It makes you so special, so warm inside when you use that word to derogate and insult the everyday people: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, firemen, cops, shop attendants, postal workers, bus drivers... people who have lives, jobs, careers, families, problems needing taking care of, who want to get work done during the day and then spend some time with their loved ones, parents, kids, hang out with friends, lovers, walk their dogs, do some sports or hobbies or even just play some video games... and not fuck around with their computers for hours or days.
People for whom a computer is just another piece of technology at home that they expect to just work, like the fridge, the TV set or the washing machine. Nobody wants to fuck around for hours with their TV or with their washer just to get it to work.
And you, the uber nerd, the supreme geek, so special, basking in your own awesomeness, so knowledgeable, because you can do arcane things with your computers that are useless and meaningless to most people around. Things that 99% of the people around don't need nor don't give a fuck about.
You're pathetic and you know that. And you compensate for that by calling people "normies" because you know very well they have a lot more meaningful and fulfilling lives than your own. They're just "bad with computers" the same way you are bad with everything else but computers. There are so many things, so much knowledge, so many skills out there which you do not know anything about, do not understand and are completely ignorant and clueless about, little man.
When was the last time you performed surgery on human eye, designed an aircraft, engineered a rail tunnel or defended a complex legal case or even designed a computer chip or component you're so proudly fucking with? Have you saved any lives recently? I mean, in real life, not in a video game, in case you missed that /s. That's what those stupid normies do.
Have you gone outside? Ride a bike? Date someone? Pet a dog?
Develop some compassion for other people and some humility.
Here is the thing: I'm not in a hurry to switch to Linux. I have Windows 11 under control. For now.
Once a year I spend an afternoon and I build my own Windows 11 Pro ISO image with NTLite. Another afternoon to do a clean install on my four desktops and one laptop. I got this down to science by now. It runs a fully unattended installation, creates a local account, bypassing all Microsoft requirements and skipping all those annoying questions, and boots straight to already customized, clean desktop, with a custom theme, custom icons and hundreds of tweaks, optimizations and hacks already applied and most settings set to my preferences. All cloud stuff, AI crap, unwanted applications (Edge, OneDrive, Teams, all third party crapware, all gone) and other bloat removed permanently, no re-installs, telemetry removed and blocked.
All settings and configs are backed up and it takes maybe half an hour per PC to set it all up. The longest part is re-synchronizing Nextcloud, but I self-host it on my home LAN, so it's no so bad.
Windows feature updates are blocked for two years, so there won't be any nasty surprises, I only get security patches and Defender updates and definitions and I install them manually, once a week, there are no forced updates of any kind.
People look at my screen and ask me if it's Linux, it's so different from vanilla Windows 11, all custom stuff with Windows 10 like Explorer (which doesn't have the lag problem like the default Windows Explorer:
Calm, custom goofy-floating (the float is optional) Start Menu and Task Bar with no crapware, no spam and no ads (StartAllBack):
And it can stay worry-free this way for two years, but I usually build a new one once a year. I don't need to worry about system updates breaking stuff or changing settings. It's perfectly stable and as fast as it can be expected from the hardware. I only update the graphics drivers and individual applications.Since updating graphics drivers doesn't require a reboot and sleep works properly on Windows, unlike on Linux, my Windows desktop can stay up for months, unless I trip the breakers, need to do something with the BIOS, or just shut them down if not needed for a while. Other than that my custom Windows build requires no attention until the next build.
Man, I can't imagine what would happen to Linux if Microsoft had a sudden change of heart and released the mythical open source Windows Core at very low cost? Windows Core is an imaginary product that features the base Windows OS without all the apps, bloat, ads and telemetry. It boots to under 1GB of RAM, runs fast and smooth and costs $10 :) Hell, I managed to make a Windows 11 "server build" that boots to around 1.2 GB of RAM with fewer than 60 tasks running yet everything needed for base operation works. There is shitload of bloat in Windows! Linux would become irrelevant as a desktop OS overnight.
Wake up!
But this is all going to end, or become too difficult to be practical or worthwhile, most likely in the next 2-3 years. It gets more difficult to customize Windows with every annual update. Microsoft is going all in with their cloud bloat and forced AI garbage and there are rumors of Windows subscriptions. So, I'm sure Windows will become unusable to me as a lot of that rubbish will be baked into the core of the OS and impossible to rip out without breaking something else in the process.
Honestly, I would prefer to stay on Windows for as long as I can. I don't find Linux desktop that much superior to Windows 11 (with the exception of Plasma customization), nearly all Windows issues and annoyances can be addressed for now. Linux is just a another, different OS, basically a good one, but it comes with its own set of problems and annoyances and the lack of quality desktop software is a huge problem for me and many like me. It's not like switching to Linux will result in some sort of computing nirvana. Far from it.
This is my opinion and I'm quite set in this, I've tried pretty much all major Linux distros, Desktop Environments and all major applications and I have read a massive number of documentation, posts, blogs and articles over the last two years. Nobody can change my mind on this. I'm making an honest disclosure. Windows is a better overall experience for a person who doesn't care about "having fun withe their OS" and just wants to use apps and play games with minimal fuss.
Sure, building a custom Windows installer ISO seems like a lot of complicated work, but NTLite is a GUI app, using plain language and the process is a lot less frustrating and less time consuming than constant tinkering with Linux. Linux is needy unless you just need the bare basics: email and web. NTLite also has a very helpful and friendly community that won't call you a noob, blame you for everything and tell you to read the fucking manual. They will actually help you and presets for NTLite are available too.
Then a lot of what I do with NTLite, can be done post-setup too, once Windows is installed using free utilities such as O&O ShutUp 10++, Chris Titus Windows Utility, WinaeroTweaker and WAUManager. Miscrosoft's own AutoRuns for Windows lets you disable a lot of their own crap even. Doing it this way is not as thorough but it gets rid of most annoyance. Registry tweaks are also easier than typing a long line after a long line of terminal commands. Rufus, a utility used to "burn" Windows ISO to a USB drive lets you create a custom USB installer drive though that bypasses most of the annoying crap during Windows 11 installation:
One other trick is that many of the most useful and permanent tweaks do not work in Windows 11 Home and require Windows 11 Pro. However, licenses for Windows 11 Pro go for as low as $5 on discount sites. I won't argue whether they're legal or not but they exists, I used them several times, Microsoft has not sued them out of existence yet and these Windows keys work just fine and these websites even have better and more responsive customer support than large online vendors. I got a bad key once and I got a quick refund with zero hassle the next day.
Once you have a new Windows 11 Pro key simply enter it in Windows Activation settings and your Home edition becomes Pro edition without having to reinstall. It will download some updates, because software needs to be added, like Group Policy Editor.
- But... buying cheap licenses from shady websites? I don't know, man...
I hear ya, but consider what Microsoft is doing: they take $150 for lame-ass home edition from you, or $250 for Pro, and then they force Microsoft account login on you so they can shove ads and collect your data for fuck knows what purposes just because they're a fucking monopoly. Is that cool? Ten years ago I would not consider buying a shady Windows license, but now I have no qualms. When my Windows 11 Pro de-activated itself after a BIOS update I had no options but to get a new license for $250. Microsoft support was no help. By then Microsoft revoked all my old Windows 7 licenses too. So, I bought a $5 license and started looking at Linux.
Microsoft could and should give Windows for free to consumers and schools and they wouldn't even feel it as vast majority of Windows license sales and other business are in the enterprise, the cloud, the education markets and then OEMs like Dell, Acer, HP, etc.
Wait, they kinda do, actually...
If buying a cheap license this way bothers you then just run Windows 11 for free and entirely legal.
- Um.. what?
What a lot of people don't realize: you can run Windows 11 for free without activation for as long as you want. Microsoft doesn't seem to mind. Windows 11 Pro installation ISO is freely available for download. Install it and simply ignore Windows activation. Everything will work, all software and all hardware will work, Steam will work. The only limitations, right now, imposed on non-activated Windows are: inability to change desktop wallpapers, change icons and colors and you get a nag on the desktop after a month which can also be dismissed but I won't talk about that here.
None of these will prevent you from using Windows otherwise. If you install StartAllBack it comes with some additional tweaks, besides replacing your start menu, like it restores the old school Control Panel in its entirety which gives you the old Personalization Control Panel back, and that allows you to set your own desktop Wallpaper and colors on un-activated Windows.
So, download the free Windows installer ISO from Microsoft, make a custom Windows USB drive with Rufus, ignore activation, debloat and customize with the free utilities I mentioned above and you can enjoy free, debloated, non-intrustive, calm Windows 11 Pro and the process is easier than switching your entire OS to Linux which has problems of its own AND you get to keep and enjoy ALL your favorite software and games.
How long will we be able to do it? Like I said, I think 2-3 years, maybe more if you can live with some of the annoyances. Unless the AI bubble really bursts and Microsoft stops with the idiocy they're perpetuating now.
