I’m a life-long Windows user who nowdays has a MacBook as a daily driver and a gaming PC running Linux. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy but holy fuck Linux just makes me want to tear my head off. I just spent 45 minutes trying to install Standard Notes “the right way” and in the end I just gave up and downloaded it from the Ubuntu store instead. Error, you need to add this repository. Error, you need to enable this feature. Error, you need to install this tool first which you can use to install another tool and that tool helps you fix the issue preventing you to solve the first issue etc. I honestly can’t even imagine how you could make this any more difficult.
I guess Linux is like welding; it’s great when someone sets the welder up for you and you just press the trigger and start welding but you’re up for some absolute misery trying to figure that out on your own.
Also, a huge credit to chatGPT. I can just take picture of my terminal window and it gives me step-by-step instructions on how to troubleshoot most issues I’ve had. I’d be at complete loss without it.
I have the opposite experience. Last time I tried Linux for daily desktop use was ten years ago and it was so fickle and cumbersome that I went back to Windows and terminals and x-server on virtual machines for my dev needs. A few weeks ago I got a new convertible laptop, hated Windows 11 with passion enough to do the plunge again, prepared to be cursing that shit ain’t up to shit. But… It just worked. Hardware support out of the box. Some quirks obviously but nothing deal breaking. I’m used to containerization on servers and I’ll be damned but Flatpaks are effing awesome. Even Windows games run perfectly. It. Just. Works. I’m almost expecting the entire thing to literally blow up in my face with shards of hope and OLED panel because, you know, Linux desktop experiences of the past. Fingers crossed. Maybe this is the future after all.
Edit: Fedora KDE on a HP Envy x360 15"
Edit 2: Forgot to mention that I tried PopOS first that did not just work out of the box. Or well it seemed to at first but then it got complicated. Fedora was my saviour.
Somehow Minecraft runs better on a (well, not so-)crappy government provided laptop I have linux installed on, vs a £1k+ laptop with an RTX 2060
I understoon 30% of the terms used in this comment. May explain why your experience with Linux differs from mine.
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You haven’t been using Linux for long enough.
I remember when you literally couldn’t install it on a laptop. I remember having to download wireless driver binary blobs in order to get only a select few WiFi adapters to work. I remember printing being a roll of the dice. I remember hardware graphics acceleration being non existent. I remember when gaming on Linux was Doom, Quake, any of the various Tux games, and Battle of Wesnoth. I remember when webcams just straight up weren’t supported. Installing Linux? Prepare to download “disk sets” that were lettered and numbered based on what software you wanted, and each one would go on individual floppy disks.
I used to have to look up hardware that Linux supported and make purchases based on that.
I know things are far from perfect nowadays, but I just wanted to point out that we stand on the shoulders of giants. I bought my kids some Lenovo Ryzen based laptops for Christmas, was able to boot Linux from a USB drive, install it, install steam, put their favorite games on there and it all just worked. Not a single hiccup.
Just wanted to lend some perspective.
Remember when only one application at a time could play sound? And then Ubuntu shipped an early build of pulseaudio, and all of a suden no application could play a sound? :P
Makes me appreciate PipeWire so much more.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Finding driver’s and IRQ settings for my Creative Labs Soundblaster. I fought with OSS, ALSA, and Jack to enable real-time audio. I heard my audio get garbled, unfixable without a reboot. All those moments will be lost in time, like using Subversion for source control. Time to reinstall.
I recall having issues like that when I tried to do things the wrong way. The forum posts just tell you wow to do something, but they rarely question if it’s the sensible thing to do in the first place. If Standard Notes isn’t in my repositories or if I can’t find a flatpack for it, I would just ditch the whole idea and switch to whatever note app is easily available. If something is not easily available, I just ignore those apps completely. Going through hours of trickery and hackery to build a wobbly tower that will collapse next week is not worth it.
I installed Manjaro to test a year or so ago. Only issue I had was my USB wifi adapter, that took some time to get working. Otherwise the OS install was very smooth.
Standard notes is available as appimage from their website, as a snap on ubuntu and also as flatpak on flathub. How did you install or run it? Also, please don’t equate ubuntu with linux, unless you had troubles installing it on other distros as well. It scares away other people trying to move to good gnu+linux distros (like linux mint, fedora, etc).
Oh, there’s a flatpak for it. That would have solved the problem very easily. However, the thing is, that many new users try to do things the hard way, or they end up trying to something it isn’t even worth doing.
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