (and thus staying in toxic communities) when that wasn't what you meant.
I hear you, perhaps there is a fundamental difference there with the digital world.
I really want to see some linux distro get to the point that users don’t have to wonder if something has gone horribly wrong for them. As much as I do disapprove of some of Apple’s repairability policies, and as much of a toxic human being Jobs was, Steve Jobs really was a visionary. He saw that if you paid attention to detail, you could turn a computer into something that “just worked” for people who weren’t tech savvy. Until that point, it was engineers selling to other engineers, they just couldn’t see the potential that technology had. As far as I can tell, the linux world has never had someone with such a relentless vision for user experience. I personally think it’s because the opportunity for profit just isn’t there, or at least no one sees it.
But there was a time when buying a windows license meant you got a copy of windows and that was it; now no matter what you do it’s full of ads and telemetry and constant popups about new features you never asked for. I would gladly pay the price of a windows license for a linux distro that was as thought out and usable as an Apple or Windows product in their prime, and maybe we’re entering a window (no pun intended) of time where that’s finally possible.
Currently my experience with 3D printing. It’s one thing after another, and the community, at least on Reddit and Facebook, fucking sucks. If I ask a question, it’s always “hey how about you go fuck yourself” or an essay that has zero relevance to what I’m asking. Made a post on Reddit the other day (I know, but have a single burner account until the 3D printing community here takes off more) and just asked to see some settings due to just constantly having issue after issue. Half of the responses were people just telling me they’re not fucking wizards and they need to know what kind of problems I’m having. I… didn’t ask for that whatsoever. I very explicitly just asked for someone’s slicer settings to compare to.
That's absolutely the worst help forum experience, when you're asking one question but everyone extrapolates the question they think you REALLY meant to ask and talks down to you about it.
And of course if you try to steer the conversation back to your actual question, you get painted as the unreasonable one placing all sorts of conditions on the generous free help others are allowed to bestow upon you.
The less reliance on others Linux requires, the better off it will be for general adoption.
Haha your second paragraph sums it up perfectly. A few folks did share their settings, but they were for completely different printers/hardware haha. Most of the online guides I’ve found are written under the assumption that you’re already a master at the hobby, and it’s strangely spread out in random little nooks of the internet - there’s not really a ton of centralized discussion forums. Maybe the hobby is way smaller than I thought, or maybe I’m just in way over my head, but I fix tech problems for a living - did not expect this to be as much of a challenge. Never buy a 3D printer if you value your sanity and living stress-free. Sorry, I just needed to rant for a minute haha.
Yeah 3D printers are fussier than I expected. Especially when printing anything involving supports and more specifically… small areas that need supports. I print a lot of stuff for D&D and have just started cutting things up into pieces with blender to print easier, then glue it together
I will say. My first thought was obviously to ask what printer you have, to see if I could send you my profile for you to compare (depending on the slicer you use). Then my second was to ask if you’re having issues and if so, what the issues are.
Only because sometimes a seemingly large issue could be a very small fix.
When I first started, I got it working great and then out of no where nothing would stick to the bed. I spent more time than I’d like to admit messing with settings only to realize it was the oils on my hands causing adhesion issues. Some 99% IPA fixed all my issues real quick haha.
That would be awesome! I’ve got an Ender 6 with a Micro Swiss NG extruder. I was printing decently with the stock hardware, but that stock extruder was a nightmare and kept slipping or completely losing grip on filament mid-print, so I upgraded to this extruder. Now I’m just trying to find that perfect spot to where it extrudes but doesn’t grind filament. I’ve been having some really messy prints.
I just had a feeler gauge arrive in the mail, so I’m about to use that to try leveling the bed more accurately. Everyone says to just use a piece of paper or something, but different paper is different widths haha.
I do have a PEI bed, so stuff sticks and comes off way easier now, but I would love to check out your slicer settings to get a good baseline! What kind of hardware do you have, and which slicer do you use?
