After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.

We live in a world where the idea of community has been destroyed by rampant capitalism and the death of third spaces.

While there is indeed a lot to be said for something that “just works,” that “just works” demand is borne from a capitalist/consumer process that is literally in the process of going off the rails.

Why do we get so mad at Windows? Because it isn’t ours. Microsoft grows it like a weed on our property. Its roots begin sticking out new places all the time (“hey what’s that new bullshit on my taskbar?”) and has zero respect for your needs as opposed to its needs. Windows only cares for Microsoft’s needs, and it makes that readily evident in how you’re forced to use it.

Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.

In other words, Linux is better than we think it is.

When I’ve thought about this is in the past I’ve concluded that my expectations of Linux are actually higher than Windows or Mac. It’s given me the expectation that if something doesn’t work the way I want it then it will be possible to make it do that, whereas with other operating systems I have been more inclined to just accept a limitation and move on.

You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.

If course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you should want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.

Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.

But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”.

No, I don’t think so. There should be an expected difference between Windows (for example) and Linux as far as “it just works” goes, simply by virtue of the fact that one is actively developed by a company with eleventy-bajillion dollars and the other is developed by lots of hobbyists and a handful of profitable companies.

If Windows doesn’t work, it’s not unreasonable to expect that it should. If Linux doesn’t work, it is unreasonable to expect that it always will.

Each time I go back on windows I realize it’s worse than I remembered, even though I never liked it. One thing I quickly realized after getting constantly asked for help about issues on windows : people tend to be greatly biased about how reliable it is, mostly because it’s all they’ve known for a long time.

People often talk about compatibility regarding Linux, but are somehow oblivious to all the devices and hardware made for windows that somehow fails miserably to work when it has no good reason to…while Linux, despite most hardware and software not being made with it in mind, can sometimes somehow work wonders.

Windows only «just works» because it’s made by a monopolistic monster of a company, with a ton of software and tools and stuff made for it because of how widespread it is, and despite that their OS is just plain garbage…

Generally, when things work on windows, it is the effort of whomever made the device or software. Microsoft generally does not develop drivers. However, when things work on GNU/Linux it is the effort of GNU, Linux, or the community. The manufacturer probably did nothing. This simply explains why we are generally relaxed or “give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work””.

So fairly comparing a Linux distro to raw windows, Linux is better. When you install a distro, things just work, when you install windows, most stuff do not work and you need to complete setup. Unless you use tools provided by the manufacturer, but then again, it is same story.

When Linux doesn’t do what I want, it’s never because it was deliberately designed not to do what I want in order to increase shareholder value

I’d clarify that the shear customizability of Linux is optional.

Take a SteamDeck with SteamOS versus a RPi with e.g Debian.

If you “just” play with the SteamDeck and you don’t tinker, well, it “just works”. In most, even though not all, normal situations, e.g plugging a screen, pairing a BT headphone, mouse, keyboard, etc it is solid. It has no problem even while using a compatibility layer like Proton for games themselves made for Windows. It even enable some tinkering thanks to its immutable OS and let the player switch to desktop mode. Not everything works but my personal experience since it’s been out has been pretty much flawless.

Now, take a RPi, with just as stable hardware, with Debian, even stable, and put on it some IoT device, make some weird modifications for it, try a bunch of stuff, remove package, tinker more, chances are it will still work. Tinker more, make stranger modifications to the point it becomes unstable. Is it Linux itself? I’d argue it’s not. I’d argue that instead because we CAN tinker we sometimes do then forget that it’s not the same context as something expected to run without hiccup because it’s been limited to basically the same verified usage.

So… IMHO Linux is even better than it is, we just shouldn’t confuse weird (and important) tinkering with how it can be actually used day to day.

Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?

No, it’s better.

Seriously, when something that I paid for it doesn’t work is annoying when something that I choose to use doesn’t work is somewhat my fault, I think that’s the difference.

Exactly. I give more credits to linux, and it deserves this. I like your garden metaphor, yes my linux pc is like my garden and linux behaves to be, unlike windows.

Windows will continue to get more and more user-hostile as time goes on, and they want everyone to have a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud services, so they can be in total control of what they deliver to the user and how the user is using their services/apps, and they also will be able to increase pricing regularly of course once the users are dependent enough (“got all my work-related data there, can’t just leave”).

