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Why people gave up using linux?

The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?

267 comments

  • I switched to a Mac a couple years ago but I'll always at least keep a Linux VM and a separate Linux laptop just in case.

    As for why, generally speaking, Apple puts a lot of really, really good work into making a machine that feels immediately productive with little fiddling around, they're ahead of the pack in some ways, and for advanced stuff it's "good enough".

    My reasons:

    1. Cross-device integration (at least with Apple) - I already use an iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. The integration between iOS and macOS is just really, really good. Android+Linux just doesn't come anywhere close. And that's even if you put in the hours it'd take to set a bunch of disparate apps up to try to replicate it. Anyone telling you otherwise is completely full of bullshit or is showing that they actually haven't used Apple devices.
    • Using my iPad as a secondary display takes literally 2 clicks.
    • Setting my Apple Watch to unlock my laptop takes literally 4 clicks.
    • Casting my screen or even just sound takes 2 clicks.
    • Handoff is just magic. If you recently used something on your phone and have the matching app on your Mac, you get a shortcut in your Dock to load whatever you had on your phone on your computer to pick up where you left off. If I am in a Signal chat, I can instantly open the chat I was viewing on my phone. Same for browsing websites, text messages, and a bunch of things.
    • Airdrop between devices "just works".
    • If I connect to a wifi access point from my phone, my laptop will prompt me to automagically copy the password over (i think) bluetooth. Or if I'm at a friend's house and they use an iPhone, they'll get a prompt to share their wifi network password with me.
    1. Device restoration - Restoring a Mac is just impressive for how little effort it requires. If someone stole my laptop, I can drive 15 mins to an Apple Store, buy a new laptop, point it at my NAS, and be back running in an hour or less to exactly where I left off. Similarly, If I buy a brand new laptop, copying data from the old one to the new one is incredibly boring -- in all of the right ways. All apps/info/config/etc gets moved over. No weird quirks or workarounds or anything needed.
    2. M-series laptops - At the time, there were no other good options for ARM CPU laptops, especially ones that can be spec'd to 64GB of RAM. The M CPU laptops are crazy fast and efficient. I can literally use my laptop for 9-10 hours in a day going full-hardcore, and still have juice to spare. Yeah I know Asahi Linux works for the most part now, but I don't have time anymore to beta-test my main box.
    3. Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.
    4. Software - I wanted to save this for last since everyone quotes this first. I wanted to meddle with music and Ardour doesn't really scratch the itch the same way Logic Pro does. Another example: as bad as the Mac version of Microsoft Office is, it's still far more nicer feeling than LibreOffice and requires much less work to get a good looking presentation/etc. out the door on a time crunch.

  • I've used Linux since about 1996, when only Slackware worked for me ( Red Hat didn't work right, & I never tried Yggdrasil ).

    Ian began his Debian distro sometime around then ( Deb was his partner, hence the distro's name )

    About a year ago, I was using openSUSE, both Tumbeweed & their more-stable LEAP.

    They removed the drivers for my wifi adapter, in an update.

    They broke my desktop.

    Again.

    I've been told by Steam support ( in 2023, iirc ), directly through their system, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family of Linuxen.

    UbuntuStudio stuck with XFCE for YEARS, even though XFCE is rigged to prevent one from being able to grab the corner of a window, because almost-all of its different options ( themes? ) permit only a 1px thick window-grabber, and that isn't usable.

    Why??

    Try installing Haskell Stack on Void Linux for ARM.

    You can't:

    Haskell Stack requires GMP lib, for arbitrary precision arithmetic, and you can't get that to work on it.

    They won't add it, to make Haskell Stack installable.

    So, if the only machine you've got is ARM based, and you need to learn Haskell, go get a different distro.

    ( "Haskell Programming From First Principles" requires Stack )

    I used Ubuntu Server on ARM, for awhile, and the Ruby it included was broken, with a hard-coded bit in one of its scripts that had the wrong-location for one of the basic things in Linux...

    can't remember what it was, perhaps it was /usr/bin/mv instead of /bin/mv or something .. it was stupid, though, and it was in the Ubuntu version of Ruby, which was a deprecated version of Ruby .. so...

    the upstream Ruby maintainers wouldn't fix it, because they only maintain the maintained versions of Ruby, AND...

    Ubuntu wouldn't fix it, because they insisted it was upstream's problem, even-though they wouldn't include a maintained version of Ruby.

