The only few reason I know so far is software availability, like adobe software, and Microsoft suite. Is there more of major reasons that I missed?
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.
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.
Yeah I'm still on Windows for the same reason. I seem to be a Linux gaming bug magnet, but I just keep having issues on basically any Linux PC that I try to game on. It's getting better, but still not reliable enough for me. I have a Steam Deck now, which is super cool. But even there I had my fair share of bugs. I tried installing some software in desktop mode which instantly crashed the store (this was on first boot after a fresh install and update). I've also had my fair share of full Deck crashes during games already, especially after updates. Overall it's very cool that it all works, but I don't want to end up in a situation where I have to debug a game for 30 minutes (or more) instead of just playing the game. And that happens just a bit too often to me.
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.
this is actually my case lol, no way I'm writing thesis in libreoffice or onlyoffice if I didn't have much experience of using it
If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.
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.
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.
I've been using Linux on my laptop for years; I use i3wm that makes using it way easier than anything Windows can provide; but on my desktop pc I have too many stuff installed that I can't be bothered to migrate all to Linux.
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.
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.
Learning curve, however slight it may or may not be.
Historically updates could break your system somewhat regularly. Packaging and the underlying mechanisms have gotten very good, it is less common today. Can still happen though.
About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.
So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I'd shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.
For servers, I use FreeBSD, it's dumb to run Linux there, too.
Nothing's improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.
I want to use SolidWorks. My kids want to play Fortnite and Valorant.
It's due to lack of support by mainstream developers. I can only hope the Steam deck takes off and continues to sell; once a critical mass of people are on the platform it'll only gain momentum. We're not there yet but this is the closest we've been in 30 years.
I understand SolidWorks. But out of the myriad of games that exist why does anyone want to play those two craps.... :-D
I know it might be hard to imagine, but your tastes aren't objective or universal; other people find things enjoyable that you detest and vice-versa.
Which doesn't change anything about those two games being crappy :-D
When did they give up? Lemmy is literally crawling with people that won't shut up about linux.
I've always loved using Linux, but sometimes I just need things to work; so that whatever I'm doing is quick/painless. But as much as I've switched back and forth, I keep getting pulled more into Linux, the more I learn about my (personal) technical problems
Sure, I can fix it on windows... but the more I delve into Linux, the more I begin to understand the underlying principles of all of it. And for a lot of things; the more I learn about Linux, the more I'm able to navigate across multiple OS's. Learning a little Linux has taught me a metric shit-ton about how computers "speak", and that knowledge has crossed over to a lot of different applications.
I still don't use Linux full-time. But I'm definitely starting to prefer it the more I learn. I hate fighting against locked-out bullshit on windows, when I "just need things to work". But I still like being spoon-fed sometimes, when I don't have time/patience... but I now much prefer taking the time to make my computer work for me. I've learned a shit ton about computers because of Linux
I've been having this weird issue with wifi where it will just switch itself off (shown in NetworkManager as "no available connections") and not allow me to restart the OS normally. It's like the driver is crashing or something. Hardware isn't the issue, otherwise it would have happened on Windows. Drivers can be an issue, as NVIDIA users know too well. Games can be a bit choppy on Linux if you use ray-tracing, probably due to drivers as well as the intermediary processes for getting games to work like DXVK. This was my experience with Cyberpunk 2077. Game modding can be an issue due to .NET not being fully there yet, especially if you have games that are glitchy and require stability mods for a good experience. (e.g. any Bethesda game that exists.)
The only thing keeping me from full-timing Windows is the fact that Windows 11 just plain sucks. I feel like I have to use it, rather than want to use it. Compared to even a bog-standard KDE setup, the Windows experience is miserable. As for Mac, I have a Hackintosh but Apple really loves to render everything on the GPU side and it's chugging my ol' GPU. Maybe I need to go get an M-series MacBook this year.
