this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Please let me keep these old chains for a bit longer!
We must continue to improve freedom-respecting operating systems so that more users will switch.
Freedom respecting operating systems have been painless for most machines for at least a decade at this point, for that long anyone could have installed an easy distro and just used it normally. The problem now with getting people to switch is that they expect zero adjustment period, when they could just get used to something new that still functions 95% the same as Windows on the user's side.
I don't know how rare it is, but it hasn't really been painless on laptops from my experience. I've had to deal with trying to find the right kernel parameters to stop my laptop from freezing, to having an incredibly high default scroll speed which I've still haven't figured out how to change, to having to ask the orange alien place to figure out why my Internet card was not working. It may just seem like a hassle to some people, but I believe for most, it's enough of a hassle to just give up and go back to Windows.
I switched my old-ish laptop to EndeavorOS (based on Arch, btw), a few months back, as my first Linux experience. After a week or so of hiccups and getting things the way I like it, it's been an amazing experience. Ridiculously stable. Better than Windows 11 even. I'll never go back.
Last time I used Ubuntu it had made some really bad UI decisions. The scrollbars and grab areas to resize windows was 1px wide, making it pretty mich impossible to use. There was no setting in the system preferences, but I had to run some command overwriting some config ...
Yeah I have one laptop that doesn't play nice with default Debian drivers, and even the special .iso with a bundle of different wifi drivers, still can't connect during install. Debian derived distros all work fine, but Debian itself gives me problems with that one machine. Hate when it happens, but sometimes you just gotta try out a distro with different default settings.
Get Adobe to port their software to Linux. They're literally all that's holding me on Windows. I know there's some options to replace them, but those seem to be a mixed bag of seemingly deliberately difficult to use, or require way too much setup time to port my existing portfolio (LR to DT).
I recommend against dual booting because sometimes it may seem easier to switch back to Windows than try again to overcome an adjustment (or a painful problem that is harder to solve that a bug in Windows/Mac because of that lack of experience).