    Fuck idiocy.

    On & on & on.

    Fix 1 thing, & break 3 more , seems to be the "religion" of the various Linuxen.

    I'm old, & tired of being beaten-on by "friends" and "allies".

    Abusers are abusers.

    IF I ever succeed in fixing my health, breaking ( permanently ) my health-obstacles,

    THEN I want to do a linux-distro that simply excludes all bullshit, & enforces correctness-of-function.

    Funtoo seems to be part of The Right Answer ( it is the evolution of Gentoo ), in that people get the benefit of whatever hardware they've got, instead of a dumbed-down version which is more sluggish than need-be.

    I'd want it to be based entirely on Haskell, & Julia, leaving-out pretty-much all other languages ( Haskell's correctness & Julia's ruthless-efficiency ).

    Notice how there is a huge push to replace X.org with Wayland?

    Wayland removes ability to run The Linux Terminal Server Project, so you can't have little arm-terminals stuck on the backs of displays, and 1 single real-computer in the back, with an ocean of RAM, for all the students to use for their real apps...

    This "improvement" forces all to either have a powerful-enough desktop or .. not be allowed to run the modern distros/Linuxen at all.

    War against inclusion of people in poorer places, where it is much more doable to afford a bunch of RasPi-terminals than it is to afford dozens & dozens of x86-64 machines, is warring for .. fashion & class-status??

    The X Window System works. Through it, TLSP works.

    It enables people to have their Blender-renderer machine in the other room, where its fans-noise isn't going to bother them.

    Fashion-motivated or fad-motivated "strategy" consistently solves the wrong problem.

    Same as breaking people's wifi solves the wrong problem.

    WTF "loyalty" for a distro can ANYone have,

    .. once one has been "punched-in-the-face" by them, enough times??

    I've read OpenBSD's statement that "lack of a manpage IS A BUG".

    That IS PROPER.

    They GET it.

    There are development/programming methods that hold-to the same kind of properness:

    Behaviour-Driven Design, e.g.

    Test-1st.

    As somebody pointed-out, of all the "agile" methods, XP included engineering-processes, like test-1st whereas .. the rest, like Scrum, don't...

    That difference-in-religion, XP's objectivity MATTERS.

    Any "improvement" which breaks the functionality-tests or behaviour-tests, and you don't get the "improvement" in.

    Nobody has the integrity to do that, at the distro-level?

    I wouldn't permit any desktop-environment which is hard-coded to have 1px window-grabbers to be included in a distro, hence XFCE would have to get fixed, or it would be locked-out, explicitly for that usability-defect.

    I wouldn't permit breaking of people's network-access to be an official update's component.

    MAKE IT WORK RIGHT.

    That needs to be SOME distro's spine, that is usable-by-most, and efficient, and including the capability that people actually need to get stuff done...

    I want low-vision people being able to use it.

    I want blind-readers working in it.

    I want deaf people having full function through it.

    I want quadraplegics being able to work through it.

    I want TLSP working, so a single x86-64 machine, plus a batch of displays & RasPi's stuck on their backs, give a classroom the ability to teach calculus with Julia which is the proper way to be learning algebra or calculus ( seriously, try Julia: it's wonderful ).

    Anyways, you're seeing a tiny sliver of the decades-of-abuse that operating-system makers have put in us, that is in me.

    I won't willingly run any MS software ever again, due to their religion of molestation-of-priivacy & abuses ( I was one of the ones stung by their stolen from STAC disk-compression tech, in DOS 6.20, and their Vista era sending all searched-terms from the desktop to Microsoft violated privacy-law for both health-care sytems & for police systems, but .. they're "too big" to make accountable?? etc. )

    But the Linux world seems to have one hell of a religious-problem against stable usability.

    Distro-runners need to read a book by Al Ries: "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding", and understand that that stability/identifiability is a REQUIREMENT for a userbase to be not-sabotaged by one's distro.

    DON'T KEEP CHANGING THE WAY EVERYTHING WORKS, and expect your userbase to love you for it.

    KDE 3.5 had much right-idea, but nowadays .. wtf??

    Too complicated to be allowed to see where one is, within the menu-system??

    That isn't a "feature", that is "fashionable" mental-illness.

    And I despise the Apple-style contextless GNOME way.

    /grouch

    just an opinion, of an old, useless bastard, who's tired of being obstructed/abused by distro-decisions.

