I use Ubuntu for work, but my gaming rig runs windows. I went through all of the applications I use on my windows pc the other day and they're all available on linux now. With proton getting as good as it is, app availability on linux, and with the annoying occasional ads coming through my windows os, I'm starting to think I won't upgrade to windows 11 when 10 stops being supported.
I had to use Ubuntu at work and the experience made me hate it to the core.
My experience: Gnome it ships with is too opinionated with no basic configuration options without installing 200 extensions which may or may not work, no option to turn off the touchpad when an external mouse is pugged in, no hibernate option because z-ram or something, no fractional scaling because "pixels aren't fractional" to quote Gnome devs, Wayland broke screen sharing in some apps and extensions while switching to X11 gave me screen tearing and made touchpad gestures stop working, had no HW acceleration in Chrome, SNAP and APT shit the bed needing me to spend hours going through forum posts for fixes and tinker with the command line, OOM daemon can just straight up kill your main productivity app you're currently using, the list goes on. This is not a great UX.
All those issues are productivity show stoppers for me, and in Windows 11 Professional they just work for out of the box without the need to install any extensions or tinker with any config files. Also better battery life.
Hot take: I can ignore/disable ads but I can't ignore an OS where much is broken or is never meant to work.
I thought this was supposed to be the flagship Linux distro but I'm sorry to say that it's more janky than the car Homer Simpson designed.
Still like Linux but via ssh and on a server or embedded system.
Tbf most of the issues you describe are with Gnome. I've been using linux for 7 years and I touched Gnome once for 5 minutes and hated it.
Never had any of the other issues you mention. Screen tearing in X11 is very easy to avoid for example, literally two lines in a config file, much simpler and faster than all the registry key garbage you have to do on windows.
That doesn't mean they don't exist for other users. SNAPs are garbage. I need hibernate. Hibernate does not work on Ubuntu. I need fractional scaling (125%) for my eyesight. That does not work well on Ubuntu or even on other distros, while it's absolutely flawless on Windows. I need HW decode for watching youtube videos on my laptop. That doesn't exist by default in any Linux distro. Your average user won't want to fiddle with Wayland, VA-API and chrome flags, read on the Arch wiki, just to get something that works out of the box on Windows.
You can't tell me with a straight face that those are not relevant issues for an OS for the average user, even though you personally might not have them because you're a tech professional proficient in Linux who lives in the terminal or something.
>Screen tearing in X11 is very easy to avoid for example, literally two lines in a config file
Yeah, two lines which can brick your display output if you don't know what your doing and just blindly copy-paste stuff off the internet that's out of date or not compatible with your distro or hw/driver configuration. Let's be real here, no average user is gonna want to fiddle with the terminal to not have screen tearing because you know who doesn't have screen tearing out of the box? The Windows 11 installation the came on your Walmart laptop.
>much simpler and faster than all the registry key garbage you have to do on windows
Screen tearing is non existent on Windows and I haven't had to touch registry keys in over 8 year, and I'm sort of a power user. I feel like your view on Windows seems outdated and based on FUD you read online not on long term personal experience.
> That doesn't mean they don't exist for other users
Right, but it also doesn't mean issues with the OS. They can be issues with the desktop environment.
> I feel like your view on Windows seems outdated and based on FUD you read online not on long term personal experience.
I used windows for a long time, but not in years. So do tell me for example, if I wanted to shrink the task bar to say, 25px height, which is much smaller from what Windows allowed me in the past, how would you do this?
Additionally, many of the guides I'm reading for removing ads and telemetry are much more involved than adding those two lines to the X config. Some of them involve the command prompt, and some are just links to third party proprietary software. I'd rather have screen tearing than telemetry and ads, and if this mythical "average user" feels the opposite way, I'd wager say that's a user failure, not an OS failure.
>Right, but it also doesn't mean issues with the OS. They can be issues with the desktop environment.
There could be for me as an average end user I don't care that every Linux Distro is a bazaar engineering project where the OS and DE are not built and seamlessly integrated together by the same company like Windows and MAcOS.
>I used windows for a long time, but not in years.
I have.
>So do tell me for example, if I wanted to shrink the task bar to say, 25px height, which is much smaller from what Windows allowed me in the past, how would you do this?
I mean now you're moving the goalposts and clutching at straws. You cant with a straight face tell me that the faults with Linux/Ubuntu such as lack of browser HW acceleration, lack of fractional scaling, lack of hibernate are comparable to the fact that you can't set the taskbar to an arbitrary size. The former is actual issues, the latter is a lack of configuration options. Those are not the same.
>Additionally, many of the guides I'm reading for removing ads and telemetry are much more involved than adding those two lines to the X config.
Like I said, I can live with telemetry if the OS lets me get work and entertainment done. I can't live with a GNU/Neckbeard OS where basic stuff doesn't work properly and makes my life hell.
>I'd rather have screen tearing than telemetry and ads, and if this mythical "average user" feels the opposite way, I'd wager say that's a user failure, not an OS failure.
I feel the opposite. I need a sane, humane OS first, that actually gets the basics right so I can get work/play done and get on with my life. What good is the lack of telemetry if the screen tears and everything is blurry, or too small, or too big due to lack of fractional scaling? Now you're damaging your eyesight but at least you don't have telemetry.
At least telemetry doesn't damage my eyesight like Linux can, and if you think your eyes are less valuable than telemetry, than I think that's a user failure, not an OS failure.
> here could be for me as an average end user I don't care that
What you don't care about doesn't change the fact that it's a real distinction. Being used to being locked to one choice because Microsoft says so doesn't mean that someone's ignorance about what an operating system is, and what its graphical interface is, makes them the same thing.
I'm not moving the goalpost, I asked you a question, and you can't seem to give an answer, probably because you know that to perform such a simple task, I'd need to modify registry keys.
My OS lets me work, get entertainment, and does not have telemetry or ads. And my eyesight is not damaged by the god awful imposed visual choices that microsoft makes.
I'm late in responding to this, but I just use vanilla Gnome and have never had any issues. My work laptop is a P15v Thinkpad. All I do is plug it into my 32in monitor via usb-c and everything works as expected. Maybe my company's IT guys are just really on it? I have no problems screen sharing in google meets, discord, or teams. Battery life I couldn't say, as I'm almost always at my desk with the exception of a couple short trips to the cafe. But on the rare occasion that I am mobile, I don't have any issues with my touchpad or anything else, at least that I've noticed.
Yeah I like KDE more, but switching to KDE doesn't fix the lack of out of the box HW acceleration in browser for video playback. It doesn't fix the lack of hibernate support. It doesn't fix the Wayland/X11 compromises. It doesn't fix the battery life. It doesn't fix the touchpad gestures(Gnome is better here). It doesn't (fully) fix fractional scaling (still better than Gnome but far from the perfection of Windows). And it's still janky/buggy from time to time, once you get over the honeymoon period, compared to the stability of the Windows DE.
Even if we just look at it from a hedonistic perspective. I play games to be happy and destress. Windows' abusiveness and anticheat software make me unhappy and/or stressed. For pure hedonism I'm better off with Proton and a smaller selection of games.
My friends and I live all around the US. The one game we all play together has anticheat. It also happens to be cross platform and they are on console. As far as being happy - being able to cross play with my buds and voice chat while we are thousands of miles apart is well worth it.
