What are the main criticisms of Linux in desktop platforms?

I've been using it exclusively as my desktop for over 20 years. Does it have flaws and shortcomings? Sure. So have Windows and Mac. What system does not have issues?

Does it fit your use case? Who knows? Just try it and be the judge. If it doesn't work, just keep using whatever you're using, no harm done.

All you need is a USB stick, some curiosity and some time. It's not like it's a lifetime commitment or something. Unless, of course, you enjoy it... then you are doomed.

Its so much less user-hostile-by-design as well
- Less user-hostile? Maybe. Hostile to the tech-illiterate? Oh, absolutely. There is no handholding. There are no guardrails. You wanna "sudo rm -fr / --no-preserve-root"? o7, gamer.

One thing that happened recently that really showcases the difference between Linux and Windows is the glibc update that broke several popular video games. These games were specifically built to run on Linux. Ironically, games built to run only on Windows could still be ran on Linux just fine. That's because those games are run through a compatibility layer that translates the Windows instructions into their corresponding Linux instructions. The games built for Linux use Linux instructions directly, so they don't need a compatibility layer.

The update to glibc changed how some Linux instructions worked and so any program using the old instructions needed to update to the new ones. Lots of Linux programs are actively maintained or at least open source, so making the change isn't a big deal. Video games tend not to be open source or actively maintained after they're released, so some of these broken games will be broken forever. When that was reported to the maintainers of glibc, they responded that they don't care if they break unmaintained, closed source software. It is the user's fault for choosing to use such software.

To me, that is the biggest difference between Windows and Linux. If someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now. If someone creates a program for Linux, it could break next week, and the people who broke it won't care. It's a bit embarrassing that programs created for Windows work on Linux more reliably than programs created specifically for Linux.

The glibc incident though was self inflicted. The Devs relied on undocumented behaviour in the ABI (application binary interface) which then got fixed/changed after more than a decade by the Devs of said Library.

It was akin to relying on a videogame glitch to do something that shouldn't have been possible and then be offended that it got patched.
- If you're considering how good software is, how it was made is irrelevant, the only thing to measure is how well it works. A criticism of Linux from a user perspective is still valid regardless of who is or isn't to blame.
- It was akin to relying on a videogame glitch to do something that shouldn't have been possible and then be offended that it got patched.
  
  Let me introduce you to any% speedrunners
If someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now.

TBF, that's not even always true, especially with a loss of 32 bit support. For example, BioShock Infinite no longer runs on newer versions of OsX
It someone creates a program for Windows, that program will likely still work 10 years from now

I was with you all the way until here. This statement is absolutely laughable to anyone who has messed around with older videogames. Sometimes, if you're lucky, running it in compatibility mode with the version of Windows the game was made for will work, but oftentimes you're reliant on fan patches or long installation guides showing you the exact configuration of settings necessary to stop the game from constantly crashing. At that point, getting the older game to run on Windows is just as tedious as getting it to run on Linux, potentially less.

You still are getting more of a guarantee from Microsoft, because Windows versions have typically had long lifecycles and were pretty averse to risky-changes within an OS release, but even that doesn't seem to be the case anymore with Windows 11.

@ryujin470@fedia.io here's a brief list, in no particular order and based pretty much entirely on my own opinions and experience.

you have to learn a little bit about what happens behind the scenes sometimes. for example, if you don't know what distro packages are or what flatpak is (or the reasons behind each of them, honestly) then installing apps kinda sucks at first.
you can end up installing a package thinking it is the official one, when in fact it is some variety of third-party. generally this doesn't really hurt anything but it can (look up fedora flatpak).
sometimes cool features get stuck in limbo because none of the people who want them know how to code
sometimes cool features get stuck in limbo because of politics (in-project politics, not what you probably thought at first)
it can be hard to figure out if something is good or if the people reccomending it are just trying to help a new user find something easy and, since they don't actually use it and haven't for a while, don't know that it kind of sucks now (I'm thinking of ubuntu here but it happens with a lot of stuff, distro or otherwise)
all the damn tribalism
drivers are hell on most distros
app availabilty on non-.deb systems
some apps refuse to look native (gtk apps on kde, qt apps on gnome, anything made by a mac user for some reason, every browser fighting tooth and nail to default to windows titlebar icons)
all the damn tribalism

Is a duplicate of 6.