BTW, macOS doesn't exists as far as I'm concerned. But it's a viable choice if you don't care about privacy much and need something like Adobe or Affinity software, since macOS itself is somewhat less annoying than Windows, but not by much, but it's more cohesive and looks way better. It's another privacy nightmare though, except it's disguised very well by the Apple propaganda machine playing the "good guys". And you have to buy new, expensive and non-upgradable hardware, even if very good quality (Apple laptops are legendary). If you must drop Windows and prefer to keep your hardware then Linux is a much better, if not the only choice. If you've got the cash and want something that just works, then get a Mac.
I will switch to Linux as the last resort then when Microsoft makes it too difficult to customize Windows. Linux servers are great, I love them, but the Linux desktop... not so great. It's fun to tinker with but, as soon as I try to actually do stuff that I normally do, I hit walls and roadblocks everywhere. The main issues are availability and quality of desktop applications and hardware compatibility. Distros themselves are mostly fine. Debian and Fedora are my favorite and I really do like KDE Plasma but I need my applications.
There are some other problems with Linux, like the fragile graphics subsystem where games take the entire system down when they crash. This never happens on Windows as the graphics drivers are a user process that run separate from the kernel. Luckily, games don't crash that often so this is something I'd be willing to live with. Only two out of six audio jacks on my main PC work under Linux and I need three of them. Sound quality is much worse in Linux too and needs a lot of tinkering. There are lots of problems, some are insurmountable, with NVIDIA and Realtek hardware and all my PCs have NVIDIA GPUs and are full of Realtek on-board tech (network, sound, Bluetooth, USB) that works fine in Windows. Oh yeah, Bluetooth is another nightmare on Linux. The newer the hardware, the more problems you will have under Linux.
To learn more about Linux, from a Windows user perspective, read this piece. It's very long but I wrote an extensive intro to Linux, explained a lot of the confusion and covered all pros and cons of Linux in lots of detail.
Sure, whenever you complain about these problems on Linux forums someone will pop in instantly with the "it works fine for me" fallacy and tell you you're doing something wrong. The only thing you did wrong was installing Linux without trying to learn to tame Windows first.
To be clear, I don't love Windows either, I use it because it works and runs my apps. I despise Microsoft though. If I could have the same applications on Linux, that I have on Windows, I would have already switched, a long time ago, as I can work around the hardware related issues to some degree.
But I'd rather deal with Windows annoyances and have access to large selection of high quality, mature and polished software, than limit myself to poor quality and limitations of Linux desktop applications.
Another problem is the Linux community, I wrote more about this here. It's not for the fain of heart!
In the end, I'm familiar enough with Linux so I can use it as my desktop, if I have to; but I'd prefer not to use it, if I don't have too.
I will keep tinkering with Linux then to stay familiar and keep up to date so, when the time comes to ditch Windows, I will be able to do it with minimal friction and delays.
FOR WINDOWS USER, BY A WINDOWS USER (MAC USERS CAN GET SOMETHING OUT OF IT TOO)
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
Let me preface that we'll be talking here about Linux as a desktop operating system. It is important to understand that there is a big difference between Linux as a server and Linux as a desktop. I'll explain as we go along.
I'm a Windows user but I'm not a total noob to Linux. I've ran various Linux servers on and off for decades. I self-host my own web server, DIY NAS and my own Netxcloud instance as well as a local ad blocking DNS server (AdGuard), all on Debian. I used to self host internet forums, CMS such as WordPress and Joomla for few years too. I tinkered with Linux on the desktop too but I never found it worthwhile. It was fun to tinker with but Linux on the desktop always had two major flaws (well, more like three): lack of quality desktop software and hardware compatibility issues and, besides Steam coming to Linux, this has not changed much, I will elaborate on this towards the end.
It's hard to remain objective when discussing Linux desktop these days because the Linux universe is very fragmented, polarized or polarizing and even the community is divided as there is a great deal of infighting and disagreement within the Linux community itself. For an outsider coming from Windows or macOS it can feel wild.
Also, Linux is about choices and choices are subjective and not all choices offered in the Linux universe are good or even popular and the community just doesn't seem to agree on anything.
I'll try to make some sense of this mess for Windows users looking for the first time at Linux as an alternative. This is written for Windows users by a Windows user. I'll be honest as much as I can about both advantages of Linux as well as about its disadvantages. But it's not all fun.
Linux server is great, it's rock solid, very fast and utterly reliable, it runs most of the world's web servers and cloud servers, nearly all supercomputers. Although Linux does not run most world servers in the general sense. Microsoft still dominates corporate server space because of their Active Directory.
The Linux's success in the server sector, unfortunately, does not translate into quality and popularity of Linux as a desktop OS. Linux as a server OS is an absolute success, while Linux as a desktop OS remains a niche. If it wasn't for Valve and Steam, Linux desktop market share would stay at 2% forever.
WHY INTEREST IN LINUX DESKTOP NOW?
Things are changing somewhat though and, ironically, Microsoft is providing a lot of free promotion for Linux these days. The enshittification of Windows is proceeding at an increasingly fast pace. However, no matter how badly Microsoft enshittifies Windows, Windows will not go away entirely and there will never be a mass exodus to Linux, "experts" say it may reach 10% in a decade maybe. In reality, the world is going mobile and more people will rather switch to to Mac than to Linux or just use a tablet (iOS or Android).
Desktop computing (this includes laptops) is becoming less relevant as millions of young people are introduced to information technologies these days by the way of smartphones and tablets. There are 20 year olds who never touched a computer in their lives.
Android devices now dominate the world. There are more Android devices than all laptops, desktops computers and game consoles combined. Mobile gaming is bigger than console and PC gaming combined too. More about Android later, yes, "it's Linux", but wait.
Microsoft missed the boat to the mobile market big time and so it's natural that Windows will become less relevant in the near future, among consumers that is, it'll still be relevant in the enterprise. This is likely the top reason why Microsoft is doing what they're doing, pushing AI so aggressively, as they are desperately trying not to miss the AI boat, but it seems they picked the wrong boat this time, but who knows. Anyway, I digress but the world is going mobile and both desktop Linux and Windows are going to lose in the long run.
So yeah, I have been seriously looking at Linux desktop this time. I spent most of 2025 testing nearly all Linux distros and came down to some interesting conclusions that I will share with you here. I'll be as non-technical as possible and I'll avoid tech jargon as much as possible.
WHAT IS LINUX ANYWAY
Linux is not an operating system. Linux is the kernel of an operating system. It's the core. A kernel is low level software that loads when a computer starts up and the kernel controls everything in the operating system, it runs all software processes and manages all hardware but it has no direct user interface and no user facing, high level applications. I guess it could be described as the hidden engine of an operating system.
By itself, a kernel is not usable then by a user, it needs an operating system built on top of it that has some sort of interface. Two most common operating systems interfaces are: Graphical User Interface (desktop, windows, icons, taskbar, menu bar, operated with a mouse or a touchpad) and Command Line Interface (the terminal where you type commands on a keyboard). An operating system also provides some basic software to configure the system such as display, sound and network control panels and disk formatting utilities. Windows and macOS are operating systems an they have their own kernels too.
Linux Kernel is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), free as in "free beer" and free as in "free speech". Anyone can download the Linux kernel source code, see it, edit and modify it and use it either for personal, public or business purposes. There are, of course, some rules to how FOSS is distributed and used but this is beyond the scope of this writing.
Worth mentioning is that Windows kernel is proprietary and closed and that's why you don't see free and modified copies of Windows (distributions) around. If Microsoft ever opens the Windows source code it will make Linux irrelevant as a desktop OS overnight as vast majority of Linux users are those who reject Microsoft closed software or switched because their PC could no longer run Windows due to the arbitrary requirements set by Microsoft and all the bloat they have been adding to Windows.
macOS kernel is open source too since it's based on FreeBSD (UNIX) but nobody is making any macOS distros, not sure why, I never really gave this any thought. I guess because most of what makes macOS, well, macOS is closed source like the GUI, most application frameworks (some are open) and services and why grab a modified macOS kernel if you can grab pure OpenBSD kernel. So it seems pointless to clone macOS as it will no longer be macOS and who would want that? And why risk pissing off the army of Apple lawyers in the process? While using the Linux kernel lets people create different operating systems.
Linus Torvalds developed the Linux kernel in 1991. It was just the source code back then. The installation was very difficult so distributions started to pop up to simplify the process, some by offering graphical interfaces. Two of the oldest distributions still remain: Debian and Slackware.
Linux distributions (distros) are then complete operating systems, built upon the Linux kernel that add a Desktop Environment (Graphical User Interface) for desktop use or can be used strictly with Command Line Interface for servers and specialized uses or by people who enjoy it for some reason. Distros also add software, utilities, settings apps, etc. everything a user needs to operate a computer and do stuff.
There are few base distros, that go way back to the early days of Linux, all other distros are their derivatives.
