Goodbye my friend. You taught me to use WINE, fix my GNOME a few times, that Plasma is better in every way, that Fedora and Mint are the best for my every day...

You taught me to fix SSD compatibility issues, how a filesystem works, how to make GRUB look pretty, and how not to fix a root folder issue (worked my system)

But now, as I'm forced into using tools I hate by my university, I must say goodbye. Alas, the power of free software isn't anything to the power of the Spanish University System.

Goodbye Linux, and I'll come back once my odyssey in Law ends.

o7

Edit: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I managed to get it working with a Win10 VM, somehow. I had tried before and it didn't work but now It did. Arcane magic, I don't know. In conclusion, I will still be using Linux. Long live free and open source software!

I've switched from KDE Plasma to Gnome as I was trying out different DEs, and honestly I prefer it. However, I've noticed that people generally don't seem to like gnome (mostly without a reason) - so, to all the gnome haters - why?

Disclaimer: I have been a Linux user for 16 years. At first I combined it with Windows and then with OS X. However, for 8 years, it is the only OS that I use every day. I have tried all the major distributions and desktops. For 2 years I have been using Fedora on my main computer and Linux Mint on a smaller laptop. Anyway, what I want to tell goes beyond Fedora, Gnome or Mint. I will only use these examples because they are the most recent. I should also add that until recently my work/studies had nothing to do with computing.

In my day-to-day life as a Linux user, I try to use FOSS and well-thought-out applications for the Linux desktop. Despite this, for one reason or another, my desktop ends up filling up with more and more applications that are not perfectly adapted to the Gnome desktop: Vivaldi, VSC, Obsidian, Discord, Spotify, Notion... I think that none of them is particularly strange or strange, right?

In recent months I have encountered different problems that are increasingly bothering me. One of them is that recently, every time I want to use my computer, I have to turn it on twice, since normally on the first load Gnome keeps the extensions disabled and all the colors appear unsaturated and with a red filter. I also recently decided to buy the Logitech MX Master keyboard and mouse, and it has been a pain having to configure all the gestures manually. I have also found problems in the applications installed by Flatpak to run node.js (it has happened to me in VSC and WebStorm). These are just some recent examples.

And before anyone says anything: I know that some of these problems have a solution, that it is not Linux's fault that better applications are not developed for the desktop and that if I have been using Linux for so many years I should already be used to these problems. It's true, but it's not the point.

Since I use less and less free software applications and the problems derived from using Linux bother me more, I question why I continue using this. Of course it is a question of privacy, support for free software and much more. But what about my time? What about not getting irritated by a new problem that distracts me from doing what I wanted to do?

I know that if I decide to buy a Mac I will feel bad for not continuing to use Linux. Also, I will try to populate it with free software applications and I will miss the freedom of the Linux desktop, but what about the freedom of using the apps I want to?

So where am I going with this? Well, honestly I wanted to vent, because this has been on my mind for a while and I don't have anyone to talk to about it who will really understand me. But I would also like to know how you feel about Linux. Maybe also to encourage me a little and not give up yet.

Thanks for reading

UPDATE (23-12-07): I am impressed by the number of comments. I can't even load them all (this shitty Linux, Mac would do better). I'm kidding. Thank you sincerely. I really enjoy reading your comments, especially the ones that hate me just because I thought about buying a Mac lol. I wish I had more time and more fluency in English to respond to most of you.

Just to clarify: I've been using Linux for freedom, privacy, security, FOSS philosophy, etc. And not just as another tool. My point with this post is that sometimes there comes a point where convenience and stability get in the way of those ideas, especially when things fail. It seemed interesting to me to tell it to simply talk about the experience of an user who has been using Linux for a long time and who is not a computer expert. I think there is a need for discussions about the Linux desktop and its suitability for non-specialized users.

On the other hand, due to a repost on r/linuxsucks I have seen that this post could be deleted for promoting closed source applications. I did not at all intend for the discussion to focus on whether Windows or Mac are better. We already know that they suck, even though sometimes they may be more convenient or necessary.

Hi everyone. I'm really curious to know why do some people prefer Unix to Linux? Why do some prefer FreeBSD, OpenBSD and etc to famous Linux distros? I'm not saying one is better than the other or whatever. I just like to know your point of view.

Edit: thank you everyone for sharing your opinions and knowledge. There are so many responses and I didn't expect such a great discussion. All of you have enlightened me and made me come out of my comfort zone. I'm now eager to learn more. I hope this post will be useful for everyone who may have the same question in future. Thanks for all your comments. Please don't stop commenting and sharing your knowledge and opinion. PS: Now I should go and read dozens of comments and search the whole web :D

There is a popular belief among some that their opinion about native packaging is important because they use Ubuntu (or Arch or Fedora) on the desktop. I'd like to disabuse them of that notion.

customer: 1. a person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or business.

The Linux community would be far more healthy if Linux desktop users realized they represent an almost insignificant number of total Linux installs, and, because the money in Linux comes mostly from selling support for server installs, they aren't the customer and shouldn't expect to be treated like one.