Your comment is to be ~~closed~~ deleted in 3..2..1..
- no idea what you're talking about
- yeah but 10 is so obviously better than 6

Software compatibility for things such as Adobe products and other things that are built specifically for windows.

And a lot of hardware

I've been using Linux Mint for the last 1–2 months (or so) and one of the things I miss the most is how on Windows, games just run (typically). Now, on Linux, one of the very first things I do upon wanting to play a new game is check the ProtonDb page. I am not always able to play the game I want. There's often not even any ProtonDb page for a lot of older games, notably in my case Jazz Jackrabbit. (For example, even though the Jazz Jackrabbit Collection on GOG has a Linux installer, for some reason it won't run.)

Make no mistake, I ain't never going back to Windows for my personal use if I have anything to say about it. The sense of personal security I feel from not having my every move be captured, scrutinized, and sold by Microsoft is way too important to me. If I can have that feeling of relative comfort by forgoing a few games, it seems like a worthwhile price to me.

Nevertheless, the "plug-and-play" nature of games designed for Windows is something I miss.

GoG install scripts are actually community-submitted and not actively maintained. You might have some luck with Lutris or WINE. Sometimes, Bottles or even PlayOnLinux are compatible. WINE actually lets you emulate older editions of Windows for PC games. Sometimes, all you have to do is switch the toggle from 'Win7' to 'Win95', and it works.

https://lutris.net/games/jazz-jackrabbit/

It's a headache, and a loooot of googling, trying to get games to run. But with Proton's introduction, it's gotten a lot easier to get things to run without pulling out wads of hair.

But you're right, if the app is non-native? Have fun breaking out the thumbscrews, because ya better like pain. 😂
- Not a bad set of promising suggestions... Thanks!
  
  And yeah, I've found Proton to be invaluable for making things soooo much easier, but if a game doesn't have a page, it's not as easy. Lol.
@EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone idk about GOG but in my experience any games through steam just work unless they have some shitty anticheat

@ryujin470@fedia.io
- Yeah, I don't really buy most of my games through Steam. Mainly just GOG since I like to own my games. Still, I will buy from time to time games on Steam, like with the Portal/Half-Life sale like half a year ago or whatever, to support Valve, which is a good company and I respect them a lot.

It always feels like it’s someone’s hobby and not a mature product.

Fixing nearly anything is digging through a text file that might follow a standard but never the same standard as the last text file.

Not to argue, just a bit of self-humour:

And I am doomed because I enjoy it. To hell with all the GUI open-settings-then-a-tab-in-it-and-down-to-rabbit-hole-of-tabs-and-setting-sub-windows, just give me plain damn config file. Also, praise be to people who write where the program looks for config files and what can supercede what in man entries

Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:

The program you're using was not developed for you.

It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it's their time.
But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user's perspective because they make sense from a developer's perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that's just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

This is a great explanation. I started an open source project that was reasonably popular because I was off for two weeks and had a problem I wanted to solve. Before those two weeks were up, I had completed everything I set out to do. I didn’t really expect anyone else to use it or care. But they did, and over the next 2-3 years I burned myself out testing different distro configurations, debating with people on mailing lists on other projects that affected mine, responding to hundreds or thousands of issues that came in, coordinating language translations, reviewing pull requests, etc. I kept going thinking that maybe it would look good on my resume or lead to work in the future, but the only person in an interview that had heard of it told me he disagreed with its existence!

Even though I had total control of the project, it was so hard to keep my original vision in place. Should I turn down an incredibly ingenious pull request because it didn’t fit my original vision, even though many other people will use it? But if I accept it, it’s another complexity to maintain. What about a pull request that meets a lot of goals but is only half way there in terms of implementation - do I take my time to finish that? Some of the people arguing in the ecosystem were paid employees of Canonical, Microsoft or some other entity that seemingly had nothing to do all day but try to bend projects to their will. I really had no time left to deal with my own interests in improving the project.

I know this is a long rant, but many of the projects in the Linux ecosystem are maintained by people in a similar situation. It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.
- It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.
  
  That's a very good point. I've often wondered that myself. We may have reached peak Linux already - it's so hard to scale up massive FOSS projects without somehow sacrificing ideals on the way.
But that's true of all software in a way.
Facebook wasn't developed for you. Nor was... Microsoft Windows or anything else. They were developed to make their companies money.