The next big step that will follow after the whole M365 and Azure will be that businesses can only deploy their Windows clients by using MS Intune, which means MS will deploy your organization’s Windows clients, not your organization. So they’re always shifting more and more control away from you and into MS’ hands. Privacy is always an obvious issue, at the very least since Nadella is CEO, but unfortunately the privacy-conscious people have kind of lost that war, because the common user (private AND business sector) doesn’t care at all, so we will have to wait and see how those things will turn out in the future, they will start caring once they are being billed more due to their openly known behavior (driving, health, eating/drinking, psychology, …) or once they are being legally threatened more (e.g. your vehicle automatically reports by itself when you’ve driven too fast, or some AI has concluded based on your gathered data that you’re likely to cause some kind of problem), or once they are rejected at or before job interviews because of leaked health data or just some (maybe wrong) AI-created prognosis of your health. So I think there will be a point when the common user will start caring, we just haven’t reached that point yet because while current data collection and profile building is problematic because it’s the stepping stone to more dystopian follow-ups, it alone is still too abstract of an issue for most people to care about it. Media is also partly to blame here when they do reviews or news about new devices and then just go like “great camera and display, MUST BUY” and never mention the absurd amount of telemetry data the device sends home. MS is also partnering with Palantir and OpenAI which will probably give them even more opportunities to automatically surveil every single one of their business and private sector users. I think M365 also already gives good analytics tools to business owners to monitor what their employees are doing, how much time they spend in each application, how “efficient” they are, things like that. Plus they have this whole person and object recognition stuff going on using “smart” cameras and some Azure service which analyzes the video material constantly. Where the employees (mostly workers in that case) are constantly surveilled and if anything abnormal happens then an automatic alert is sent, and things like that. Probably a lot of businesses will love that, and no one cares enough about the common worker’s rights. It can be sold as a security plus so it will be sold. So I think MS is heavily going into the direction of employee surveillance, since they are well-integrated into the business world anyway (especially small and medium businesses) and with Windows in particular I think they will move everything sloooowly into the cloud, maybe in 10-15 years you won’t have a “personal” computer anymore, you’re using Microsoft’s hardware and software directly from Microsoft’s servers and they will gain full, unlimited, 100% surveillance and control of every little detail you’re doing on your computer, because once you hand away that control, they can do literally anything behind your back and also never tell you about it. Most of the surveillance stuff going on all the time already is heavily shrouded in secrecy and as long as that’s the case there will be no justice system in the world being able to save you from it, because they’d first need concrete evidence. Guess why the western law enforcement and secret services hunted Snowden and Assange so heavily? Because they shone some light into what is otherwise a massive, constant cover-up that is also probably highly illegal in most countries. So it needs to be kept a secret. So the MS (and Apple, …) route stands for total dependence and total loss of control. They just have to move slowly enough for the common user not to notice. Boil the frog slowly. Make sure businesses can adapt. Make sure commercial software vendors can adapt. Then slowly direct the train into cloud-only territory where MS rules over and can log everything you do on the computer.

