this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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How on earth can people stand using Windows full time? Everything I'm on a Microsoft product I feel claustrophobic!
Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I've tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.
I really dislike what windows has become, it's bloat ware that's getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I'm off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.
For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it's the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that's the simpler stuff.
Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.
(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it's constant ad/bloat ware, it's segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)
Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone's personal computer (no matter O.S). It's also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.
The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn't run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.
The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they'll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don't have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we've had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).
For what it's worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don't work, developers who won't flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I'm just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn't being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don't want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol
Really? Busybox is more-or-less feature equivalent to a BSD userland (FreeBSD userland can be a bit more bloated, see the ls man page), but how many people have picked that up? Still using GNU coreutils, haha.
I saw many *BSD developers told Linux kernel developers to hang their work for a while and fix quality problems.