this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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It's legitimately staggering to me how much easier to maintain Linux is for the average use case than Windows. No messing with drivers; has preinstalled what's essentially a GUI app store to manage literally all of my applications; updates that don't require a restart; no bullshit with licensure; a trivial install process with zero dark patterns; no malware; and I could just keep going. Linux has faults with the UX, but having switched to it from Windows about a year ago, it's extremely evident why this stereotype is perpetuated in spite of Linux being the sort of OS I would recommend to my grandma over Windows: nose blindness.
When Linux genuinely improves the ease of use over Windows, Windows users don't even recognize it as a problem. Like imagine if the roles were reversed where on Windows I could just click a button, type in my password, and update every single one of my applications at once, but on Linux, I had to individually open any given app and check for updates manually. Windows users would rightfully be bemoaning that as too complicated for a lot of users and bitching about how tedious it is to maintain (in the case of Windows, updating is a bizarre patchwork whose difficulty depends on the application's developers). But since it's a problem they've become nose blind to, when Linux actually fixes this obviously ridiculous issue Windows has, it's seen as "not a big deal anyway".
I'm a huge Linux fan but that wasn't my experience. My experience was apps getting borked by attempting to load the updated versions of libs and communicating with a half-updated system where they don't understand each other. For example with KDE I often had the experience that after updating packages, even the shutdown and similar buttons don't work in the start menu. They were doing nothing, and when I looked at system logs, I have seen some failure with starting that confirmation overlay with the countdown. But similar experience with Firefox too.
Somehow it does not happen on my laptop, even though I use the same distro and still KDE. But on the desktop it was predictably happening, and the worst part was that I was still new with how a desktop works (technically) on Linux so I could not even troubleshoot it, while the system was actively falling apart. By the way, I still don't know what the fuck was happening, or how would I diag it.
Upvoted because your experience is valid, but I will say that mercifully so far, I haven't had this issue personally. Instead, rather, my Windows 10 installation is basically broken because MS pushed an update that requires it to enlarge the recovery partition, but because there's another OS past the recovery partition, it can't. So whenever I use it now, I need to wait for it to try updating itself, recognize that it failed, and then undo the updates and boot again (the entire process takes 10+ minutes). I only use this partition for emergencies where something critical absolutely won't work on Linux, but it's still hilarious to me that this happened shortly after I abandoned ship.
Part of it will be because an uodate needs a restart of an app, a service or reboot(kernel) to actually update. People think the update finishing means everything is now running new code in memory, but it will hold old code till it is allowed to use the new stuff. Not sure on a deb system but with zypper ps -s it tells you exactly which packages are not running latest updated packages and need to be "released" before it can
My brother, you don't realize how critical that is. UX is all that matters for us regular people when it comes to computers and operating systems. Even after Windows 11's moronic redesign people still find Linux UX to be relatively inferior, which speaks a lot about the absolute state of it.
I do realize the importance of the UX, which is why I listed some of the mountain of problems with Windows' UX that make it an inferior one to Linux. As I noted, the reason people tend to find Linux's inferior is that they're simply nose blind to the landfill of Windows UX problems that would be a dealbreaker if they were on Linux but not Windows. (That, or they literally never use Linux and just assume it's inferior because of memes that say it is.)
The reason I pointed out that Linux has faults with the UX is to say that it's not some perfect wonderland with zero problems, but it's a huge improvement over Windows.
As a linux user, updates often need services manually restarted, or a reboot to update the kernel...problem is many linux users think running an update means you are running all the latest, but you arent if apps are still open or services still running, linux keeps running what you had installed and won't run the new till you close your app or shut a service