For me, it was the lack of support for certain Wi-Fi cards. I had to pull an older Wi-Fi card out of an old Chromebook, because no flavor of Linux supported the card that came with the (Windows 11) laptop. And guess who has two thumbs and no Ethernet port...

Finally got it working, but at one point i was almost willing to have a USB tether to my phone, just so i wouldn't have to fight with windows anymore.

Edit: Just realized it said desktop, but my desktop also has Wi-Fi, i just haven't had the courage to switch fully from my Spectre Win 10 install...

it's made out of like a thousand different independently maintained hobby projects

That's actually not true. It's made out of dozends independent non-profit organizations that are backed by hundreds of companies. And thousands of different independent hobby projects.
Which makes it all the more impressive
- i am impressed sure but the bottom line is that i need tools that work consistently

Wifi
Adobe suite
Drivers

AMD has open-source drivers that play better with Linux distros. If you're running post-2020 Intel hardware, good luck.

Many (most?l tools I use and games I play aren't natively compatible, and while there are sometimes free alternatives to them, they're usually buggy, unmaintained, or lacking basic features

I'm having a hard time believing that is true of late. Unless it's really niche?

I’ve had loads of problems installing software and making it work.

Any specific examples?
- Sure. Please note that I am quite ignorant and unskilled when it comes to Linux. I will seem like someone who’s got shoes on but doesn’t know how to tie them. I’m sorry. I wish I was more skilled and knowledgeable.
  
  ProtonVPN installed via YAST worked on OpenSuse Tumbleweed but didn’t work in OpenSuse Leap.
  
  RStudio in NixOS was hard to update. For example, during the switch to Quarto instead of only Knittr, there was a period where I spent months without updates. I was using an old, old version.
  
  With NixOS, Fedora, or OpenSuse, installing Signal from a program packaged by Signal itself was not possible. There was a Flatpack version run by a contributor, but nothing by an organization.
  
  I totally recognize that I could learn more and become a better user. It’s just a bit frustrating that these weren’t problems for me over at the land of Surveillance Capitalism OSes. I hope these problems are solved with time.

I'm using Linux Mint for my daily driver for about 5 years. It works great with no ads!! I'm not a gamer and Libre Office works well for me so no significant problems with software. I also do some basic python programming on it. The more complex command line stuff takes a while to figure out but Mint has been great!

I've never seen an ad on Windows. Not sure what people do to get ads.
- Open the Start menu, usually
- Play Solitaire

Doesn’t have the apps people need/want

Every few years, i come back to Linux to see how far i can get before hitting a major obstacle. Installed Linux mint summer last year to get away from windows.

First impression: Steam and proton are great, i can play my favorite game Mechabellum without any issue. Helldivers 2 otoh won’t work due to what seems to be an anti cheat tool.

Software development is also kinda good. Install vs code, let’s go.

But then the trouble begins: my brother laser printer that works out of the box with windows and macOS refuses to print. No error message or anything, just nothing happens. Next thing is that i want to use lm studio to host local llms, but they don’t have a full release for Linux, only a beta that is not available from the mint AppStore. There is an appimage available however, so i have to learn how to handle these. Too bad the Linux version does not support in app update, you always have to install the newest appimage manually.

I would like to develop an llm application using C#. I download the dotnet framework from the AppStore, but VSCODE is not able to find it. After investing several hours trying to find out why this is, i surrender.

And then, for some reason, my NVIDIA card breaks. I try to reset to an older version of the driver, but to no avail - i don’t know whats going on, but steam only shows if i deactivate hardware acceleration and games also will only run on the integrated graphics card.

I surrendered and went back to windows. See you guys in 2 years.

Edit: some spelling

What's ironic about the LLM stuff too is that they are usually developed in Linux, not Windows, and when you do get one working, it works a bit faster. The issue, like most things Linux, is there's no good GUI options on Linux, because the same people working on it in Linux seem to assume you don't need one because you use Linux.

As long as this remains the norm, adoption will be slow.
- That’s a great explanation! I guess I could use Ollama instead of lm studio, but this is also another command line tool without an UI

Just installed Debian, no wifi
Lots more stuff just like #1, such as my 10 year old and 3 month old Logitech wireless mice weren't detected, and support for them is (fortunately) only available from a third party, which I found by searching the web for an answer.