Community based, second oldest distro that exists today, after Slackware, it's a conservative distro, focused on stability and minimal updates to avoid changes. Debian is for users who value stable, un-changing environment, ("stable" here does not mean "doesn't crash" but it means "doesn't change" during the lifespan of the distro), preferable as a server OS, but it's also rock solid for desktop or professional workstation use where uptime and lack of surprises and interruptions are top priority.
The trade-off is that Debian comes with older software and an older kernel, that gets few updates (mainly security and stability patches and no new versions), and often lacks support for the latest hardware out of the box.
Contrary to what some say, Debian runs games just fine though. But its software can fall out of date as major releases come out every two years. There are ways around that that but they'll defy the purpose of using Debian in the first place.
Debian is my preferred distro for running servers and one of the top two candidates for my desktop.
Maintained by one person, amazingly, it's the same person who developed it 32 years ago, this is the oldest Linux distro that still exists, but it kind of fell out of favor, not sure why. It has no stated support policy, its website is barebones and there are no official repositories, so maybe that's why? I never cared to look into it much but it does not appear to be of interest to potential switchers. Interesting that it lasted so long though. Trivia: The name "Slackware" stems from the fact that the distribution started as a private side project with no intended commitment. To prevent it from being taken too seriously at first, Volkerding gave it a humorous name, which stuck even after Slackware became a serious project (Wikipedia).
Community based, rolling distro (ever changing), bleeding edge, focused on the newest software and the latest features and gets very frequent updates. It's the polar opposite of Debian. Arch gets updates and new software versions frequently, it's meant for people who want the latest software and/or who own the latest hardware or just for bragging rights, but yes, stability is a trade-off here and it is not ideal for users who are new to Linux as updates often break stuff or introduce major changes. Arch is for tinkerers and the DIY types.
Corporate based (USA), goes way back, one of the earliest distros too, but the Red Hat of today is not the same as the Red Hat of twenty years ago, it's a corporate entity owned by IBM and it's strictly focused on the enterprise market (servers and workstations) and it's rarely used as a desktop OS by regular users, maybe by some enthusiasts.
Red Hat is for businesses that require robust systems along with full blown, paid support contract options where they can call priority tech support and get a technician on site the same or the next day.
Many Linux fans detest Red Hat for forgetting where it came from and for being a billion dollar corporation which is against the Linux ethos and also for being an Intel subsidiary now. Red Hat corporate shenanigans and their philosophy that doesn't favor customizability (Red Hat is the one pushing GNOME which is the most popular and most polarizing Linux GUI, more on this later) anger many Linux users.
However, Red Hat and Intel are the two top contributors to the Linux kernel. Everyone running Linux runs their code. It's unavoidable. This also makes some people question the "freedom" of Linux. Is it really free when majority of its core is developed and maintained by billion dollar corporations for business use? But then, would Linux even survive this long without corporate backing if every piece of it was slowly coded by volunteers in their spare time? No, it would not. What most hard core Linux fans refuse to admit is that Linux success in the enterprise, as a server OS, is not an accident or the fact that it's free, open and awesome, but because large corporations poured significant amounts of cash into its development to use it in the enterprise environments. Linux server is big business. Surprised? Yeah, most Linux users don't like when you talk about this.
Wait... so how the hell is Linux so popular on the server but so few people use it on the desktop? There are reasons, but let's not get there yet. We will discuss this later.
Corporate based (Germany), forked early from now defunct SuSE, which was a derivative of Slackware Linux, openSUSE is focused on the European enterprise market, also not very popular outside of the enterprise but it's the less evil European alternative to American Red Hat, for businesses who don't trust American corpos with their data. A checkered past of numerous acquisitions too, however, paints a typical corporate image. Though, openSUSE seems to cherish their reputation as the "less evil Red Hat" and are careful not to ruin it. Though, of course it's not hard to find people speaking badly about openSUSE.
Fedora needs a special note as it is not really a derivative of Red Hat as some people may think, but it's not a base distro the same way that Debian, Slackware or Arch are. The Fedora Project was forked off of Red Hat before it became an enterprise monstrosity, something like twenty years ago. Therefore, Fedora gets usually mentioned among the base distros then, the same way openSUSE is counted as base distro, despite evolving from something else.
Fedora keeps close ties with and is sponsored by Red Hat though, they share many technologies and even programmers and many people say that it's testing grounds for Red Hat. Fedora is sort of a polarizing distro then due to its corporate backing. It falls somewhere between Debian and Arch, a bit closer to Arch. It's "semi rolling", not as cutting edge as Arch, easy to install, set up and use but has much newer software and supports the latest hardware better than Debian.
Fedora is a very good distro for experienced users who want a modern distro or for gamers who own recent hardware and can handle some occasional update issues but not the extreme bleeding edge that is Arch. Some people dislike Fedora's ties to Red Hat though.
Yes, Android is based on the Linux kernel too, again a major corporate Linux operating system, the largest mobile OS, hell, the largest OS on the planet, period, designed to make loads of money for Google as their primary consumer intelligence and advertising platform and it is based on Linux! Yay!
However, the Android kernel is so heavily modified that many purists argue it hardly resembles Linux any more and so it's no longer Linux. For this reason many Linux users are happy to distance themselves from Android. Unless someone questions the Linux market share then they're happy to bring up Android. Go figure. Otherwise, Android is the largest Linux distro in the world and the largest operating system in existence going by the number of devices. There are more Android devices on the planet than Windows, macOS, iOS and all gaming consoles combined.
There were more base distros, but these are the most commonly seen around these days.
There are major differences between these distros besides being "stable" or "rolling". Mainly how they handle software installation. Software released specifically for one of them may not work on another. They also differ in how basic system settings and configurations are handled and stored and they differ on some design principles and philosophies. A derivative based on one of them will likely share these aspects, though usually with some differences and modifications.
DERIVATIVE LINUX DISTROS
There a desktop distros as well as specialized distros such as TrueNAS and Open Media Vault or appliance specific distros such as Google Search Appliance.
Derivatives make changes to the base distro according to various philosophies. Some may be made for a specific purpose or for a specific community even. There are distros made for religious uses, distros customized for a specific nationality or language group (Indian BOSS - Bharat Operating System Solutions), or distros for the absolutely latest hardware or for a narrowly specific hardware, for specific professions or for scientific use, for instance.
A very sticky point in the Linux universe is NVIDIA drivers installation, more on this later. On base Debian, for example, that can be challenging for a newcomer. So many Debian derivatives make that easier by adding easy GUI utility to manage NVIDIA drivers. Some distros are specifically designed for NVIDIA gamers, like Nobara. So, if you own an NVIDIA GPU and don't want to mess with the terminal, then look for a distro that makes NVIDIA driver installation easier.
EXAMPLES OF DERIVATIVES
Sorry, no embedded links as it made this section unreadable. If you're interested in any of these, then just copy and past their name into Wikipedia.
Debian based
Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Open Media Vault, TrueNAS, SolusOS, Knopix, Damn Small Linux, there are literally hundreds more. There are more Debian derivatives than all others combined. Only Slackware is older than Debian but Debian remains extremely popular due to its legendary stability and huge and very active community. BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) is an example of Debian based, nation-specific Linux distro, it's made for India.
Arch based
Manjaro, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, KaOS, SteamOS, few more. Arch derivatives are usually much easier to install, set up and use than the base Arch distro, they lower the pain threshold and make Arch more accessible, while retaining the cutting edge aspect of the distro for the most part.
Red Hat based
Oracle Linux, Alma Linux, CentOS, Yellow Dog Linux, Mandrake, Turbolinux. Not too many.
Fedora based
I've already mentioned Nobara, a gamer distro created by Glorious Eggroll, the same developer who created Proton GE, a cutting edge version of Steam's Proton that many gamers find superior to Valve's own Proton. Bazzite is another very popular, gaming oriented distro based on Fedora. I am not aware of any other popular Fedora derivatives. Asahi Linux is based on Fedora too and runs on Apple Silicon Macs. I think Fedora itself is so good that there is little need for derivatives. Nobara and Bazzite are fairly popular as they come pre-packaged with anything a modern PC gamer or streamer might need. Nobara even offers hassle free NVIDIA edition too. Though, to be honest, my gaming experience on core Fedora was fine, I tried Nobara, but I preferred to stick to the base distro.
openSUSE based
There are really no derivatives of Open SUSE other than maybe Gecko. openSUSE is mostly focused on the enterprise and not very popular among the community and home users but it does work very well as a desktop OS, gaming and all, but for some reason most home users and enthusiasts are simply not aware of its existence. It's free to download and use.
Slackware based
Slackware did not spawn a huge distro ecosystem and is no longer very popular itself, though it does have some dedicated followers that used it for a very long time. Salix and Platypus can be spotted in the wild. Interestingly, the defunct SuSE Linux, the precursor to openSUSE, was based on Slackware.
There are no derivatives of Android as far as I know.
