Asklemmy

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Adequate Unixy bits - The terminal does everything I need, the utilities are fine. I use Nix (and some Homebrew) to maintain various CLI tools.

5. 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.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it's a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won't catch on for the average PC user.

Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.

People told me "oh yeah, gaming on Linux is a comparable or even better experience compared with gaming on windows." Well after a whole weekend spent troubleshooting and trying different distros only to get 20fps max and no controller support for a 5 year old pc game I went back to windows and was playing within about 30 minutes including the time to install the OS.

Edit: Before you go giving me tips: yes, I tried that too. You're missing the point if your solution to the above is "more troubleshooting, I guess."

It's gotten a bit better, but last time I tried switching, the GUI client for my VPN provider was shit, the PC gaming compatibility aspect (non-Steam) wasn't quite good enough for me, Nvidia's drivers said fuck you to my display, and I couldn't quite figure out how to set up Samba. Lol.

20ish years ago I installed Ubuntu on a laptop with the intention to get off Windows. I then spent 4 to 6 hours a day for the next two weeks just trying to get the WiFi to function. None of the fixes I could Google up worked, and that was frustrating. It was the people in the Linux forums that finally made me quit trying, though. The amount of gatekeeping was kind of shocking. Like, how dare I bother such mighty computer men with my plebian questions. I should feel honored that anyone condescended to respond at all, and I should gratefully accept their link to a fix I've already tried and fuck off.

I bought a new PC last year and I hate Windows 11 so much that it's got me eyeing Linux again. But the thought of having to repeat that whole ordeal again makes me feel sick to my butthole.

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 )

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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.

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

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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??

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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 )

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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.

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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.

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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 ).

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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??

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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.

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/grouch

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

_ /\ _

Historically, it's been because I didn't just "use it". Instead I tinkered with it, and then broke it beyond my ability to repair.

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.

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.

I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.

I've used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:

• I'd encounter a hardware driver issue I didn't know how to fix (Nvidia...)
• I'd dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
• I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment's control panel didn't support, and I'd have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn't understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
• Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn't know how to fix.

The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren't a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.

I haven't used it since Valve made Proton what it is today, but:

The troubleshooting was a nightmare. Heaven forbid the trouble be with graphics drivers. I love the command terminal and all but when you try 10 different solutions from Stack Exchange and Reddit and all of them give you errors or do nothing at all.... At some point I just had to accept that it wasn't worth the amount of time I had to invest in it.

I hate Windows as much as the next guy but I had to admit that troubleshooting, for whatever reason, took significantly less time when problems came up on Windows.

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.

Some people like to work on their pc, and not work on their pc.

Don’t get me wrong I love Linux, but outside of the Lemmy echo chamber is isn’t very accessible for the average user

It's more of a hobby than a daily driver for someone that games on PC games ranging from the early 90s to modern games. Too much hassle when I just wanna install and play.

The best way I've seen it put is as such "why would I bother with a list of workarounds and janky, barely supported tools, just to get on par with out of the box windows". Because like it or not, windows is a piss easy OS to get running on, and Microsoft puts a huge amount of work into making compatability a non-issue. If it was made for windows, it probably still works so long as your hardware hasn't broken it, regardless of how old. Linux just can't match the sheer amount of stuff that works on windows. And Linux subsystem means you don't even need a dedicated Linux boot for things.

So all in all, Linux just doesn't stack up that well as a daily driver. Sure, I have various systems that run it, and they work great, but that's because I don't ever use them beyond narrow purposes.

It’s “hard”.

I’m an os slut. I use whatever… daily driver is Mac, most of my work is RDP to windows servers

I’ve always got a Linux flavor or two running

We are not most people… not even close. “Most people “ love that their computer runs chrome - and that’s good enough.
It lets them facebook and do taxes.

Asking even the most basic lift. Install Firefox; try an ad blocker. Care about your privacy.

Nope. Make Netflix work is about as far as it gets.

I want to get Asahi running when I have some time to spare. I’ve only don’t run it as a daily driver because what I have works. And that’s fine.

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.

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.

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.

Everything I know about Linux I learned troubleshooting a problem. And I still feel like I don't know shit about the OS. After so long with Windows, Linux feels like living in a country where you don't speak the language; everything is harder than it needs to be.

If the day comes where games are as easy on Linux as they are on Windows, I'll give desktop Linux another shot.

This said, I've self-hosted on a Debian box for years.

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.

I tried to install Linux on my new laptop, trying multiple different distros.

• Many of them did not work with my 3840x2400 screen, with unreadably tiny UI
• The sound did not always work
• When the sound did work, I either couldn't change the volume, or figure out how to disable the speakers when I plug in headphones
• Sometimes screen brightness could not be changed

In short, driver problems. So many driver problems. I was sinking too much time into it, and I was basically unable to use my computer. So I gave up and switched back to Windows. Windows has its own annoyances, and I want to use Linux... but Windows mostly works, most of the time. Linux doesn't, and I have neither the time nor the technical skills to make it work.

This is a weird reason, but there is a logic to it.

I use Linux at work, and I associate Linux with writing software.

Once I'm done working for the day, I want to relax and do something fun. For me, that is Windows. While I don't particularly care for any OS, I associate one with work and one with play.

The opposite was true when I used to work with .NET on Windows 7. I hated using Windows on my home laptop, and Fedora became my "fun time OS".

Nothing works without extended fiddling. While fiddling, nothing works the way the manual says it should. Googling for solutions gets results that are terminal commands than don't do what the poster says they should.

Microsoft sucks, but Windows programs work as expected 95% of the time. Linux programs don't work at all 75% of the time, even after extensive reading and extended periods of time wasted fucking around with fixes proposed by the internet.

Last time I tried diving headfirst into Linux, I got frustrated by having a problem and all the suggested solutions are all wildly different (from an outside perspective) series of editing settings or unusual terminal commands. I already knew how Windows worked well enough to do most things I wanted, but didn't have almost any understanding of how Linux operated so all of the opaque solutions offered without explanation of why or how it should fix the problem just added to my confusion. Couple that with having to sort through one or two dozen suggestions to find one that actually works, not knowing if even attempting any solutions would cause other issues later.

Linux would have to manifest a physical fist that punched me in the face every so often in order for me to quit using it. (I'm just shy of 20 years since abandoning Windows)

My reasons:

• So far there hasn't been something I've wanted to do on Linux that wasn't doable - and most of the time (especially these days) it's easier.
• Everything MS has done in the consumer space post Win-2K
• Everything Apple has done.

Employers requiring that I use Windows on a computer they provide has been a thing, once or twice. It's their computer, so no argument from me.

Nowadays that would be pretty weird thing to do though. I mean, I'll gladly do it if you're paying me by the hour, I guess.

I'm actually looking at rolling Linux exclusively at some clients. The employees are working through a web app. All the ads, interruptions, and poorly tested updates in Windows waste time, but not enough to be a problem worth solving on their own. It's managing software licenses that's just too much of a pain when we need to suddenly bring on more staff (it's a small business so no dedicated IT department). Easier to just have a standard Linux image that I show up and spam onto a dozen hard drives. I'm available for maintenance, but it's never actually been required.

Because over time I realized Linux wastes a lot of my time on unimportant shit. Then I was given a Mac and eventually I realized that macOS has most of the upsides of Linux while being much more stable, less buggy and more pleasant to use. It just works®™

I don't regret ever using Linux tho, it's a great for learning new stuff and acquiring different kind of thinking. Everyone who's a programmer or in some adjacent field should use Linux at least for a while. It's easy to notice when someone never used it.

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.