I haven’t given up on Linux. I have at least 5 Linux machines in the other room, including tablets, laptops, and servers.
There’s a few Mac’s in the mix too, but those are workstations.
Though I can sympathize with the complaints here in these comments. I brought a ryzen laptop home and installed a distribution on it. Sleep didn’t work. Tried 2 more distros, sleep still didn’t work. Now that laptop just sits there. My Chromebook gets more use than it. Having to shut it down and boot it back up every time wasn’t worth using it anymore when my pinebook pro does have the support you’d expect for functions you’d expect from a laptop.
Check in your BIOS, there might be a setting for sleep compatibility for windows or linux.
I had the same issue with my Lenovo L14, until I’ve read a forum post explaining that there is different kind of sleep settings and they differ between windows and linux.
Unfortunately I found out that it’s due to a bug in the kernel that hasn’t been fixed yet. I was thinking of giving it another change up and replacing popos with arch. If worst comes to worst I’ll do a brunch install and give it to someone who needs it. I’ll still get my Linux fix from my pinebook, tab, and various servers.
I had the same problem with sleep when I switched last year.
Try using hibernate instead. Takes a few seconds longer to start back up, but it saves your session and works just fine for me.
Edit: just saw you’re using PopOS. Still worth trying, but I’m on EndeavourOS (with KDE Plasma) which, from what I understand, is basically Arch with training wheels. So that could be the difference.
Funny enough, it dawned on me I’ve used Arch ARM for years but haven’t tried it on that laptop yet. Think I’m going to give it a shot when I get bored. But first my mission is hunting down a bug in fedora with my pinebooks wifi. I use it a lot more than my other laptops and tablets
Edit: I installed arch and everything is working correctly from what I can tell so far 😂 idk what was up with pop, fedora, and Manjaro…
The affinity thing especially annoys me. They have real potential to steal a niche from Adobe. Does even need to be native, they just need to work with wine.
Gave up because of hardware issues. Laptops had fan problems with it on, the grub wouldn’t install right, a lot of the good distros would show up as black before or after installation. My latest attempt with a decade old iMac made the screen die after less than half an hour upon each reboot. Most of these computers should work very well with Linux but they never did for me. Back then it was a matter of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I don’t know that I fully qualify as “gave up using Linux”, but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I’m definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).
I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn’t work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren’t exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.
Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there’s much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I’m sticking with what works (even if it’s FAR from perfect).
I started out on Red Hat over 20 years ago, then went to Gentoo for a few years. I got a new job after the me I was at crashed and burned and switched or the Fedora, but the rest of the folks at the shop were running fancy new MacBooks as was the style at the time. As a tech lead I didn’t like the idea of being the odd one out when it came to what we were running so I just bit the bullet when my linux laptop died and got a MacBook and I’ve just stuck with that ever since, at least for professional dev work. It’s still a UNIX under the hood and I get most of what I want and basically all of my tooling is OSS and free software, and I don’t have to mess with fiddly settings anymore. I still run Linux server-side and keep a few Linux laptops around, but I just run macOS now for dev work and I’m fine with that.
I did my time with compiling the entire thing from scratch in my Gentoo days, did all sorts of tweaking on compiler switches for KDE and X, debugged kernel drivers on racks of Dell PowerEdge blades when the network stack would inexplicably start dropping packets seemingly randomly, all that stuff. I still run Linux but it just ain’t my daily driver anymore.
Nothing works without extended fiddling. While fiddling, nothing works the way the manual says it should. Googling for solutions gets results that are terminal commands than don’t do what the poster says they should.
Microsoft sucks, but Windows programs work as expected 95% of the time. Linux programs don’t work at all 75% of the time, even after extensive reading and extended periods of time wasted fucking around with fixes proposed by the internet.
What apps did you struggle to get working as expected?
I do grant that unfortunately due to the distro and window manager differences there can be issues with graphical inconsistencies and integration into the system (file associations for example)
I loved Linux at work when I had a sysadmin. Shit worked great. At home I started using Linux and despite some driver issues, it was mostly good. Then I started working for myself (so no more sysadmin). Some Linux update totally screwed up my computer and I lost a lot of work. It also became too much work to try and configure the apps that I needed to use for work. Switched to windows and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. Still boot up Linux now and again for this or that, but I don’t trust it enough as a daily driver for my needs.