Noticed there was no mention of Linux Mint, Pop!OS, Zorin OS or Tuxedo OS? That's because these are derivatives of a derivative: Ubuntu; though there is also a Mint distro based directly on Debian (LMDE - Linux Mint Debian Edition). Ubuntu itself spawned a large ecosystem of derivative distros. Another example is Garuda Linux (easy Arch Linux) that is based on Manjaro, an Arch derivative itself.
DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS
Now. If this wasn't overwhelming already, let's talk now about Desktop Environments (DEs). There aren't as many as distros but there are few. DEs themselves are not usable. They have to be installed on top of a distro and they turn a distro into a full blown Desktop Operating System. Without a Desktop Environment, a distro can only be used from a command line interface (CLI).
Most distros come with, or offer options of, several DEs. Either by giving you an option to chose a DE during the install process (Debian does this, for example) or by offering different ISO images with different DEs (Fedora and Ubuntu do this, for example).
Looking for the right "version of Linux" for your desktop or laptop computer really involves selecting two things: the distro itself and the desktop environment, a combination of these two. While it's possible to install any DE on any distro, it's far easier to just pick a pre-packaged one as DEs are insanely complex pieces of software and the installation is not always straightforward and can often result in instability.
The most common DEs in use these days are (in alphabetical order, not order of popularity):
GNOMEis by far the most popular DE and the most polarizing DE as people either love it or hate it. It's sponsored and pushed by Red Hat, it's minimalist to a fault, lacks customization options out of the box, it's also very resource intensive despite being so minimalist. It looks kind of like macOS but it's nowhere as good as macOS. It will feel alien to most Windows users, unless they're looking for something drastically different. I find it strange why it dominated the Linux landscape, Red Hat, I guess, but that's out of scope here.
KDE Plasma, created by KDE, an international free software community, is the most configurable DE, also to a fault, as it trades some stability for extreme, and I mean extreme, customization. Plasma is heaven for people who like to tinker with their UI, it's the polar opposite of GNOME. It's also, along Cinnamon, the most familiar for people coming from Windows. It's built around the desktop metaphor like Windows and has a Start Menu, a Taskbar (that can be placed anywhere) and it works in a way that is very similar to Windows. It's resource intensive too but not as much as GNOME and the eye candy can be scaled down or disabled to make it snappier. Plasma is my preferred DE, by the way.
Cinnamon, also built around the desktop metaphor, is the default DE for Linux Mint, developed by the same team and designed to be stable, responsive, friendly and moderately customizable. It places somewhere between GNOME and Plasma in terms of usability but it's more lightweight than these two.
These three are the most popular. Others are less popular but have their niches, purposes and dedicated fans. Some are very lightweight (Xfce or LXDE), ideal for slower machines, like really old, with hard drives even or for users who do not desire eye candy or "modern" interfaces. They are not flashy and they lack features compared to GNOME, Plasma and Cinnamon but they can run on very old or low end machines without any problems.
Cosmic Desktop is a newcomer and still under early development but many people hype it as the next big thing in Linux. Many praise it for its speed, but it has GNOME aesthetics which is not my cup of tea. It was originally based on GNOME but it was rewritten later. We'll see. It's developed by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distro, based on Ubuntu. System76 is an American company that sells purpose-built Linux computers. They guarantee hardware compatibility. Pop!_OS gets high praise from its users. It can be freely downloaded and used on your own hardware. They went for the macOS looks though and that's not my cup of tea.
If you live in the States and want quality hardware that is guaranteed to work with their Pop!_OS distro and even comes with some support, then System76 may be worth looking at.
If you live in the EU, Germany based Tuxedo Computers is the European option for purpose built Linux PCs. They also have their own distro: Tuxedo OS which is based on Ubuntu, but has Snaps removed and KDE Plasma is the default DE. They also maintain their own software repository hosted in Germany.
I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with markets outside of the US and the EU. I'm sure they have dedicated Linux hardware vendors as well.
There is a new breed of DEs: tiling window managers (TWM), but I won't talk about them as they are not true Desktop Environments, as far I'm concerned. They're for specific group of people who want... I don't know, a tablet UI on a desktop PC? Not my cup of tea either.
DISPLAY SERVER
OK, finally, a third piece of the puzzle is a Display Server. It is system software that allows Linux to show graphics on the screen. So, a Display Server sits somewhere between the kernel and the Desktop Environment and is not something most people notice. Why would they need to?
Normally, you wouldn't need to know anything about Display Servers. The reason why it's worth mentioning is that there are two Display Servers for Linux: X11 (Xorg) and Wayland; and the Linux universe is going through a major transition from the old X11 to the "new" Wayland. The reason for quotes there is that Wayland was released in 2008, a full year before Windows 7, for perspective. The development has been glacial and resulted in lots of heated discussions and very mixed feelings among the Linux community.
Some distros still use X11, some dropped it or are about to drop it. Wayland still lacks some basic features and it doesn't agree on some aspects with the NVIDIA drivers. You can't really avoid Wayland as there is no alternative and X11 is going away. It may take another 10 years or more, however for Wayland to get anywhere near maturity as the transition is clearly not going well.
The bottom line is that if you have a fairly modern hardware then go with Wayland because it's the future. On older hardware X11 may work better. If you own an AMD GPU then this is a non-issue and you can forget it. If you own a modern NVIDA GPU then you will most likely run into some issues related to Wayland, but it largely depends on which underlying distro you choose. Fedora, or its gaming derivatives Nobara or Bazzite are probably the best choices here.
LINUX FRAGMENTATION
As you might have already figured out, the Linux distro landscape is very fragmented. There are over 600 distros, though vast majority of them are just small projects very few people actually use. There are probably 10-20 distros that actually matter.
Some say it's good because it creates choices, some say it's bad because it spreads the developers efforts thin and most of these distros are basically useless pet projects anyway. Those developers' time and effort could have been put toward improving the already popular distros. This fragmentation also confuses potential new users, discourages them from using Linux and wastes a lot of collective community time.
I agree with the "it's bad" opinion. Choice is, of course, good, but excessive choice of products that vary little or are of poor quality only creates noise, confusion and waste.
Then the prolonged and painful transition from X11 to Wayland isn't helping and just creates even more problems for potential newcomers to Linux.
SO WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE NEW TO LINUX?
Don't panic. Most people will just say that if you have older hardware, don't need the latest software and want minimal fuss and something familiar to Windows then go with Linux Mint Cinnamon. You really can't go wrong here, even though I don't like Mint myself any more (nothing serious, just personal preference, I want more customization). Mint makes it easy to install NVIDIA drivers too and you can game on Mint just fine. They also have decently helpful forum that is well moderated, but do put your virtual flame retardant suit on when visiting any Linux forums.
For an even more stable system, you can't beat The Mother: Debian. It offers all DEs in a single installer. You can have Debian with GNOME, KDE Plasma or Cinnamon. For older hardware, Debian with Xfce or LXDE would be the best choice. There is a reason why the Raspberry Pi devs chose Debian for their tiny computers. Though new users with NVIDIA GPUs should probably avoid Debian and pick Mint instead.
If you have much newer hardware, say newer than 5 years, especially NVIDIA GPU, then Fedora would be a good choice. Fedora comes with GNOME or with KDE Plasma and has good support for NVIDIA drivers. That's why gaming distros Nobara and Bazzite chose Fedora for their base and these may be good options too if you a streamer type gamer.
If you are very savvy, and not afraid of tinkering and own latest hardware then Arch derivatives may serve you well. Manjaro and CachyOS are very popular. Though CachyOS claims of superior performance need to be taken with a grain of salt as I have not seen any concrete proofs so far. Also, considering that most games are GPU bound, all CachyOS CPU optimizations don't do much for games. It's a good distro otherwise, but requires some compromises.
WAIT! WHERE IS THE LOVE FOR UBUNTU?
Everyone recommends Ubuntu or Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma)!
Well, more like everyone used to recommend Ubuntu. You will see fewer recommendations these days. Ubuntu is owned by Canonical, a large British corporation. While not as big and evil as Red Hat, Canonical is a corpo and it behaves like one. If you're thinking about leaving Windows because of Microsoft shenanigans then Red Hat and Ubuntu should not be the ones to consider.
Ubuntu used to be good, it was THE distro to go to, the default choice and many people, who don't follow on the news or just don't care, still seem to think so. Canonical made some questionable decisions in the past that alienated large parts of their community and led to the rise of Linux Mint which is Ubuntu without Canonical corporate bullshit.
The main Canonical sins are:
- if you want the latest security updates in timely manner then an online account is required. It's not as egregious as Microsoft account requirement, you still have a local account and you can use the OS and install software without any limitations, but you may need to wait weeks or months even for the latest security updates. This is free up to five computers, or a paid service for more than five computers. So, yeah, this leaves a bad taste.
- if you log in remotely to an Ubuntu server via SSH you get advertisements for Canonical services, kind of like OneDrive push in Windows 11. It can be disabled, it can be disabled in Windows too, but the fact that they are there in the first place upsets some people.
