From time to time, like everyone else, I indulge in a guilty pleasure. In my case, it’s not something you can read about until after 10pm, but the occasional encounter with someone who tried Linux (again) and after a while went back to those pesky Windows because that Linux is unusable.
At this point it is worth recalling Jean-Luc Picard’s reaction to Geordi LaForge complaining about Reginald Barclay: “I suggest you get rid of your personal prejudice.”
It gets more fun every year also because I have personally known Linux as a desktop system for almost 30 years, I started using it here and there almost a quarter of a century ago, and it has been fully functional as the primary system on my PC since the fall of 2010, more than 13 flight.
Well, what the hell didn’t want, I came across one such talk again, where the author “left Eleven, installed Ubuntu and after six hours meekly returned to Windows 11”. I do not dispute in any way that the author really meant it this way and his story is completely factually correct, however, it reminds me of a situation where a person wants to lose weight and so stops eating pork roasts in his favorite pub, goes to a vegan restaurant and because he is refused the impossible burger give his favorite tartare, he will return to the pub after a few hours.
And since one doesn’t become a vegan for that one isolated motive and has to put up with the limitations of a radical dietary change anyway (until the gut microbiome adapts), Linux can’t be expected to do what Windows does, especially when Linux 90 % of software manufacturers excrete the remainder. I state this knowing that I recently wrote here about how operating systems are becoming more and more alike.
What doesn’t work on Linux
So millions of different things don’t work for us on Linux. When it comes to various professional or obscure hardware, Linux often draws the short end of the stick. Various audio devices, scanners, authentication keys, cutters do not work. Thousands of software products, from Adobe to the latest game, don’t work directly either. In particular, the big ones, trampled by the latest technologies, often work through Vulkan, but not as fully as on Windows. And if it does, your GPU won’t have as elaborate control panels as on the majority desktop platform.
I am not writing anything surprising. But it’s not Linux’s fault, it’s a feature of it. A property given by the approach of software and hardware companies, which sometimes reject Linux for their own reasons (after all, as a target for making money, it is too small a platform), sometimes they are forced to do so by circumstances (Hollywood does not want to play protected UHD Blu-ray movies on the strange system). Other times, it’s simply the case that no one wants the given functionality enough to implement it, so other things simply take priority.
Cultural specificity and myopic assessments
But Linux has advantages over Windows that often stem from the “half-madness of specific developers”. Where some printers have been out of support since 2015 with the launch of Windows 10, they still work on Linux with the latest kernel. Where some graphics haven’t received a new driver in 10 years and the manufacturer abandoned them a long time ago, they still work on Linux (albeit with minor problems), some are still kept running, even if it really doesn’t make much sense anymore, and some are even added functionality by developers , which they should never have.
No, each system simply has certain cultural specifics. Unfortunately, however, they often have to collide with reality, when “some writer” (for example, Ježek žejo) writes a text about them that sounds critical in the first sentences, and the majority of readers will not even read beyond the headline and a few words, which even in 2024 they still communicate the twisted fact that “Linux is not usable”. And so the regular reader of the regular web will hear this flawed mantra again, only to then sit down in front of their WebOS TV with an Android phone in hand and push data from dozens of web services through the network infrastructure, all 99.999% running on a certain unnamed operating system kernel. And he meditated on what Linux is and why it is still of poor quality.
It’s actually still the same fairy tale as it was 25 years ago. But 25 years ago you could understand that there is some truth in it. We didn’t have Knoppix with its LiveCD yet. We didn’t have Ubuntu with its easy driver installation. We didn’t have an online service that would retire one application or another for almost every activity performed on the computer. We didn’t have small rectangles in our pockets, with which you can do it from the comfort of a living room chair, as well as toilet bowls or seats in public transport, and one day it will surely come to the comfort of a hotel bed in the orbit of our planet. Back then, we didn’t even have digitization, which mostly freed us from the need to print/scan/copy anything. We didn’t live lives in online services, but pretty much with our data on our drives managed by our applications.
However, we lived at the turn of the century, when the paid Red Hat box was really not the only option to get a Linux distribution. In addition to the fact that Red Hat was normally downloadable back then, there was also Slackware, Debian, Mandrake and many others, not to mention that those who did not have access to the Internet could usually get a Linux installer on a CD once every few months as an attachment i magazine like Chip – I personally tried Red Hat 5.x or SUSE 6.x this way. Then Mandrake came for me, in the form of a 3×CD installer, burned twice a year on Verbatim DataLife Plus CD-R media.
It is regrettable when the tone of the article is unfairly negative in the first sentences, however the second half of the text is already in a different spirit. At a time when most of the general readership swallows only the few sentences in the introduction, Linux catches on, even though it has been innocently involved for many years. Isn’t it time to move on?