    _ /\ _

  • Linux works well if you need something to function as a tool, be it a NAS, network appliance, server, etc. You can setup it up with the small subset of things you need it to do and trust it’ll just run without further interference.

    When it comes to a consumer device, it fails the “just works” criteria much harder the OSX or Windows. Software tends to be maintained by an army of unpaid volunteers passionate about their specific use case with a lot of infighting around how things get done. Such functionality is often developed by people with such a warped idea of usability that they consider VIM to be the ideal, modern, text editor. This is a piece of software that started life in the mainframe days, where input lag was measured in seconds rather the milliseconds, in order to minimize number of keystrokes, no matter how convoluted. This leads to multitudes of forks of functionality with subtly differing functionality often with terrible UI and UX catered to the developer’s specific workflow.

    Whenever a lay persons asks how to get started with Linux, they get sent down a rabbit hole of dozens of distros, majority of which are just some variant of Ubuntu, with no clear indication of what’s different as they all just describe themselves as the ultimate beginner distro. With the paralysis of choice, they can pick one at random and hope it’ll work with their hardware without issue, spend hours figuring out the nitty-gritty differences and compatibility issues, or just give up and keep using what they already know.

    • My take is that:
      Linux is a utility OS. Just doing what you told it to.
      Windows/Mac are a general purpose OS. They try to assist and help you where possible. But thwy allow for some kind of deeper tinkering if needed.

      Linux trys to become Win/Mac but failing because of the fighting you mentioned. Also because that OS aint being checked by QA for general folks.
      Windows Server/Mac Server are trying to be a Linux OS but being way too bloated and trying to do things they arent meant to do.

  • Performance and reliability when gaming is my only reason for keeping Windows installed.

    Steam and everything else have already exceeded my wildest expectations in Linux, however I am somebody who wants to come home from work, fire up a game and have it work perfectly with the best settings and framerates I can manage. I don't have the time nor patience to troubleshoot why some update just broke the game in some way after I've spent the last 10 hours dealing with other people's problems.

    • Yeah I'm still on Windows for the same reason. I seem to be a Linux gaming bug magnet, but I just keep having issues on basically any Linux PC that I try to game on. It's getting better, but still not reliable enough for me. I have a Steam Deck now, which is super cool. But even there I had my fair share of bugs. I tried installing some software in desktop mode which instantly crashed the store (this was on first boot after a fresh install and update). I've also had my fair share of full Deck crashes during games already, especially after updates. Overall it's very cool that it all works, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I have to debug a game for 30 minutes (or more) instead of just playing the game. And that happens just a bit too often to me.

    • Man I relate to this so hard.

  • Weird edge cases. You would think that edge cases are a minority, but a setup without any edge case is the real minority.

    From screens that decide to not power up (Nvidia !!!) to programs not wanting to start (Minecraft flatpak who doesn't run from desktop but okay from command line), sometimes when you want it to just work it's exhausting.

    On my side I've totally given up on windows and happily run a full AMD household, it's fine, but still.

  • Because it refuses to work well without constant tinkering.

    I picked up a raspberry pi 5 to use as my desktop at home, and tried pi OS, Ubuntu, KDE Plasma, all of which could connect to my home wifi network, but none of which would provide reliable upload or download speeds. Ongoing issues with connection quality to my Bluetooth speaker. Trying to find fixes online is challenging.

    I wound up installing android, and everything just works.

    • So... You're aware that all the things listed are Linux at their core, right? Android runs on the Linux kernel.

      Constant tinkering really means understanding how the system works; not to mention a system (be it Mac/win/lin) which needs no modification is one unused. The only way construction in NYC would stop being a 'problem' is if the city were dead.

      • Android is Google/Linux not GNU/Linux tho. You can't even create a damn symlink.

  • There are two parts of my story.

    For those with limited time, I gave up Linux once because it was so “strange” from Windows I felt uneasy to use one, and other time because I simply had no use case for it. For those with time, kindly read on.

    I had always been an MS-DOS/Windows user who tried Linux and failed several times because I didn’t “get” it, until sometimes between 2006 and 2007 when Mac started its transition into Intel CPU. It was interesting enough (as it was the beginning point for Mac to become mainstream in my country). I decided that my first laptop was going to be a Mac (my house used to see that building own PC was the way to go). It was the first lightbulb moment when I tinkered with a few options in the terminal. This helped me in the future when I tried Linux again. Count it as a transferable skill of sort.

