Technology

Sorry, it's not ready for prime time.

It's great for advanced users who are willing to put in the effort to work for them as a desktop.

It's also great as a host for services.

And is dogshit in a business environment.

As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol). So I was in IT working before Linux existed.

I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.

There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.

There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one. So many run-of-the mill things that take effort to deal with.

Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people.

There's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?

Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.

Someone else said it better than me:

Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.

So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's on a Windows server.

Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment, or for most users who are used to Windows/Office.

If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

As a very advanced user, I just don't have the time to play fuck-fuck with Linux on a desktop - I have work to do with what little time I have.

Here's a question: if Linux truly competes with Windows, why don't massive organizations that have the IT manpower/expertise use it for their desktops? They'd save millions in licensing alone. Why is it they feel those tens of millions are better spent on contracts with MS?