- Snaps, they are Canonical's solution to one of the Linux biggest problems: software distribution and reliance on different dependencies that may be missing. I'll explain this later. Snaps are pre-packaged applications that include everything the application needs and are guaranteed to work on an Ubuntu system. They're like Flatpaks (I'll explain later too) and they have the same pros but also the same cons: they start slowly and they take up a lot of space so not everyone likes them. So yeah, there are advantages to them since they just work.
So what is the problem with Snaps? They're installed by default and are difficult to remove, they're op-out, not opt-on like Flatpaks. It does not matter for many, if not for most, users but you lose the choice and choice is part of the freedom that the Linux users cherish so much. Snaps can be removed but it involves running scripts and reinstalling a lot of software. And Canonical announced that in the next version of Ubuntu the sound subsystem will be installed as Snap, so removing Snap will get harder.
This stinks like Microsoft to me and Canonical is likely to continue on this path. I fight Microsoft over the control of my system, why would I chose Ubuntu and fight another corpo over the same? If none of this bothers you then Ubuntu or Kubuntu or Ubuntu Cinnamon are good distros, apps just work and it's more updated than Debian, but a bit behind Fedora.
WHICH DISTRO IS THE FASTEST?
On the same, modern hardware, I noticed no drastic performance differences between Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and CachyOS. My game framerate was literally the same in all of them. If anything, I found Debian to be somewhat smoother.
CachyOS is supposedly using some advanced optimizations, but I've yet have to find any solid proof of its superior performance.
As already mentioned Debian with a lightweight DE will be best for older hardware.
IT'S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD IF YOU PICK A WRONG DISTRO AT FIRST
Your mileage will vary though and it's not the end of the world if you pick a wrong distro at first. "Distro hopping" is a thing, some even enjoy it. But if you're not a tinkerer then choosing the right distro, or as close as possible to one, will save you time and effort later on.
However, even being on a "wrong distro", you will learn Linux and hopping to another distro later will be a lot easier than the original switch from Windows or Mac. In particular, if you switch to another similar derivative, like from Mint to Ubuntu or from Debian to Mint. Switching to another "distro family" may be a bit harder, but still easier than the first time.
WHAT ARE THOSE SNAPS AND FLATPAKS YOU MENTIONED?
Software distribution and installation is kind of a problem on Linux. It's not like on Windows where you go to the developer's website, download the installer and run it. Two reasons for it: fragmentation and poor dependency and backwards compatibility. An app will run on Ubuntu but not on Debian, for example.
So, each base distro developed their own software distribution system based on their own curated repositories. You install software either by running a command or through a software store and they pull the application from the central repository.
Success? Far from it.
Now developers need to package the software for three or four different repositories or the repository maintainers re-package the software for their respective repositories. This mostly works, it's fast and delivers the most compatible software. It is the preferred way to install software on Linux.
But... of course there is a "but"... this means that different distros can offer different versions of the same software, sometimes broken, sometimes outdated, or not offer the same software at all. That's because distros will have different versions of dependencies (libraries and frameworks that applications need to run, think DotNET, Visual C++ or DirectX on Windows).
So, a centralized solution was needed. This is where Flatpak and Snap come in.
Software is pre-packaged with its dependencies in a little virtual file system, sandboxed away from the system for additional security and installers are stored on a central, distro-independent repository (Snap Store or Flathub).
Success now? Nope. Both Snaps and Flatpaks have issues.
First, some developers either forget to package the necessary dependencies or don't know how to do this properly which defies the whole concept of this system. Software refuses to work.
Second, the packages can be very large. A 20MB application may come with a gigabyte worth of dependencies. The system is supposed to be smart and avoid downloading (deduplicates) dependencies that have already been download by another app, but, like many things on Linux, this also does not always work as designed.
Besides one app my need version 3.01 of something while another may need version 3.02 of the same thing, and so you now have two separate downloads. This can add up on smaller SSDs. However, this happens to some degree on Windows too: many applications come with their own versions of DotNET, Visual C++ or DirectX redistributables and Steam compartmentalizes different versions too for each game, resulting in multiple version being stored on the disk.
Also, Snaps and Flatpaks are slow to launch, since they have to mount a small virtual filesystem each time they're launched, which irritates some people. This can be profound. Fooyin installed as .DEB on Debian 13 launches instantly while the Flatpak version of Fooyin takes over five seconds to launch.
Finally, many Flatpaks (I don't have experience with Snaps) install with too restrictive permissions which prevent the app from working properly and requires tweaking its permissions and you have to use another app for that. Annoying.
Many people hate Snaps because the way Canonical pushes it while Flatpaks already exists and do the same thing anyway.
There are also Appimages. Standalone software images that you can download from the developer's websiste and just double-click them to run. In theory, at least. Appimages are not very popular, I know only one, Satisfactory Mod Manager, and it works well, but Appimages have all the other disadvantages of pre-packaged software like Snaps and Flatpaks.
Then there are issues with updates, again, autoupdate doesn't always work.
Oh, and Flatpaks installations are terribly slow for me. All this year, I get under 100 Kilobytes/second. I can install Krita in few seconds but a tiny Flatpak utility can take 30 minutes.
- Dude, I'm staying on Windows! - Can't blame ya...
OK, OK, it's not that bad. How often do you install software? Alright, yeah, it sucks, but you can live with t.
THE NVIDIA DRAMA
Finally, going back to the "NVIDIA thing" also known as the "NVIDIA drama". Not to scare you, but NVIDIA on Linux means pain. Especially when mixed with Wayland. AMD is the way to go.
- But it works fine for me! - Where did he come from? Shut up!
NVIDIA GPU/drivers can be made to behave to some usable degree and many people will be quick to say "it works fine for me", but I can say that "Windows 11 works fine for me too". It's a matter of skill, patience, available time and expectations. Not even counting installation issues and NVIDIA drivers breaking monthly with updates on Fedora, I had many stability problems with my NVIDIA GPUs (3080 and 4080), with many apps randomly quitting or locking up, even something like Puddletag, a music tagging app, seemingly having little to do with a GPU, but it was unusable. KDE Plasma was very crashy too. Once I put an AMD GPU in, it all stopped. Day and night difference.
If you're not gaming then Intel CPU Integrated Graphics (iGPU) are very stable under Linux too.
SO, HOW IS GAMING ON LINUX REALLY?
Not bad, but ike a lot of things "it depends": what games you play, how you play them, do you mod or edit your games, do you play competitive online games, what hardware do you have?
Steam works like magic on Linux. It is true that most games run on Linux under Steam. Many don't run very well though. Some games run almost as fast as Windows, we're talking 90-95% FPS. Two games, I played: Cyberpunk 2077 and Satisfactory ran on Debian and Fedora alike at nearly native performance and looked very good, I could not tell a difference between Linux and Windows.
WARNING!
Do not use Flatpak Steam, use the native version. Flatpak Steam causes headaches and installing ProtonGE is more complicated. On Debian and derivatives, just download the .deb package from Steam's website and run it. On Fedora KDE it's available from the Discover software store, you may need to enable the Steam repository in Discover, but again, avoid the Flatpak!
Another game, No Man's Sky ran at half FPS compared to Windows 11 and it was very stuttery. Yes, I waited almost 30 minutes to allow it to rebuild shaders and what not, bu no luck. Weird, since it's a Vulkan game.
Another one, Planetary Annihilation TITANS, an older and very CPU heavy strategy game, ran at half at the FPS, stuttered profoundly and paused every few seconds. It was unplayable under any version of Proton, including protonGE. The game is heavy under Windows too so I had low expectations and I was right. Since then, they re-released a native version (yes, a native Linux game!) but I haven't had any Linux installed since then, so I was unable to test it.
Two more, Dishonored and Dishonored 2, these ran normally, I could not tell a difference, but these are older games and they run at like 300FPS on Windows. But they were stutter free and smooth on Linux.
A common problem reported with games on Linux is poor sound quality or sound breaking up, but I have not experienced that.
ProtonDB website is a good crowd-sourced repository of information about Steam games on Linux. Find your favorite games to get an idea what to expect:
Scenario 1 - you have an AMD GPU and you play vanilla Steam games, never mod them. In this case you will most likely have no significant problems with graphics drivers or the games (will talk more later about drivers on Linux!). Some games may require a bit of tinkering in the way of adding launch options in Steam, but this is a thing on Windows too, and you will find these tweaks on ProtonDB.
Another thing you may have to do is to select different versions of Proton in Steam, newer games=newer Proton, but it's also easy, all in the Steam app. For some games Proton GE gives much better results. You have to download a tarball (a compressed TAR package, the preferred way of file compression on Linux, like ZIP on Windows) from GitHub, unpack it and copy it to a specific folder inside Steam. This can all be done in the GUI without ever touching the Terminal.