    Then around as late as 2021 (because of various life circumstances), I decided to become a cyber security professional—a long time passion of mine. In order for the journey to be pleasant, Linux must be learnt. I enrolled in a course from one authoritative source for SysAdmin, and that was the first time I got to study the innards of the system. After that, along with myself landing a cyber security job, I became more fluent with Linux. Today, I work closely with clients who use Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, and sometimes Solaris, so there is no dull moment (except for troubleshooting Windows from time to time). Linux becomes part of my professional life, as the main use case.

    Linux learning curve does feel steep, but choosing a right distro for others help a lot. I never have my peers giving up on Zorin so far, for instance.

  • Because to most people, a computer is like buying a car, it should just work.

    A Mac is an Automatic, no configuration is needed outside of your favorite radio stations. Sure most people hate that the infotainment was replaced with a touch screen that only support carplay. But hey for the rest of the time they don't think about it. A widows PC is the same thing, but made by Tesla/BMW where the heated seats are a subscription service.

    Linux is a range from manual to a kit car. Sure it can look like the big boys or even cooler. But the amount of work that's required is insane to the average user, and most people won't want to touch the hood, let alone to configure the infotainment so it can connect to your iPhone since it technically supports car play. But to those that know how to use it will swear that their manual car is better in every way than an automatic.

    • That's the thing about Linux though, is it really depends on the user. The average user doesn't need any more than a web browser and maybe some Office suite. Chrome OS has shown this. Linux is actually great for these users.

      It's the semi-power user, the one that has to do a lot of work, but doesn't know much about computers that Linux seems to trip up.

      It's like that wojack bell curve meme.

    • You perfectly describe Linux from 10-20 years ago but a lot has changed and improved

      Last time I installed Linux, it took me about 30 minutes. I had a perfectly fine system that I then improved to my personal likings because I can, not because I must.

      I also (about a month or so ago) installed windows 11 and it was a shit show. Getting the ISO installed on a USB stick already took hours and more attempts than I wish to remember to get something that actually worked.

      Then the installation, It took literally hours, loads of "I want to sell you shit you don't need!" screens, I needed to download gigabyte sized files for drivers with bloat shit, it managed to freeze within minutes.

      People pay money for that shit and it will spy on you.

      Meanwhile in Linux land, you can have it as simple or as complex as you wish

      Don't come up with the "but inevitably something will break and then you need a command line she'll" because have you ever had the fun of needing to dig around in undocumented windows registry bullshit, or the windows "power" shelll?

      • I too am using Linux, but finding an "automatic" linux is difficult since most distros are about performance. It's like trying to find an Italian Sports Car with an automatic.

        And for the general user, they don't install their OS. It's preinstalled on a Laptop, or an all-in-one, think-dell office PC that their company provides them. Sign in like you do with everything today and you are good to go. Even Macs do this.

        Linux has improved, but the desktop os's need to be more stable (in 1 year I broke 2 manjaro installs and my BTFS file system died in my Fedora install), packages need to be more up to date, and there needs to be gui's for any setting that a user needs to access like restarting a systemd process. A general user will not touch a terminal. Let alone download a git repo, just to update the latest build of Mangohud since the Ubuntu version is so out of date that the GOverlay GUI Utility that's on Ubuntu doesn't work with it.

  • For me was when Mint suddenly broke my Bluetooth driver and I had to dig deep about how to fix that wasting my entire day on it, this was 2016 I think.

    I just wanted to play some games.

  • Bugs. Bugs, everywhere.

    These often require workarounds via the terminal -- if we're lucky. The whole situation gets old after a while, despite myself using Linux for 25 years now, and being an ideological supporter of Free Software for just as long. For new users, it's terrifying. At the end, convenience wins, and that's why I'm typing this via an M1 Macbook Air. Despite that, I still have 5-6 older Linux machines/laptops around, and I often run Debian ARM via virtualization too on this Macbook. I won't ever quite decouple from Linux.

    But it's important to objectively point at its faults, and for the chance that these faults will never get fixed, unless massive corporations come behind it to do the heavy lifting: proper beta testing of absolutely everything on the desktop/apps. That's the non-glamour part of coding that volunteer programmers hate to do, or can't do. It's what saved the Linux kernel, systems utils and server software: the companies that came to clean it up, develop it further, and support it. The desktop doesn't have that same support. That support died in 2002 when Red Hat announced that it will become a server-only company. Ubuntu is too tiny to help, and they've moved to servers too anyway.

