Asklemmy

When did they give up? Lemmy is literally crawling with people that won't shut up about linux.

My cousin gave up Linux because he struggled to find answers to problems. He was really into trying to build a home server and followed YouTube videos. He used to video call with me for tech support, which was kinda exhausting like teaching a kid how to use a computer.

After a few months, he gave up on it and gave me his server filled with weird ass directories and software constantly giving errors because it's not configured correctly. It was easier to wipe and restart.

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 tried it during the start of quarantine just to see what all the fuss was about but it clashed way too much with how i use computers. I have no background in compsci and my occupation doesn't involve computers at all, so every problem I experienced was completely new and the solutions were never intuitive. For someone like me who spends maybe 8hrs a week at a desktop (and that's being generous) there's no incentive whatsoever to make the switch.

People don't like to tinker or figure out things that were easier to accomplish on other OSes. That or they learned 1 way to do something and expect Linux to with that way.

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 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.

On my gaming PC: I had a lot of random boots to black screen. (Vega 56 GPU)

USB ports did not function at all with USB drives.

TF2 had terrible performance compared to windows.

There was no way to configure my sound card settings.

I still run Ubuntu + kodi on my HTPC, have done for about 10 years. Updating versions of either can often lead to time spent in the terminal. Usually nvidia gpu related. So far the issues have been overcome.

Why people gave up adulting?

I really only want Linux for software dev work(docker mostly). Windows has wsl which has worked beautifully for me besides memory leaks a couple times a year. The issues I face with wal pale in comparison to my experience dealing with Nvidia drivers and gaming on Linux.

My daily driver is a Mac, so use Unix, mostly because I like the ecosystem and, as a designer, I’m tied to the adobe apps. This is what keeps me on the Mac side of things.

I do have a Linux server I use as a media server and other library storage running pop_os, which I really like. I also like how smoothly it interoperates with my Mac. I will say, though, a couple of decades of using Linux on my servers have taught me a lot about using UNIX on my Macs.

Hardware support. My laptop speakers and fingerprint reader don't work in Linux.

for me it was Wifi glitch. No matter what I try, reinstall the drivers, but I was unable to use Wifi on my Laptop.

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.

Too much of a hassle. I don't wanna risk having my setup break when... Never, really. I want to use my machine and that's it.

I don't know that I fully qualify as "gave up using Linux", but I gave it up for daily personal use, so maybe that counts? I'm definitely not opposed to picking it back up again one day, though! And I do have a Linux device (Steam Deck) that I use frequently, so it's not all doom and gloom.

For probably 10+ years, I used various flavors of Linux on my personal laptop. But around 8 years ago or so, my then current laptop was getting old and getting to the point where it needed to be replaced. At the same time, I was also wanting to get back into gaming so I opted for a laptop that came with Windows by default (Linux gaming at the time left a lot to be desired).

I did try to go the dual boot route with that laptop, but man it sucked. No matter what I tried, the touch screen functionality either didn't work at all, or it was too buggy to be useful. The graphics card performance was terrible. That was still in the era where finding the right wifi drivers could be a chore, and even then they weren't exactly the most stable. It was one problem after another. So, I gave up on Linux for personal use, entirely.

Now I have a different laptop that I specifically verified has decent Linux compatibility and there's much better Linux support for games but at the end of the day, I just find that my time and interest in tinkering with the OS has diminished, so I'm sticking with what works (even if it's FAR from perfect).

My guess is also choosing the wrong distro and/or the stress of having to reconfigure your digital life.

Most people are coming from being on a PC/Mac for +10 years and so it feels inefficient for the first month or so until you get the hang of things. I legit had a checklist of +20 tweaks to make to my env to make it more to my liking. The joys and frustrations of choosing KDE as my intro DE almost drowned me but I made it to the other side.

command line interface

I’m fine with it, but it’s cryptic and a deal breaker for many.

I haven’t given up on Linux. I have at least 5 Linux machines in the other room, including tablets, laptops, and servers.

There’s a few Mac’s in the mix too, but those are workstations.

Though I can sympathize with the complaints here in these comments. I brought a ryzen laptop home and installed a distribution on it. Sleep didn’t work. Tried 2 more distros, sleep still didn’t work. Now that laptop just sits there. My Chromebook gets more use than it. Having to shut it down and boot it back up every time wasn’t worth using it anymore when my pinebook pro does have the support you’d expect for functions you’d expect from a laptop.

Hardware compatibility and, unrelated to the this, Adobe sw are the main reasons for me