Scenario 2 - like above, but with an NVIDIA GPU. Aside the already mentioned issues with drivers (more later), most games will run well and everything above applies. But DLSS and Frame Generation may not be supported in all games and using ProtonGE may be required for most newer games.
Scenario 3 - You mod your games, no matter what GPU you have, modding can be major PITA, depending on the game. If you can install mods by hand like in Skyrim, Starfield or No Man's Sky then it's easy. The only difficulty lies in finding the game folder which is buried few levels deep in the Steam folder. Game settings are buried even deeper as Steam maintains an entire Windows-like directory structure deep inside your home directory. There is the C Drive, Users, Documents, the whole thing. Once you find it, it's just like on Windows. Just create shortcuts on your desktop, for quicker access.
However, a game like Cyberpunk 2077 is basically impossible to mod by hand under Linux for any sane person, since many mods are not just text files or packages but they're Windows DLLs and EXEs. They require another level of translation using WINE, ProtonTricks and what not. Luckily, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, there is the alpha version of native Linux Nexus App, it's rough around the edges and supports like five games, but it works with Cyberpunk 2077, though it's a bit tricky, but it's all GUI, no command line.
For Satisfactory modding fans there is a native Satisfactory Mod Manager Appimage that works just like on Windows. There may be other native mod managers but this is all I know so far.
Scenario 4 - you don't want to use Steam, you have GOG installers or standalone games. Just forget it. Use Steam or stay on Windows. I'm serious. Yes, they can be made to work using Bottles, Heroic Launcher or even WINE itself or few other weird softwares, but it's tricky, time consuming, unintuitive and often just doesn't work well, no DLSS, no FG or game runs like crap if it even launches at all. The level of required tinkering is way above my level of patience. I can install a web server, MySQL, PHP, Nextcloud by the time I get a single GOG game to run. Maybe I was just unlucky. It's just not fun.
HAVE YOU SWITCHED YET?
No, I'm still on Windows mainly because I have an RTX4080 in my main desktop and I just don't want to deal with the NVIDIA problems on Linux. I have three Ubuntu servers and one old Macbook Pro running Fedora 43 KDE. I hope to squeeze two more years out of my custom Windows 11 build before Microsoft makes it unbearable. When that time comes, I'll get a higher-end AMD GPU. The one I have now, I picked up a used RX6600 for testing, is not exactly a modern gaming card.
WHICH DISTRO WILL YOU USE?
I'm in a decision paralysis between Debian KDE and Fedora KDE. I can't decide, but it's gonna be one of those two. After a year of testing I ruled out everything else for one reason or another. I found most of the derivatives to be pointless. Stick to the roots. I ran Debian and Ubuntu servers for decades so I'm more familiar with that side of Linux. But Fedora offers the latest KDE Plasma, while on Debian I'll have to wait two years for the version of Plasma that is available on Fedora 43 right now. But Fedora is noticeably, though not terribly, less stable than Debian. But stability is Debian's thing. I have some time to make the decision, so maybe things will clarify somewhat by then.
SOOOO, AFTER ALL THIS... IS LINUX GOOD OR NOT?
Yes and no. Linux is not objectively better than Windows as a desktop OS in a general sense. A lot of what you heard is half-truths, myths, misconceptions and trolling.
THE MAIN ADVANTAGE OF LINUX IS PRIVACY
This is true, of course, it's the #1 reason why people switch to Linux. There is no corporate spying, no advertising and telemetry can be disabled and it's opt-in, if it's there (KDE asks you to allow some telemetry on the first login and Debian during the installation but it's all optional and no push). There are no forced updates (thought they can be disabled on Windows too). There is no asinine AI push either. AI is surely coming to Linux but it will not be as intrusive as what Microsoft is doing and certainly opt-in on most distros.
The only notable exception is Ubuntu. As mentioned already Ubuntu displays ads in SSH sessions, simple text ads, but still ads. Also, Snaps call home to GitHub for reasons not fully understood yet. I have not done much research into this since I don't care about Ubuntu but I saw articles and videos where people claimed that Snap packages make dozens of connections to GitHub, despite telemetry being disabled.
Also, the corporate distros like Ubuntu and Red Had and possibly Fedora, by the way of its ties to Red Hat, will most likely be the first ones to get some sort of AI nonsense added. Though for now, the Fedora Council insists that it will be all opt-in and not enabled by default. If you want most privacy then go with Debian. They have a very clear and hard stance on freedom and privacy.
LINUX WORKS MUCH BETTER THAN WINDOWS ON OLDER HARDWARE
It is also true that Linux works better on older hardware because lightweight distros and DEs exist, tailored specifically for older hardware. Also, Linux does not have the same arbitrary hardware requirements as Windows. You can run it without TPM and without Secure Boot. This is probably the #2 reason why people switch to Linux. However, high end DEs KDE Plasma and GNOME can be almost as resource heavy as Windows. Though, Plasma customization options are light years ahead of Windows. There is no contest. Plasma absolutely is the most customizable Desktop Environment on Earth. You can make Plasma as flashy or as simple as you desire.
I have a 10 years old Intel Macbook Pro. The latest two or maybe three versions of macOS don't run on it. Windows 11 runs on it but it's slow and the laptop is full of weird-ass hardware and Apple Bootcamp Windows drivers are very old, so the trackpad and Bluetooth don't work under Windows 11. Under Fedora 42 KDE everything works! Even dual tap for right click is set properly by default. It's a bit sluggish still but noticeably snappier than under Windows 11, it'll be probably better running a lighter DE, but I like KDE Plasma. I recently upgraded to Fedora 43 and it still works fine.
FLEXIBILITY AND CUSTOMIZATION
And this brings us to the third strength of Linux over Windows: flexibility and customization (unless it's GNOME). You can accept a prepackaged distro that fits your needs, if you don't feel like tinkering. But nearly every distro and DE (unless it's GNOME LOL!) has the power to do customize the hell out of it.
OK, GNOME works fine for people who want something different than Windows, simple and kinda macOS-like looking. But GNOME throws away all desktop OS standards and metaphors and ignores all established UI/UX design guidelines. It literally is an iOS clone for desktop computers. Except it's not nearly as good as iOS. Some people like that. There is no customization out of the box and even adding something basic like windows minimize buttons requires third party extensions that break with every update and ruin all your customizations.
OK, NOW ON TO BAD THINGS, I GUESS?
Yeah. Anything else that you heard about Linux desktop is not um... entirely true. Linux is not faster than Windows, unless it's old hardware. On the same, modern hardware Linux is as fast or even sometimes slower than Windows, mainly due to problematic drivers, more on this in a moment. For the same reasons, Linux is not more stable than Windows either. It's particularly bad if you have an NVIDIA GPU. In my experience, I have NVIDIA GPUs, it was a crashy mess compared to Windows. Using an AMD improved things a lot, but more on this in a moment.
For simple use, when you have older hardware, you don't play latest games and you don't need complex or specialized software beyond a web browser, an email client, a simple music player and some basic typing, Linux will work flawlessly if you go with a stable distro.
WHAT IS THEN THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH LINUX ON THE DESKTOP?
And here we arrive at the number one, giant, deal breaking, insurmountable, problem with Linux: lack of quality desktop software. Sure, this is subjective to a large extent and what is available for Linux works for some people, but not for most. Every time you complain about this, or anything related to Linux, someone will quickly pop out with "it works fine for me" fallacy. But this is the #1 reason for abysmal Linux adoption as a desktop OS.
It is a chicken and egg problem: small market share=no software, no software=few people use Linux. Commercial developers are not interested in Linux's tiny market. Plus, Linux is built around FOSS, remember. Very few Linux users will actually pay for software and the general Linux community will likely combat any attempts of selling commercial software for Linux, even though they happily buy games from Steam. But Linux community...oh, more on it in a moment. No single week passes by on DxO or Affinity forums without someone begging for a Linux release.
Sure, many people are so strongly driven by the FOSS philosophy that they will accept all bugs and issues just because it's FOSS. Some people live in shacks in the woods too because of ideological reasons. Most others do not care, they want software that works.
And no, running Windows software using WINE or Bottles is pain, I'd rather stay on Windows.
If you're on Windows you may be familiar with Mozilla and their Thunderbird and Firefox applications or Libre Office or KDE Krita. Yes, these are FOSS and they look and work the same, mostly, on Linux. Ironically, I find all four to run better on Windows, but it just could be me. As we already know Steam is also available for Linux and Valve single-handedly saved Linux gaming and made Linux desktop what it is today. Steam is the number one reason in the raise of Linux popularity in the last few years.
If you need Adobe software, forget Linux, it's a no go. All Linux image editors are abysmal compared to Adobe, Serif's Affinity, DxO software or even the little known gem of Photoscape X available for free from the Microsoft Store. If you bring up Adobe on a Linux forum and someone mentions GIMP, you've just met a clueless troll, ignore and block if possible. Krita is a much better application than GIMP, but for some weird reason KDE stubbornly keeps insisting that Krita is a painting program, even though it looks and feels like Photoshop, down to keyboard shortcuts. Instead, they have Showfoto app that I was never able to figure out what that software is actually trying to do, it's awful. Krita has all the markings of great Photoshop alternative but it's unpolished, has weak tools (Healing Patch is terrible) and lacks features like batch processing.
