this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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i installed arch on my laptop almost 10 years ago
I have to fix something maybe once a year and I only update once a week, if i remember
reboot maybe one time in a month
the myth that you need to fix Linux constantly needs to die
Same experience here. Despite rolling release and everything.
My fiance is constantly fighting with windows 10 and 11 because shit breaks on there all the time. The challenge isn't that Linux breaks more often, or that troubleshooting it is harder, it's that if you have experience with how Windows breaks, and how to troubleshoot windows breaking, Linux breakages and troubleshooting feels entirely alien.
Sadly I have to disagree. If I have an issue on Windows, I just can never find an answer because every result on my search is the microsoft forums, which of course never has any solutions that work.
On the other hand, specifically for arch, the arch forums always have the answer for me because there are actual smart people on there.
A side note, windows and their products always have terrible documentation, which can add to the frustration at times.
I think you're both right.
If you've always grown up Windows, then you generally know the steps to go through to try and fix it, which are oftentimes laborious and sifting through useless answers like
sfc /scannowuntil you finally find some command you need to run likeonedrive.exe /resetand about 12 other steps to get your OneDrive syncing (example problem).Now you switch over to Linux as a fairly new user, oh my audio isn't coming from my speakers but is from the jack. Uhhhh, the Settings show it all there and working? Oh, here's a forum answer but it tells me to edit my pulseaudio.conf file? Where the hell is that? Oh, I found it but it's read only? Oh, I have to type
sudo nano /etc/pulseaudio.confinto a terminal? Woah, what the fuck is this text editor?? I guess I use the arrow keys to move, but no mouse support? Alright I've edited it but what the heck Ctrl S isn't saving? Oh, the legend at the bottom says Ctrl O, and uhhhh, yeah overwrite? Now Ctrl X to exit, and uhhh, okay it's still not fixed but maybe a reboot fixes it. And if we fast forward 4 hours it turned out to be an audio driver.You get my point. Linux is just different enough where if something breaks, and its something weirdly specific, its a lot of unknowns the user has to rapidly learn where they know these annoying troubleshooting things in Windows already. Linux does have really good forums and answers and documentation but its a learning curve regardless and that can be too much for a really casual user who doesn't have the time or will to follow through.
It's especially tricky when one is generally only trying to install xnix on a device that is no longer supported by MS/apple.
Though it seems to be less of a problem for me when I install Ubuntu distros. I recently installed the LT Kubuntu on a Surface Pro 3 with no hiccups, despite how intensely proprietary EVERYTHING on surface devices turns out to be.
I was fine using Windows 10 for a long while. Windows 11 has freaked me the f* out with how intensely the Borg has removed all abilities to customize app installs and wholly eliminated the ability to remove bloatware and have it stay removed. Windows 11 is basically a huge very effective advertisement for every OS that is NOT windows.
I feel that, but in the opposite direction. I'm used to Linux, so the weirdness of Windows is alien to me, and every time I have to try to fix a family member's computer ("hey you're good with computers, aren't you? Could you take a look at a problem I'm having?" I'm a sap like that) I feel absolutely baffled as to what's broken and how it's even possible for that to break in the furst place.
"the fuck do you mean the windows can't detect the laptop's builtin keyboard?"
Like the error you used to get at boot on AT vintage machines "Keyboard not detected. Press F1 to continue".
To be fair, back in the day I had plenty of times where Linux refused to recognise the harddrive it had just booted from. Computers are wierd, and their software is built by humans.
Went out for supper the other night with a buddy of mine who came to visit from out of town. He's a systems technology trainer coordinator at a community college. (Basically, he teaches the teachers about new technologies before they have to teach it to their students the next term.)
We were talking about tech at supper, specifically windows, and I realized that I have been on Linux for so long that I completely lost any knowledge of how to do any of those things in Windows. And I'm honestly okay with that.
I am a system admin and have to run a ton of Windows servers, I feel it. If you don't keep up on the patch notes shit can get bad without even realizing it. I hate Windows for all the crap that is layered on it but it wouldn't be so bad if Microsoft didn't change shit just to change it and move stuff around without a good reason. The forcing of things is what really makes me upset. IDK about your AI shit Microsoft! ITS NOT HELPING
None of their docs for 10 or 11 are gaurunteed to be accurate either because they keep changing where things are in what menus to "be more intuitive" only it wasn't intuitive before, and it's not intuitive now, and when you do a web search for a problem you get instructions from 2 months ago that reference settings and options that don't exist anymore. (this is me agreeing with you by the way, I'm piling on, not refuting)
I genuinely think at this point if you, dear reader, have a computer, and you want to use your computer, you should be strongly considering installing Linux Mint, MX Linux, or AntiX depending on your hardware not because it will be easier to use than windows, but because it won't be any harder to use than windows, and you can start building up the knowledge and skills for how to use and troubleshoot linux just like you did when you first started using windows, and it will be easier long term because Windows is just going to keep getting worse and worse and more unusable and less documented and harder to troubleshoot and use.