Just using that outright probably won’t work. What I would do is load up the default Ender 6 profile that Cura has, and then adjust settings based on mine. For instance. You went from a bowden extruder to a direct drive. So you can probably copy my retraction settings as a baseline and adjust from there. You need far less retraction on direct drive extruders (i.e. 0.2mm-1mm for direct drive vs 5mm-8mm for bowden).
I would also look up CHEP and Teaching Tech on youtube. They have great videos on bed leveling and everything else related to 3d printing.
Most of the online guides I’ve found are written under the assumption that you’re already a master at the hobby
I’ve had exactly the opposite experience lol. Most of the stuff out there is dreadfully basic, and if you want detail like scientific comparisons of the strength-weight ratios of different infill patterns, good fuckin luck. Some chum on YouTube will have some half baked experiments and that’s as good as it gets.
You're not wrong, but running Linux directly correlates to more time spent on "tech forums in general," so it's still a bigger problem with that OS than others imo.
Nope. Been using the same installation of Windows 10 for years, and everything just works.
Even swapped the SSD from one laptop into another one. Added a UEFI boot entry, and it came right up.
I think the only problem I ever had was audio or Wi-Fi occasionally failing to work after resume. But that resolved itself after one of the major updates.
The only annoyance I've run into is the "Let's finish setting up your device" screen after feature updates. But you can disable that fairly easily.
I mainly use it as a glorified Chromebook though. Browser, Windows Terminal + WSL, maybe the occasional Inkscape or Lightroom. All the "interesting" stuff happens in Linux VMs atop ESXi running on an old desktop.
But for everyday use, it's nice to have something that "just works" when I pick it up.
I might check out Linux again in a few years though. From what I've read, PipeWire seems to be killing it in terms of progress on the audio side. So once the Wayland ecosystem matures, it should be fairly easy to get back that "just works" status with Linux.
In terms of performance, the main issue Windows really has is disk I/O. But a modern SSD fixes that easily. I am using a second-hand, nine-year-old Dell Latitude laptop, and it does everything I need it to do. Boots up in seconds. Has to stay plugged in though.
Screens, scaling, nvidia drivers, games… Even spent an hour on gnome trying to get my desktop background image to fill the whole screen instead of repeating to fill the space. Solution ended up being download an image editor and resize the image to be the exact same size as my screen resolution. Tried KDE and kept hitting 100% CPU bug
In the end I just wanted a pc that worked, so went back to Windows with WSL.
Seems a perfect combo. Do my dev in WSL, and the desktop just works.
However I’m getting increasingly frustrated at every UI change Microsoft make… Which is what made me try Linux in the first place. If Microsoft Win7 and early 10 was great, I wish they’d stop touching UI and just improve under the hood
No, already burnt out from reinstalling different distros. I try Linux desktop every couple of years and it’s always the same frustrations. I’ll give it another go next year
ReactOS is fascinating, when I was younger and dumber I was optimistic about the project…but at it’s current rate it’ll never be an actual usable daily driver, and with Proton, the need for it is lessening, not growing.
I honestly get where you’re coming from as I went through a similar process of hating Windows, trying to make Linux work for me and just ending up back on Windows. I finally settled on Nobara Linux, but in my personal opinion it might be worth looking into Linux Mint for you if you want a rock solid distro. I installed Mint for my girlfriend not too long ago and everything magically worked with Nvidia drivers, wallpapers, Discord screen sharing, etc. I was so impressed that I considered distro hopping one last time.
I’m actively trying to switch to Linux, so it’s not from a lack of effort.
The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I’m a photographer, and I’m scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There’s no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.
As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I’ve got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn’t save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.
On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.
My Xubuntu server won’t let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.
Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.
Mint’s settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it’s back to the default size again!
The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!
Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I’m doing. They’re the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?
My main issue was trying to get two monitors to work. I followed some guides on how to update the drivers and each time it broke to the point that it would only be a black screen. Not even a terminal to help troubleshoot.
I have a 3080 12GB and can’t use it on Linux. After about a week of trying I gave up.
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