I fail to understand KDE's stance here: they have a winner, they have the potential to revolutionize Linux software landscape by developing Krita into an actual, powerful image editor that would give Photoshop user a valid option, but they chose not to do it. Krita is available for Windows, you can try it out.
I guess it comes down to the fact the software development under Linux is developer-centric and there is no concept of user satisfaction. But a large organization like KDE should know better.
Libre Office is a very capable MS Office alternative for individual users. It's available for Windows too and I use it on Windows. But if you need to collaborate with MS Office users then forget it. Dismiss "it works for me" trolls. Libre Office is not a viable MS Office alternative for heavy professional users. I guess, you can use Office 365 in a web browser.
Linux even lacks a decent music player. There is nothing that is remotely close to Foobar2000 or MusicBee. There are like fifty music players for Linux but they're either look like they were made in the 90s or lack basic features like smart playlists. There is Fooyin which shows a lot of promise but it's only at version 0.9, not entirely stable and lacks some features but it's shaping up to be the best music player for Linux by far. Fooyin follows Foobar2000 customization philosophy quite closely.
Unfortunately, the development is glacial. It's developed by an individual developer who recently started a new job, moved to a new city and life happened so it took almost a year for Fooyin to get from 0.8 to 0.9. He says the process should pick up some pace now that he settled in. This is a typical problem with FOSS: slow development, projects get often so delayed that they become irrelevant or forgotten or they're outright dropped and abandoned because the developer lost interest or has more important things to do. Sometimes, these projects get picked up by others or forked, but they usually just remain on life support until they're no longer compatible with anything.
Another one is backup software. OK, backup software needs not be pretty to look at but it needs to be functional and must be absolutely reliable. There is no good backup software for Linux. Most people use shell scripts based on rsync or something. I've used Retrospect Backup on Macs and Windows for nearly 30 years and there is nothing close to it on the Linux side. Funny thing is that a lot of Linux users would argue this tooth and nail but it quickly becomes obvious that they have no clue how real backups actually work. There are very complex backup solutions for Linux such as Proxmox Backup Server but it's a server product and a total overkill for desktop use and requires way too much effort to run.
There are no cloud based backup services such as Backblaze Desktop Backup besides Borg which is a lot more expensive and more difficult to use.
You can't stream Amazon, Netflix, Disney, etc in FHD or 4K in Linux. Only 720p. This is because Linux lacks sufficient DRM to satisfy the studios since it's not a centrally managed environment such as Windows or macOS but just a mass of independent distros. This is unlikely to change for many years if ever. So, if you want to stream FHD or 4K, you're gonna need Windows or Mac for that.
THE SECOND BIGGEST LINUX PROBLEM: POOR HARDWARE SUPPORT
Another big one is poor hardware support. Linux has a huge problem, which is by design, and the community pretends it does not. They'll deny anything. The problem is that hardware drivers are baked into the kernel. What does this mean? This means you can't simply buy a piece of hardware and simply install new drivers for it like you do on Windows. Your new hardware must have compatible drivers in your Linux kernel already. This is particularly problematic for stable distros like Debian that come with kernels that could be couple of years old.
There are ways around it: install a newer, unsupported kernel, switch to a rolling distro or actually install newer drivers if they're available. The first option, installing newer, unsupported kernel, means tinkering that most people don't want to do. It also comes with the risk of breaking something or even rendering your system unbootable. The second option, distro switch, may simply not be an option for many users. The third option, installing third party drivers, is only possible if the driver is available, like NVIDIA's, and it's a risky process on Linux because it involves rebuilding of the kernel during installation. The installer does this but it's prone to errors and if you reboot too early, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the process has completed, your Linux will box no longer boot and you're in for lots of pain.
Another problem with drivers being baked into the kernel is that a faulting driver will bring your entire system down. A game that crashes the GPU driver will either lock up your system or give you a nice BSOD (Black Screen Of Death) and hope you have a reset button on your PC, like in the Windows XP days. The Linux kernel maintainers have been adding mitigations for this but they usually don't work.
Graphics drivers are the type of drivers that are most susceptible to crashes for some reason, on all OSs, maybe because they're very complex, I have no idea, I don't care, which makes Linux graphics subsystem annoyingly fragile. Installing or updating NVIDIA drivers, or pretty much any new drivers, requires a reboot, sometimes two, sometimes ends in a BSOD if the process fails or if you reboot too early. Do not try to complain about this on the Linux forums because they will blame you for being a noob.
Windows had the same problem... 20 years go... and Microsoft got around the fragile graphics drivers problem by making them a user process. This means many drivers in Windows, including graphics drivers, run like any other process invoked by the user, not as part of the kernel: but like a web browser, a word processor or a calculator app. If graphics driver crashes on Windows it will simply get restarted, you will get few seconds of black screen and even most of your application will be still opened. I don't remember the last time I had to press the Reset button on any of my PCs. When running Fedora for four months it happened almost every day. It was bizarre.
This is why NVIDIA GPUs are a problem on Linux: NVIDIA does not contribute their drivers to the Linux kernel, AMD does. But the problem is not NVIDIA here, the problem is Linux faulty design. Even with an AMD GPUs, your kernel may be too old when you buy a newer GPU and you will have to upgrade your kernel or switch distros.
Linux fans will literally bent backwards trying to prove why drivers in the kernel are awesome and why NVIDIA is bad. Some of the mental gymnastics can be amusing, but in the end you will be the one banned from the forum for complaining about Linux sucking. I don't know, maybe there is some advantage to having drivers in the kernel where Linux matters most: the server space. But from a desktop OS user perspective this is utterly inconvenient and annoying.
I can't find anything at the time of this writing, but a while ago I came across someone saying that that there are voices inside the Linux community that are pushing to change that, and move some drivers to the user's space. That would significantly improve Linux's appeal as a desktop OS. But, if Wayland is any indication, this will likely take decades, so don't hold your breath as Linux development moves at glacial pace.
Realtek is a similar story. Last time I checked they did not contribute to the Linux kernel. They offer some Linux drivers for download but they're buggy and hard to install, and so most of their drivers have to be reverse engineered by the FOSS community. This is clearly not a Linux fault, but most people do not care what's inside their computer and why it does not work. On my three PCs only two audio jacks out of four or six work and on one mobo SPDIF is not recognized at all. Two of my Realtek on-board 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet chips auto-negotiate 100 Mbps instead of 2.5 Gbps and they reset spontaneously if I set them manually. This is huge problem since pretty much any motherboard made in the last decade will have some Realtek devices. The problem is worse with newer motherboards or laptops.
Again, another general attitude in the Linux community is that "fixing things is integral to The Linux Experience". Except there are many that can't be fixed at all or are just too time consuming and too impractical.
I normally insist that car analogies don't work for computers but I can't hep myself here.Who would want a car that you have to regularly take apart just to fill it up with gas or add windshield washer fluid? Even just opening the hood is too much for majority of car owners. Where nothing fits in place, because someone decided that square cap holders are better than round ones, and where you have to jerry rig the simplest things to make the fit?
People want cars to take them from here to there with no fuss and no effort. It's unreasonable to expect anything different from computer users. Computers are tools, devices, not lifestyle, for most people. People do not define themselves by the Operating System they use or the brand of their microwave oven. Sure, people may prefer one brand of car over another, by why? Because it works better for them, it's more comfortable and reliable.
Remember: most computer users are not you, most computer users are your mom. And that doesn't mean they're "stupid normies". They just have different priorities in life than you.
THE THIRD BIG PROBLEM WITH LINUX IS...
You might have guessed by now, it's the community.
Elitist, combative, often outright disingenuous and delusional, overrun by clueless but aggressive trolls. They'll ridicule you and blame you or your hardware for all your Linux problems. It's like their purpose in life is to torment people because it makes them feel superior. You see the same people in all forum threads talking people down, never actually helping anyone. It's all they do, all day long.
Then they go on to Steam and other forums, butt in into unrelated topics, where Windows users are simply trying to solve a problem and screech "Windows is garbage, switch to Linux!". Look at their post history and that's all they post. This is so irritating.
The nonsense they regurgitate about Windows. It would be funny if it wasn't tragic. They bring up non-issues, things that haven't been true for 10+ years. Most of them have no clue what they're talking about they just, well... regurgitate. Certainly Windows has problems, that's why we're here, but they talk about some random nonsense like they never even used Windows. Their obsession with Windows bashing is irrational and irritating.
Then they go on Reddit asking why so many people hate Linux... Geniuses!
You may get several different answers to your problem, eventually, and some may even work, after three pages of irrational arguments and how this is all your fault because you're stupid.