I accept that I am biased by that I have years of Linux experience, but I switched my 68 year old mother to Linux because she couldn't update her laptop anymore because of Microsoft shenanigans and she finds MX Linux to be neither harder nor easier to use. It simply is, to her. There are things she doesn't know how to do on it, but those are things she already didn't know how to do on windows.
I got my mother in law on Mint linux a couple years ago, it never gives her any problems. It is the way to go with the seniors
100%. We tried it first but her laptop was simply too low powered to run it so we stepped back to MX Linux, which is somewhat of a light to middleweight distro. I really wanted her on Mint since it would be more her speed, but even the XFCE edition was too much for the machine. Also, credit where credit is due, when mom found out MX Linux was developed in conjuction with the antifascist distribution (AntiX) she really wanted to go that route, or even all the way to AntiX 🤣
Tried with my mom, she wanted to go back to windows because it had the games she wanted to play - the mobile shit ported from google play to microsoft store
I feel your pain, I am a "Linux System Administrator" and the amount of Windows server crap I have to deal with on a daily basis…
On the less ranty/negative side:
You reminded me of when i was at an MSP and we had this dental client. And they had some actually pretty cool software that processed 3d X-rays and generated a 3d model and would point out various types of potential issues. Now this was like ~2014 so before photometry or AI was really a thing so it was really impressive.
But to compute that stuff in real-ish time (like under 30 seconds, so by the time the patient walked back to the exam room) you had to offload the processing to a Windows server, but that worked fine.
But like everything, Windows updates continue ever """forward""' and eventually they added the Xbox game bar. I didn't think anything of it and just left it running. About a year later and a few updates to the dental software later I am looking at their server and figure "hey, I should disable this. Its a server after all".
Bad mistake. Their software stops working so now they can't take any type of scans. I'm trying to figure it out, I've got a team of engineers looking at this with me. We can't figure it out. Everything looks fine except the process just won't start. No error message, no wrong looking logs. The executable just never starts.
Well turns out at some point along the line they picked up a dependency relying on Xbox game bar for this program to run. So the solution was to just leave the service running lmao.
This is honestly more of a story about bad programming than windows server nonsense but you made me think about it. I wish I figured out what was actually depending on game bar but I left shortly after that. Actually before the patch was pushed out haha
Tbh, I disagree. Troubleshooting on windows for me became "reboot or reinstall it." Back in the days before 10 sure, but after it just got to the point where even microsoft support doesn't know how to do anything either.
In contrast, I have a problem on linux, I google, I find a stackoverflow page with the answer in a few terminal commands which are usually explained, sometimes I go check that program's manual or help page before I use it, but the command usually does fix the issue.
And it's not like you never have to use the terminal on windows, flash drive corrupted by windows and needs to be restored? Diskpart is here and it sucks but it works, CLI though. Editing conf files too, had to find (that was the hard part) and edit a conf.json file last week for a friend of mine who was installing a windows service.
(i agree entirely but if you say that to people who think linux is scary, they think you're being a dismissive jerk)
I switched from W10 to Fedora KDE a little over a month ago, and the amount of troubleshooting I had to go through during this time is unlike anything I've ever faced with Windows. I think I have a handle on things now, but the switch to Linux as a casual user was not as seamless as I'd been told over and over.
Others experience may be different of course, but in my experience Linux is not as easy to use as Windows.
Still happy with my choice to not swap back to Windows though.
I have the exact opposite experience: I recently installed Fedora (stock, so Gnome) and had 0 issues. It was easier to install that Windows. The sidenote is that I have a Framework laptop, so my hardware is fully supported. And I was a Linux user before, so nothing looks alien to me. I didn’t need the terminal to get everything working, including wireless printing.
I don't know what you're talking about because when I tried Linux it was a nightmare. The only thing that worked properly ironically was the printer. It's straight up would not play sound, if I plugged in headphones it would play sound but it would not play sound through the speakers. There were lots of people telling me I needed to install new sound drivers, or run arbitrary commands. None of them fixed it.
It ended up being a problem with the USB driver. That's ridiculous, I shouldn't have to mess around with a driver for an internal component.
Sounds like my experience from a while ago.
Yeah, wondering myself if this guys experience was also from a long time ago or maybe just an obscure device or something.
What distro?
What I will offer from my limited experience is that the Mint install I have will begin to topple over after a few weeks if I don't run updates, whereas my Mac will soldier on without missing a beat if I miss several months of updates.
With the apparent rise of immutable spins, it might get to be even less since user space is separate the OS space. I'm trying Aurora on my laptop to see if there is any advantage to running an immutable spin over the standard distros. I'm kind of torn about it right now, there are some advantages to both and some downsides to both.