Linux

I used elementaryOS back in 2016. It was the best system, the best experience, the best look and feel. That was amazing.

Everything went to shit with one of the updates. It destroyed the graphics drivers and I wasn't able to reinstall it correctly. Shortly after they released the new big version of elementaryOS which was just bad. Looked bad, worse user experience. It was also slower. And even small update killed my graphic drivers. Again. That was it. Back to Windows. Few years after that I moved to MacOS and now it's stable, looking nice and I am confident that the os will work pretty much the same on the next day.

It's crucial when you have a freelance work. I just can't imagine waking up to see that my Linux machine decided to fuck me up on a that particular day. Nope.

I use arch and it's frustrating for me too. I just tried to boot mint on a Chromebook for a friend and it shit itself with file explorer errors, taskbar going missing, and not being able to connect to the wifi. Pretty much abandoned it now.

I think it's just general fear of the command line. I've had a friend who always owned a mac, and started using it for his programming course. While assisting him in trying to compile some programs or use something like git from the mac's zsh terminal, I can tell it's a stressful event for him, even though all I told him to enter were simple commands like ls, mkdir, g++ etc.

I have a machine that runs fedora with no trouble at all. I never needed to debug anything, multimonitors and sound outputs all work. But every once in a while, something happens which can only be solved through the command line, because linux simply does not have a settings utility as extensive as windows control panel. It's fine for me, but telling that friend to bring up the terminal and enter a cryptic line will probably freak him out.

Tbh, after using Linux since 2019, i always needed to reinstall ubuntu based Linux distros and I have a tendency to just hate them for being so hardcoded and trashy. Feels like Windows but its evem more hardcoded. I ended up using Manjaro and yeah, I somehow mamaged to fix most but not all problems caused by Manjaro. But it was also not a good distro. I ended up at Arch Linux and somehow managed to just never reinstall it because everything is actually... finally... not fucking hardcoded. It mostly has a good wiki page that explains the details.

The problem with Arch is that its not beginner friendly nor for people who just want things to work. Its a long process of installing and setting everything by yourself, with the advantage that you finally have a system that is fully tranaparent to yourself and easy to manage and understand it.

As a mostly windows user, I've tried a few times, using various distributions. When buying my last pc and installing a popular linux distribution, it did not recognise my network card at all. Researching online told me I had to compile the drivers myself, since my distri did not have any shipped with it yet. ...which is pretty hard, having no internet access because of the network card not working.

For non-tech users, I feel like some parts are still pretty hard to diagnose. If an issue arises you mostly have to touch the command line and I can understand people being scared of it, having to edit plain text files, or type and enter commands that aren't descriptive, much less finding the right command by guessing. It certainly improved, with GUIs being available for most stuff, but if you want something specific, is still feels pretty rough on the edges sometimes, from the eyes of a normal user.

If you mostly need your basic apps, like browser, some office apps or a music player it works great, though.

I have installed Linux for purpose based computers in my IT and production line of work. And I’m curious about this topic. It’s sort of a dilemma. I work mainly in environments that require full fledged reliable tracking sessions in Adobe and Avid outboard hardware, etc. any time I tried to use Linux as a daily driver I regretted it. … But I want to use it. I agree with the values, and I prefer the customization and optimal use of my hardware… am I missing something as a Linux user about which distro or the way in which I’m using it.

are some of these considerations also part of what spurred your post OP?

I've been daily driving Pop on my laptop and my biggest frustrations currently are lack of working drivers for the fingerprint reader and speakers, and the Proton VPN client is crap compared to Windows.

I think this is a clash on workflows. I'm a windows user turned to linux. All I knew about was Windows and there was frustration during the transition. Now I'm at home in linux. Recently I had to use Windows for work. I wanted the gnome edge scrolling feature for my touchpad on windows. Couldn't figure it out even after hours and days of effort. The package management options was okay but sub par when you compare with linux. I hated the windows terminal. It always felt slow on my laptop. But was okay on workstation. I tried to mimick many other linux behaviour, like krunner and the windows alternatives ended up slowing down the system further and I was left unsatisfied. I've now returned to linux and run a windows vm in gnome boxes whenever I need something in windows world. We need to accept that linux and windows are like apples and oranges. We can't make them taste and feel the same. We could hope for software releases for both platforms from developers and vendors. But the experience would always remain different. In the end we the end user has to compromise.

Edit: Op I think I went a bit off topic keeping other comments in mind. All I can offer you is the frustration is inevitable if you want to do edge cases. Stick to gui options. Try to understand commands before jumping to cli. Use a container or vm to do the inevitable trial and error learning. Try to pick up on how best to phrase your problem so that your search engine can give you the relevant articles and not spam.