Linux, on the other hand, stands for independence. It means you can pick and choose what components you want, run them whereever and however you want, build your own cloud, and so on. You can build your own distro or find one that fits your use case the most. You’re in a lot of control as the user or administrator and this will not change considering the nature of open source / free software. If the project turns to sh!t, you’re not forced to stick with it. You can fork it, develop an alternative. Or wait until someone else does. Or just write a patch that fixes the problematic behavior. This alone makes open source / free software inherently better than closed source where the users have no control over the project and always have to either use it as it is or stop using it altogether. There’s no middle ground, no fixes possible, no alternatives that can be made from the same code base because the code base is the developer’s secret. Also, open source software can be audited at will all the time. That alone makes it much more trustworthy. On the basis of trustworthiness and security alone, you should only use open source software. Linux on its own is “just” the kernel but it’s a very good kernel powering a ton of highly diverse array of systems out there, from embedded to supercomputer. I think the Linux kernel can’t be beaten and will become (or is already) the objective best operating system kernel there is out there. Now, as a desktop user, you don’t care that much about the kernel you just expect it to work in the background, and it does. What you care more is UI/UX, consistency and application/game compatibility. We can say the Linux desktop ecosystem is still lacking in that regard, always behind super polished and user-friendly coherent UIs coming from especially Apple in that regard (maybe also a little bit by Microsoft but coherent and beautiful UIs aren’t Microsoft’s strong point either, I think that crown goes to Apple). That said, Apple is very much alike Microsoft in that they have a fully locked-down ecosystem, so it’s similar to MS, maybe slightly less bad smelling still but it will probably also go in the same direction as MS does, just more slowly and with details being different. Apple’s products also appeal to a different kind of audience and businesses than MS’ products do. Apple is kind of smart in their marketing and general behavior that they always manage to kind of fly under the radar and dodge most of the shitstorms. Like they also violate the privacy of their users, but they do it slightly less than MS or Google do, so they’re less of a target and they even use that to claim they’re the privacy guys (in comparison), but they also aren’t. You still shouldn’t use Apple products/services. “Less bad than utterly terrible” doesn’t equal “good”. There’s a lot of room between that. Still, back to Linux. It’s also obviously a matter of quality code/projects and resources. Big projects like the Linux kernel itself or the major desktop environments or super important components like systemd or Mesa are well funded, have quality developers behind them and produce high quality output. Then you also have a lot of applications and components where just single community developers, not well funded at all, are hacking away in their free time, often delivering something usable but maybe less polished or less userfriendly or less good looking or maybe slightly more annoying to use but overall usable. Those applications/projects could use some help. Especially if they matter a lot on the desktop because there’s little to no alternative available. On the server side, Linux is well established, software for that scenario is plentiful and powerful. Compared to the desktop, it’s no wonder why it’s successful on servers. Yes, having corporations fund developers and in turn open source projects is important and the more that do it, the more successful those projects become. It’s no wonder that gaming for example took off so hugely after Valve poured resources and developers into every component related to it. Without that big push, it would have happened very slowly, if at all. So even the biggest corpo haters have to acknowledge that in capitalism, things can move very fast if enough money is being thrown at the problem, and very slowly if it isn’t. But the great thing about the Linux ecosystem is that almost everything is open source, so when you fund open source projects, you accelerate their growth and quality but these projects still can’t screw you over as a user, because once they do that, they can be forked and fixed. Proprietary closed-source software can always screw over the user, no one can prevent that, and it also has a tendency to do just that. In the open source software world, there are very few black sheep with anti-user features, invasive telemetry, things like that. In the corporate software world, it’s often the other way around.

So by using Linux and (mostly) open source products, you as the user/admin remain in control, and it’s rare that you get screwed over. If you use proprietary software from big tech (doesn’t even matter which country) you lose control over your computing, it’s highly likely that you get screwed over in various ways (with much more to come in the future) and you’re also trusting those companies by running their software and they’re not even showing the world what they put in their software.

I’m annoyed when things don’t work. I’m even more annoyed when something can’t be made to work.

I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.

" “things that just work”.

That certainly not how I will describe the Linux desktop experience.

Thing is, a well configured Linux system will just work, and continue to work for the foreseeable future. You have zero guarantee of this with Windows.

After being in tech for like 30 years, i’d say that every OS sucks, but the way they suck and the intensity of said sucking is very much not the same across them. Linux VERY MUCH has issues, yes, but most of the time they’re in your power to diagnose and fix, in Windows the main troubleshooting advice has remained mostly the same across decades, the 3 R’s, Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat, because many times you just don’t know and CANNOT know what went wrong.

I think about this a lot, and my take is that Linux is waaayyy better if you have perfect or close-to-perfect knowledge of how the operating system works and what software is available. Similarly, I think an argument can be made for Linux being better if all you need is a web browser and you’re not using really unusual hardware.

Where things fall apart is for people who have very specific needs that are complex, even if they only need it 1% of the time, and they don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it with the power-user tools available. Microsoft has spent decades paying developers to handle these edge cases and ensuring GUI settings discoverability.

At the same time, schools and workplaces have taught people the design language of Windows, and the network effect of having so much of the world’s end-user PCs running on Windows means that there are vast resources available targeted at people without technical knowledge. At this point, for better or worse, Microsoft’s design language is the global default for non-technical people.

If a person never has to touch a setting because all they need is a browser, they don’t hit any friction and they are happy. If they need to do even one thing that requires them to dig into settings or touch the terminal, the difference from Microsoft’s design language is enough for that one frustrating experience to give them a bad taste in their mouth about Linux as a whole.