I could give you pages of why Linux doesn't compare to Windows for the desktop, which I'd follow with where it really shines - as a server for all kinds of things. It's so good for specific tasks that even VMware replaced their own Workstation virtualization with Linux KVM.

Linux seems catered for the most basic users (grandma) and extremely advanced users (Linux enthusiasts, programmers). I'm in the middle where I'm pretty good on a computer but not that into the tweaking and tuning. I don't think my demographic is catered to very well.

There's a LOT of super cool stuff on Linux but a lot of it is buried on GitHub and needs configuration to work right. 1, I don't have time to find that stuff and 2, I don't care enough usually to make it work even though I typically could with sufficient effort.

Bluetooth sucks on my fedora desktop

To be fair, Bluetooth sucks on Windows desktops as well. The hardware is just garbage a lot of the time
- weird it's so good on my iphone
- I'll blame the drivers (and some of that blame lands on MS).
Also audio is weird
- The transition from ALSA to Pulse never really fully happened and a lot of backend stuff is still dependent on ALSA. If you ever find that you have an audio channel that is just not working for no apparent reason (like audio input), run alsamixer and check if the channel is muted there.
  
  I've found this multiple times on new Ubuntu-derivative installs, and the channel muting in ALSA is not reflected anywhere in the desktop GUI audio settings and can't be adjusted through them, but nothing is technically broken - you just have to raise the volume on that channel via alsamixer. It's a very annoying gotcha.

I can give you my experience so far, seeing as the common criticisms of Linux usually boil down to unwillingness to try it as well as kernel level anticheat and Adobe products, and I....honestly don't miss either of them, but I'm mostly a dev and a single player games enjoyer, so not much to miss, really.

The speakers on my Razer blade laptop (running EndeavourOS, btw) stopped working randomly, but I'm not convinced it wasn't my fault since I did have to work on the laptop internals for unrelated reasons and might have screwed something up.

My webcam on my desktop, a Logitech Brio, has been acting up as of a couple of weeks on Bazzite, where the microphone keeps kinda dying and I have to unplug/re-plug the webcam to have a working mic. Also the audio quality on my Sony XM5s keeps changing to shitty quality, mostly when I do the re-plugging of the webcam, but it's happened at random times before. Gotta go change the codec on the audio settings every now and then due to it.

Monitor brightness can sometimes behave weirdly, not going back to a brighter setting after auto-dimming.

Games with kernel anticheat don't let me play online.

This has mostly been it, to be honest. There's a microscopic learning curve for Bazzite since it's immutable, so I have flatpaks for most stuff, and "figure it out" for anything else, but other than that, it's just better than Windows ever was. If you run into an issue, you're most likely going to be able to solve it with a quick online search or by consulting the eldritch hallucinations of OpenAI or of your choosing.

"It's different! It is not what I learned to use!"

For me if an application isn't on the pop-shop then its very hard to install, I've had people tell me to just not download things from the internet, but when the application I need isn't on the pop-shop or the repos its a non-starter.

Downloading the .deb from the website is very hard? Not being sarcastic, hoping to understand
- If its a flarpack it just works, but most other formats I've had enough trouble with to not bother with them anymore. Incl .debs.

For Gnome there isn't an easy way to add programs to the application menu. And yes I know tools exist to do this but it should be easier. Other then that I'm pretty good with Linux.

the vast majority of my work software is windows/mac (although the expensive software I wish I could afford just added linux support in 2022). that's the big one for me. on a smaller note i haven't checked on my games since, i mean if i'm going to have to run a windows box i might as well take advantage of the plusses, but i understand there is significantly worse compatibility on linux.

Had this conversation with my boss yesterday. They cant use Azure mdm with Linux it's a no go.

mdm?
- Mobile Device Management
Run Linux on your machine as a VM.
- I got Mobaxterm. Does the job and doesn't need to be natt'd.

Forced to use the command line like you're programming for ZX Spectrum in 1982

Forced! 🤣

Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it's hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won't tell people they'll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won't understand.

The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren't up to date yet, and won't be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I'm not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren't FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let's backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we'll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we'll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn't vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

Simply put, if you want to install Linux you're gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn't paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).