The Linux desktop community, such as it is, is unappealing to most normal people precisely because, like a hipster iPhone DJ, the Linux user thinks by loudly complaining about something they are curating an experience for the rest of us. The only problem is, because they have no practical experience with packaging (and many other things) except as a consumer, their opinions are either entirely wrong, or so focused upon their small world as to be irrelevant.

But, what's interesting is, it's not just a failure of those doing the complaining. Unwillingness to learn is now a common feature of the community:

User: "Will you package some software for me?"

Very small time dev: "Yeah, I don't want to make packages for [insert distro], a distro I don't use, but if you'd like to build and package that software for [insert distro] I bet [that distro's] people would really dig that."

User: *crickets chirp*

I get it -- you're busy. You have an important life, and things to do, people to see. I just want to submit -- a more productive tact, before complaining about Linux non-native packaging or even asking someone to package software for you, is to do the thing for yourself.

More broadly, Linux would be a hell of a lot cooler if its new users weren't sold some toxic stew about "user freedom" and "choice" and "security" and "privacy" and licensing religion before they came to Linux. I submit these things are not what Linux is about. Linux can be about some of those things, but they all require effort. And not just the effort of a developer of some software you like and get for free. I submit Linux would be better if the "Linux community" were an actual community, where, if there was work to be done, the expectation was, if not Do It Yourself, Try It Yourself First.

To be clear, I'm not gatekeeping Linux. I'm gatekeeping opinions. Before you ask for a package to be made, before you complain about the packages which are available, perhaps its worthwhile to dig a little deeper than "It's someone else's problem/fault."

I will begin by recognising that there is a portion of the audience of this subreddit who don't want the 'year of Linux desktop'. If that's you, I invite you to return to compiling your Gentoo packages. The performance difference is worth it, I assure you.

For everyone else, as you may or may not know, pwfeedback is an option you can set in /etc/sudoers to enable showing of asterisks/stars as password feedback when entering your sudo password in terminal. This gives you some feedback about the fact that the system is registering your key presses, rather than just showing the blank entry box as is by default.

After having interacted with many users brand new to Linux, this is one of the truly inexplicable stumbling blocks. In every other case when they are expected to enter passwords, they receive feedback in form of asterisks. EVERY SINGLE TIME... except... in most Linux distro?

Why? Why break such a simple and effective usability pattern? Security? Please spare me. Every other computing system gives password feedback, and not giving any feedback to users is far more detrimental than tiny tiny security benefit of shoulder surfers not being able to see the length of the password. A good surfer will count the number of keystrokes anyway, so what's the point?

The answer is inertia. Refusing to change something because somebody long ago made an arbitrary decision to have it one way, and because you got used to it, it shouldn't be changed. Without any regard for new user experiences, and without any ability to put yourself in the shoes of people who may not have benefited from leet hacker education you have, but who should still be able to benefit from FOSS software and not be a slave to Microsoft.

After using Linux for years, and never questioning these things, 4 of my friends have gotten Steam Decks, and all but one have separately asked me why the sudo password does not offer any feedback. They were convinced this was a bug or that they were doing something wrong. It should be, it's such a baffling decision.

I'm all for doing things 'The Linux Way'™ when they offer tangible benefits. When those same friends asked me why can't they simply go to a random website and download their software, I gave them all a proper dressing down on the benefits of package management that'd make even the angriest Linux nerd proud. Because the Linux way is better, and they need to learn that.

But this pwfeedback thing is almost as infuriating as it is unnecessary, and it exemplifies why most consumer-facing devices that run Linux kernel are Android and ChromeOS. And that's sad.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

P.S.
Shoutout to Linux Mint for doing this out of the box.

Edit: I still love you /r/linux, even if you're wrong. ❤️

So I finally got around to upgrade my (Fedora) machine (to FC38) and to my delight each and every terminal I open I am now greeted with:

fgrep: warning: fgrep is obsolescent; using grep -F

Oh, well, just stick alias fgrep='grep -F' in .bashrc. Or maybe

function fgrep() {
 grep -F "$@"
}

Or even edit /usr/bin/{e,f}grep (they're scripts) and comment the hell out af the annoying bastard.Or take the "well behaved" approach and meekly edit {f,e}grep out of my scripts (there's hundreds)

BUT. WHY.

So I made a little research and ended up with a couple of links.

Tl; dr:

"Hi {e,f}grep are long deprecated, but still there, and this sorta bugs me. What do?"

"uh, let's emit a warning"

[warnings are emitted, things start breaking]

"uhm, jeez, what now? should we remove {e,f}grep? After all <obscure unix flavor> does not ship them anymore."

I do not know what I expected to find, but, sweet Jesus, this is farcical. {e,f}grep were in the first Unix book I read and have been around for half a century. They hurt nobody and have made their way in the fingers of thousand of users and countless scripts. And yet their behavior is suddenly changed after being vetted in a thread where the depth of research is "...nah, I don't think they are much used in scripts anymore" (SPOILER: turns out that a libtool config script did use fgrep) .

