Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
It’s important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don’t think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.
But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.
Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.
Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.
People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base…which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.
I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client’s Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, “We heard you’re a Linux guy.” At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client’s Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.
Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn’t offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.
At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.