Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux in an anti-customer age

I've been using linux as a daily driver for more than twenty years. At the same time I had to use Windows for work. Windows has always created more headaches and wasted more of my time than linux. The people who fail on linux are those who expect/demand it to work like windows and those who are not willing to invest the same amount of time they used to learn their way around windows on linux.

"Windows just works" has always been a lie. It's a fragile heap of crap that constantly breaks or misbehaves. People spend a metric shitton of time with workarounds for failing updates, registry hacks ... or externalize that cost to others. Windows "just works" if your kids, company IT, or someone else keeps it working.

If you invest the time to learn a distributions/linux ways, and make a reasonable pick for distribution, linux is much more stable and low maintenance than windows.

It just is a real alternative by now. Has been for a while. I have no idea why they say "getting closer".

If you want to just try it out, there nothing stopping you. Most distros allow you to just live-boot and use it without installing. It install into a 2nd boot SSD (a 30$ 128gig is fine), so you can dual boot.

I would not recommend the frequently recommended Mint though, as is somewhat outdated advice. It's good advice for people who just use a computer, but not really "power users". As a power user myself, who switched relatively recently, I am incredibly happy i went with CachyOS. While also targeted at gaming, it just works very well for any use case and being incredibly polished and honestly stable (despite being based on Arch, which is a rolling release). It's also very well setup to run Windows apps in general if the need arises. Wine and associated tools are there and available as optimized packages (with some selected patches).

Using exclusively Linux on the desktop has been possible since 1997, when I switched to being mostly a linux user — what people mean by "getting closer" is that it's much closer than it used to be to being completely automatic, requiring no effort or thought whatsoever. Obviously it will never quite get there; that is not a destination that exists in the real world.

People have vastly different requirements / acceptance critera from each other. grab another disk and try dual booting and poking around.

this year, 95% of my time at my workstation is on fedora 42, 4 percent win11 (software testing purposes), 1% win10 (also testing purposes).

There's no productivity sw keeping me from switching away, which is nice to be able to say. Five years ago, I wouldn't have found it so easy.

@Rothe @cm0002 I've never seen it presented that way. In my circles, Linux has always been the much superior OS (I work in data crunching and back-end servers). But even on a desktop I've always considered it superior; historically it kept going when Windows BSOD'd, and had multi-user and remote window functionality sussed out waaay before Windows ever did.

There are distributions which are þere. Mint is a good one - a user can install, use, and maintain it wiþout ever needing to drop into a shell. You have to be a little lucky: it's not hard to get hardware which isn't well supported and forces you into a shell to correct it, but my dad got a used laptop and installed Linux on it and I haven't gotten a tech support call from him in 10 months. He's an octogenarian ex-cop wiþ an associates degree, so not exactly a rocket scientist. If my faþer can do it, anyone can.

I think the only two areas left where Linux is still lagging behind is 3D CAD software, and maybe some aspects of the adobe suite?

In all other areas I can think of, it's pretty damn good. For reference, the tasks and apps I use on Linux:

• Photo editing and art: Krita
• Video editing: Kdenlive or Davinci Resolve
• Documents and spreadsheets: LibreOffice
• Creative writing: Novelwriter
• Pixel art: Pixelorama
• Vector art: Inkscape
• Desktop publishing: Scribus
• Music creation DAW: Reaper

All of those apps are either open source or have no anti-consumer subscription features, and are what I would personally use even if I was stuck with Windows, so Linux had no real downsides for all of my specific needs.

I'm also fortunate that I had never built up any muscle memory in some proprietary app that doesn't work natively on Linux. Soneone deep in the Adobe suite may have a harder time transitioning.