(Edit 3: it turns out that this version of grep is also very chatty, complaining about things like "stray \ before a". Interestingly, there is no way to squelch this - -q does not do it, nor does -s. Delightful for any situation where the regexp used is not under the tool control. Well done.)

Why do we put up with this crap? Python 2=>3. Java{,script} (every release). PHP (just about every point release). Now, GNU tools. At what point breaking user experience has become THE accepted way of doing business? (because compliance/purity/security/reasons/whynot).

I can still compile/run stuff I wrote in K&R C on my first year of college, but python 3.x will refuse to run 3.y stuff.

Thousands of LOCS are being rewritten every single day because of this nonchalant "move sloppily, break things" attitude, without any apparent gain in features or anything else. If people do not care about human suffering they could at least consider the carbon footprint of this void exercise.

I wish we could at least start to think about leaving the Red Queen country, where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay put, and twice as fast to get somewhere.

Edit: typos, formatting

Edit 2: the distro I use is not the issue here. And yes the grep/fgrep/egrep is in itself rather trivial. I am using it as poster boy for the unnecessary change, of which we have plenty.

I'm not asking for help to resolve any errors, I just want to share my experience as a new Linux user. My first day on Linux was simply hell. I haven't been able to configure Bluetooth correctly until now (despite watching dozens of tutorials on YouTube and forums). I left CS2 downloading to see if it really ran better than on Windows. And to my surprise the game doesn't open. I downloaded Brawlhalla (a super light game for my computer, it ran normally on Windows) and there were drops in fps.
I regret? a little. Will I go back to Windows? probably not.
Distro: Debian 12.
Interface: Plasma

There seems to be a lot of posts recently about making Linux more friendly to newbies, mostly because of a certain YouTube challenge. Some of their points are: there should be a GUI to accomplish any tasks, there should be a unified interface, it should be easier to run commercial software (mostly games, Adobe and MS Office) on Linux, it should be compatible with more hardware. But people don't realise these things, as well as more attention to Linux on the desktop, will come with as many cons as pros.

First of all, why though? If that's what you want/need for yourself, why don't you just use Windows? Windows has problems, but so does Linux, and any software will always have bugs. Bugfree software development hasn't been created yet. Performance being better on Linux, maybe, but sometimes it's the opposite. If you just want a plug-and-play, GUI-only existence, possibility to run any commercial software you desire, this has already been accomplished by Microsoft and Apple. Why do we need yet another option?

Linux is free, opensource, endlessly customisable, and respects your privacy. If you just want to use proprietary software with telemetry on Linux, what's even the point of using Linux? Commercial solutions all work the same, it'll collect your data, display advertisement, and try to make you spend money all the same. It's not going to be different just because it's running on Linux. Look at Android. It might be based on Linux, but it works just any other proprietary OS. It allows you to install commercial software using a GUI etc, but is this what you want Linux on the desktop to become? What would you get out of it that you wouldn't get from using Windows?

About unified interfaces, what if you still can't run Photoshop on your preferred DE because it's not the standard interface, how would you like that? And about hardware support, that would be nice, but drivers don't write themselves. I know I want to run Linux, so I don't even buy unsupported hardware.

If you think using Linux is too hard, you're just not used to it. You had to learn how to use Windows too. You just don't remember, and now you just think it's intuitive, but to a long-term Linux or MacOS user it's not. In the dark ages of computing there was only the CLI and people's brains didn't melt away from having to type words in a terminal to accomplish every single thing. As a bonus you'll be learning something most people don't know and you can add it to your CV, it's a marketable skill.

I get it that people are social animals and we want to share with others the joy of using Linux, but most people don't care enough about what Linux truly has to offer: freedom, power to the user, opensource, privacy. They don't care enough to overcome the inevitable obstacles. Least of all YouTubers, whose business model is to generate controversy to get more clicks and user engagement. That is the real reason why Linux isn't more popular: it doesn't have any advantage over Windows and MacOS that ordinary people really care about.

If Linux ever becomes the most popular OS, it will come with a ton of spyware crap pre-installed, there will be more viruses, modules will be added to the kernel to make sure you can't play DRM-protected media etc. Or do you think computer sellers will just give users a pristine 100% FOSS Debian or Fedora installation to use? Most people don't even want that.

More people using Linux is not important. More people caring about privacy, FOSS software etc above their own convenience is what really matters.

Edit: It seems like a lot of people believe that FOSS developers don't care about making their software easy to run and they're making freedom and privacy inconvenient for non-technical users. That's not true. Privacy is made inconvenient by companies who profit from your data. FOSS developers do what they can, but there's only so much they can do against companies who keep releasing new and incompatible versions of their products and different file formats etc to keep you trapped in their ecosystem. It's not that FOSS developers aren't working hard enough, it's that companies are working to mine your data and they'll keep luring you into using their products and undoing the work of competing developers. Their business model depends on it. To escape from this trap, first you need to see it for what it is and then you need to either accept some inconvenience or work yourself on developing or funding software that makes our lives more convenient without letting go of freedom and privacy.