…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
Hardware, mostly. Most times I’ve tried Linux something like Wi-Fi or the touchpad was broken out of the box.
Basically, a user who only needs a web browser and maybe Libre office should not experience any friction or touch a CLI. That’s what Windows has and what Linux needs to become mainstream.
Never had touchpad troubles on Linux - as long as the device follows standard HID protocols, it’ll just work. WiFi was dicey in the 2000s; the technology was still new and every chip vendor had their own idea of how shit should work, making it difficult to get support merged for every possible device, but that really hasn’t been an issue for quite a while in my experience.
Everyone’s forgotten the olden days where you’d have to dig through a box of diskettes for all the drivers.
I was hesitant to engage because I kind of figured you’d prove my point about nobody wanting to hear about basic functionality not working. I tend to get responses like this along the lines of “it works on my machine” and “you spoiled kids, back in my day etc etc”.
Hardware issues are well documented. I still have to manually restart the touchpad module after waking from sleep intermittently. As long as Linux people are dismissive about problems like this, it’ll never be mainstream.
Don’t let the haters get you down. As a long time linux-enthousiast, you are 100% correct. It absolutely still has troubles and doesn’t “just work”. it’s a lot better than it used to be, and it’s on a great upwards trajectory!
But we as a community are overly dismissive of real problems, and I think that does a lot of damage to our reputation.
Thank you. I’m impressed and grateful at how far it’s come just in the last few years. Debian 13 is mostly problem-free for me, which was a lucky break with Windows going to shit so fast at the same time.
Nice! I use Debian all-day every-day, and I think it’s a great starting distro, if a bit dated sometimes. I’d be a little cautious of Debian 13 as it just came out of testing, so it might have some lingering bugs. But if it works for you, then it works :)
Oh no, a discussion. How awful.
I’m honestly curious. Is this just on the one machine you tried decades ago, or persistent issues across generations of hardware? The fact that there are so many disparate experiences that are described with no detail makes it hard to see where things go wrong.
Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.
I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.