I want to use SolidWorks. My kids want to play Fortnite and Valorant.
It’s due to lack of support by mainstream developers. I can only hope the Steam deck takes off and continues to sell; once a critical mass of people are on the platform it’ll only gain momentum. We’re not there yet but this is the closest we’ve been in 30 years.
For me, a few things keep me from sticking with it. The community used to be a problem but it’s not as bad as it used to be. Seeking help online regarding anything related to network services are still rife with the “git gooder” useless fucks. Two months ago I was told, “you shouldn’t be doing this if you need a guide.” I was trying to deploy a Lemmy instance… Using the guide provided by Lemmy devs… That they recommended for beginners… FML with a curling iron…
Another big one for me is access to solutions. I have never encountered a problem with windows that I couldn’t find a solution or at least an explanation for. But I frequently find issues with linux that I am apparently the first to ever experience.
And lastly, it seems like not using a terminal at all to do completely normal things is even remotely possible. Powershell allows all kinds of things that would be otherwise burdensome or impossible, but none of those are required for use. On the flip side, it feels like everything I want to do in Linux tends to require me to copypasta a terminal command, open the terminal, and run. Why? Why is there no “control panel” style settings tools? Why is every setting scattered to the .conf fucking wind? My kingdom for a distro that I don’t have to nano my fucking way through.
Software compatibility??? That is a problem I would love to have when it comes to trying to switch OSs. That would mean that everything else is already working and only MS products are acting up. Also… who switches to Linux but still requires MS Office??? Why does this person exist? Lol
Anyway. Haven’t tried the switch in a few years and it seems like things have changed a lot in that time comparatively to the preceding years, so I may be a bit out of touch. But that’s why I quit last time. I would love to not need windows ever again. But my worst windows day is still better than my best Linux day.
I understand your points and agree with them. For me the experience with support has been quite opposite though… I can always find a solution (or at least an explanation) with Linux (I can go all the way down the rabbit hole to the source code if I would be so inclined) but with Windows it’s always been just black magic rituals or random software from the internets that either work or tough luck.
Yeah, I’ve started to feel a bit of that on windows. At least with MS deprecating things that people used, or constantly changing your settings with every update. I guess a terminal script is no different than a magic black box in the same way that a program or driver is. Hmm. Good point.
I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.
Many of them did not work with my 3840x2400 screen, with unreadably tiny UI
The sound did not always work
When the sound did work, I either couldn’t change the volume, or figure out how to disable the speakers when I plug in headphones
Sometimes screen brightness could not be changed
In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux… but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn’t, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.
That may be true, and I’m glad that improvements are being made, but it’s not the display. It’s not the sound. It’s not my keyboard backlight (which got locked on maximum brightness). It’s that with Linux, getting anything working requires hours of troubleshooting. Probably if I understood the system better it would only take minutes of troubleshooting, but developing those skills would take months to years. I don’t want to invest that sort of effort just to write papers, check my email, take notes, do CAD, and play games.
I have a spare nvme SSD and recently took a weekend to play with various Linux desktop distributions. EndeavorOS and Pop! OS were my favorite. But I have an RTX 3080 and can’t afford to replace it with an AMD GPU. It didn’t work well enough with my games. I’m really attached to HDR which seems to be coming but is not generally available for most games yet. I feel like the writing is on the wall and Windows will not be a suitable option for me in the near future, but right now I have the least issues with Windows 11.
I use Linux all the time for hosting various services at work, but never with a GUI.
Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don’t know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don’t speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.
If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I’ll give desktop Linux another shot.
This said, I’ve self-hosted on a Debian box for years.
Similar, I’ve been running a jellyfin server on mint on a spare laptop, and some other networking tests for other projects. It’s a good low-risk way to learn, I think. But my income depends on the daily driver being reliable, and I’m just not comfortable enough in Linux to switch right now
I recently switched for the first time, and have been using EndeavorOS with KDE on a couple year old laptop, and my experience has been the complete opposite. It’s fantastic. I feel like this is what using a PC is supposed to be like. Before Microsoft fucked it all up.
honestly, I have experienced the opposite lately. These days, anything I’m looking to do in Linux has already been done and someone has written instructions for it. If it requires digging in to any nitty-gritty, there’s usually decent documentation as well. Windows has so many opaque and propriety processes, and opens so many network connections that I am not entirely sure what the OS is doing most of the time.
Add comment