    • Honestly I spend more time fighting weird bugs, performance issues and crashes with xcode than I do with any IDE under arch, including when I mained hyprland for like 6 months. And in this case, there usually was a way to actually fix or work around the issue.

      • Most dev tools under Linux are falling under the category I mentioned above where corporations actually maintain them and fix bugs. But the same luxury is not afforded for DEs and their apps. Additionally, Xcode is known to be a piece of s. But the Mac UI works well.

  • In 1999 I heard linux mentioned now and then, without knowing nothing about it, other than it being a non-microsoft OS. The problem for me was that I had no method of obtaining it while living in rural scandinavia, but I was chatting with someone on IRC who suggested I give FreeBSD, and gave me a link to where I could buy the discs (FreeBSD is, as the name implies, free to download and use, but you can pay for the convenience of having the official disks, which was reasonable for me as I was on dialup). So, that was my first experience in the unix-ish world; FreeBSD 3.3.

    I did tinker with it for a while, and found it absolutely fascinating. Coincidence would have it that I was also looking into perl at the time because I needed to write some CGI stuff, and FreeBSD was pretty practical for that. However, more or less nothing worked out of the box - I could never get my fairly standard Soundblaster Live to work, and it became apparent that while FreeBSD was a good server OS, it did not do as well as a desktop OS. So I reinstalled Win98, and continued to use that as my primary desktop OS. I kept fBSD on a hobby-server at home, though, which allowed me to continue tinker with it.

    A couple of years later I thought it was finally time to check out linux as a desktop OS. I don't remember trying them all, but in particular I remember Slackware and Mandrake linux. Slackware had some of the same problems as FreeBSD, where it wasn't mature enough as a desktop OS, but worked well on servers. Mandrake, on the other hand, was somewhat better at this. But still not good enough for me to switch. However, I continued to tinker with both linux and FreeBSD on the side, and on a few occasions I did primarily use FreeBSD when windows was giving me grief. I tested out Gentoo during this time as well, and liked how well its portage system felt familiar to me being used to the ports-system from FreeBSD. Come to think about it, during that time I was doing a lot of music production, for which I absolutely needed windows, that's probably one of the things that held me back.

    In 2007 I landed a job where my pearlier tinkering came in very handy, and while I at that point still considered myself primarily a BSD person, it became more and more apparent that Linux was probably a better choice for me, as the community was a lot larger, so I gradually migrated more and more over to linux. I did check out ubuntu, but I didn't like it. I started running Debian on a server I was responsible for.

    2013 rolls around, and I decided for reasons I cannot remember that it was time to try the desktop install again. I decided to try Mint. The more I used it, the less it resembled the unpolished distros I'd been trying earlier - Everything worked out of the box. I haven't moved back since.

    Come 2023 and my kids are old enough that they don't kill themselves if left unattended for 10 seconds, and I actually can hear myself think in the evening, and I start to look around for music software again. I first found Ardour, but I find it lacking a few of the things that I've always taken for granted in a DAW, so I was seriously considering having a dedicated windows install for music-work, but luckily I stumbled across Bitwig which is exactly what I need. It took a while for the software ecosystem to catch up to what I wanted to do on linux, but it finally got there.

  • People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.

    I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.

    The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.

    As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.

    If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.

    To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).

    Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.

  • I tried it during the start of quarantine just to see what all the fuss was about but it clashed way too much with how i use computers. I have no background in compsci and my occupation doesn't involve computers at all, so every problem I experienced was completely new and the solutions were never intuitive. For someone like me who spends maybe 8hrs a week at a desktop (and that's being generous) there's no incentive whatsoever to make the switch.

  • My daily driver is a Mac, so use Unix, mostly because I like the ecosystem and, as a designer, I’m tied to the adobe apps. This is what keeps me on the Mac side of things.

    I do have a Linux server I use as a media server and other library storage running pop_os, which I really like. I also like how smoothly it interoperates with my Mac. I will say, though, a couple of decades of using Linux on my servers have taught me a lot about using UNIX on my Macs.

  • Hardware compatibility and, unrelated to the this, Adobe sw are the main reasons for me

  • I don't know that I fully qualify as "gave up using Linux", but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I'm definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it's not all doom and gloom.

    For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).

    I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn't work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren't exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.

    Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there's much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I'm sticking with what works (even if it's FAR from perfect).

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