Unfortunately, sooner or later you will need to ask for help so grow some thick skin. There are helpful people there but you will have to learn to ignore the trolls and don't engage them, because they feed on that. Just block them if possible, report and ignore.
Avoid Reddit like a swamp on fire. I never had an account there and never will. All main distros and DEs have their own communities and they're usually properly moderated, at least to some degree, use these, avoid anything else. You will still get elitists and combative responses even on Mint, Fedora and KDE forums though.
They even fight tooth and nail among themselves, Arch users being the worst, they look down on people using Mint or Ubuntu like they were idiots.
Torvalds himself said few times that Linux has many problems that prevent if from being a viable desktop alternative for normal people, that went unaddressed for decades, because the community, the devs in particular, is basically too full of itself, but the faithful deny it all.
BUT LINUX IS SUPER SECURE!
Nope. Linux desktop is secure by being obscure and we know, or should know, that this is not security. Linux does have some protections such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), but it was developed by Red Hat and NSA dipped their fingers in it, so I don't know... Debian and derivatives have AppArmor. But if you're tricked into downloading malware and type your password then all bets are off.
Enterprise Linux servers are maintained by trained and paid professionals, so the situation in the enterprise is, again, quite different from the situation on the desktop.
Linux on the desktop is not as secure as Linux fans will try to make you believe. They'd say "it's FOSS so everyone can see the source". OK, who regularly looks at FOSS source code, raise a hand.... no hands. Why? Because most Linux users are not developers. I can look at the code and I will fall asleep. The devs are busy, they develop their own code in their free time, do you suppose they have the time to look at other people's code?
Anyone can fork a GitHub project, since it's FOSS, into their own malicious release, inject their code, name it in a misleading way so that it seems like the original and ta da! GitHub can't delete malicious forks like that fast enough (here and here), it's a known problem. Meantime, people download the malicious code by mistake and implement it in their own projects. This happens. Linux malware goes undetected, on average for 2-3 years, 10 years in extreme cases. The good news is that Linux malware and ransomware is mostly targeted at things like cloud servers, corporate networks, generally high value targets, they're not after your porn or your music. But "it's FOSS so everyone can see the source" is a myth.
So, for now Linux desktop users are relatively safe. Maybe. But if Linux popularity increases significantly, malware makers will start targeting desktop Linux, if only out of spite, and then Linux users will be completely unprepared. And that is already starting to happen. Most software repositories are ran and maintained by the community. They don't have the time to properly verify everything that goes in there. How many apps are in the Debian or Fedora repositories that are unsigned and made by "Unknown"? How many apps with similar names? I saw something there that looked like a fake Chrome clone and you have no clue who made it. Do I really want to trust these? Does that look safe to you?
There were even news of Snap and Flatpak stores getting malware.
The unofficial Arch User Repository (AUR) gets malware infested software uploaded often. It's maintained by untrained volunteers in their free time and it takes them on an average two days, or more, to catch it. That's enough time for people to install it and they will never know. But the Arch users' attitude tells you all you need to know. Here is a response on Reddit when someone broke the news of malware in AUR:
"Joke's on them, I already bricked my system on my own, thank you very much".
That's how serious Linux users are about security. That's how smart they are. Sad.
OK, LET'S WRAP IT UP
Linux is definitely usable, but it depends on your needs, use patterns and expectations. Read up. Pick a distro and a DE that suits you best and fits your hardware so you can avoid asking the community for help.
If you a gamer then swapping your NVIDIA GPU for an AMD would save you a lot of headache. Then go with Debian KDE or Fedora KDE.
If you want to stick to your NVIDIA GPU then Nobara NVIDIA Edition is a good choice, or core Fedora KDE.
If you have older hardware with Intel or AMD CPU Graphics then pretty much anything will work fine. Debian Cinnamon or Debian KDE or Mint Cinnamon for simplicity, stability and ease of use or Fedora if you want latest software.
These are hit pop songs (also new romantics, new wave, synthpop, electronica, some rock, some disco, dance, etc) released in 1983 alone. I didn't include metal, punk and related as that was never my cup of tea, but that will likely make this list much longer. Although, the years before 1983 and after that were just as prolific, but somehow 1983 was dubbed as "The Year Pop Went Crazy". This is why some known artists may be missing because they skipped 1983 and released either in 1982 or 1984 and later.
There were many more songs released in 1983 but the songs listed here had some sort of hit status (Top 100, Top 10, etc) or received awards in 1983 or 1984; or are simply iconic and easily recognizable either in the US or Europe. Many of those songs were one hit wonders though. Many of these songs have been remixed and covered over and over by many artists of all genres and generations, from metal, reggae to hip hop all the way to the recent years.
I'm not 100% sure about all though, as the sources seem to contradict on some releases, as well as some songs were released at different times in different parts of the world, some were re-released (as part of 1983 movie soundtracks, for instance) some "releases" were remixes, some were covers of older songs and, finally, some songs were released as singles in 1982 before the full album was released in 1983. There were more than ten songs released in November and December 1982 that I didn't include here because of this, even though the album was released in 1983.
So, here you go:
Bananarama - Cruel Summer Billy Idol - Rebel Yell Billy Joel - Uptown Girl Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy Bryan Adams - Straight From The Heart Cindy Lauper - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Culture Club - Karma Chameleon David Bowie - Let's Dance David Bowie - Modern Love David Bowie - China Girl Dominatrix - The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight Donna Summer - She Works Hard For The Money Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know? Eddie Grant - Electric Avenue Eurythmics - Here Comes The Rain Again Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (my personal fav) Eurythmics - Who's That Girl Herbie Hancock - Rockit Howard Jones - What Is Love? Irene Cara - What A Feeling (Flashdance) Kajagoogoo - Too Shy Kraftwerk - Tour De France (my personal fav) Laura Branigan - How Am I Supposed to Live Without You Madonna - Holiday Madonna - Lucky Star Michael Jackson - Billie Jean Michael Jackson - Human Nature Michael Jackson - Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' Mike Oldfield - Foreign Affair Mike Oldfield - Moonlight Shadow (my personal fav) Nena - 99 Luftballons New Order - The Beach New Order - Blue Monday (my personal fav) OMD - Telegraph Pat Benatar - Love Is a Battlefield Prince - Little Red Corvette Shannon - Let The Music Play Spandau Ballet - Gold Spandau Ballet - True Stevie Nicks - Stand Back Styx - Mr. Roboto Talking Heads - Burning Down The House Tears for Fears - Pale Shelter (my personal fav) The Human League - (Keep Feeling) Fascination The Police - Every Breath You Take The Police - Wrapped Around Your Finger U2 - New Year's Day U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday UB40 - Red Red Wine Yazoo - Nobody's Diary (my personal fav) Yes - Owner of the Lonely Heart ZZ Top - Gimme Al Your Lovin' ZZ Top - Legs ZZ Top - Sharp Dressed Man
Requires creativity, imagination, awareness, strategy and problem solving skills from the player to discover an unknown or an undefined solution, and it results in satisfaction and gives a feeling of being rewarded and doesn't require excessively long time or mind numbing repetition to solve.
Unfortunately, once a solution is discovered it may lose a reply value, unless there are multiple solutions to be found, multiple means and paths to the solution, or the process of arriving at a solution is interesting, engaging and fun enough to redo it all again.
This kind of difficulty is hard to achieve and requires extraordinary creativity, extended development time and more resources from game developers.
A TEDIOUS GAME
Requires large, often excessive, amounts of time and numerous, often mind numbing, repetitive tasks based on previous knowledge and/or button mashing in order to accumulate arbitrarily scarce and limited resources to unlock the ending or to defeat a bullet sponge boss.
There is no element of surprise, no engagement and no discovery involved, it requires little imagination and little skills, so it gets boring, tiresome, becomes unrewarding and leads to feeling of relief rather than satisfaction when completed.
There are some who enjoy this and it has reply value for those who relish repetitiveness and tedium. Some level of tedium has its place in games and can serve a purpose but way too often "tedious" is a cheap replacement for "difficult" and often gets taken to the extremes.
This is also often used to artificially lengthen the game to compensate for lack of content, lack of interesting mechanics or lack of engaging writing. This is easy to implement as it requires much less creativity, less time and fewer resources from the developers.
Before we get into this, I want to make something clear. I don't want to bash Linux on the desktop and discourage anyone from using it. I just want to tell how it really is, from the perspective of a potential switcher, because there are too many misconceptions, myths, half-truths about Linux on the desktop. Like "Linux runs most of the servers on the planet so it must be good".... oh please. First, it runs most of the web servers, not servers, and second, that success does not mean it offers the same quality as a desktop OS.
Imagine, someone told you there is an amazing walking path in a forest outside of town, all paved, water fountains, food vending machines, trash cans and shelters every 500 meters. You drive there for an hour only to find a wild forest dirt track and nothing else. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy a hike in the wilderness, quite the opposite, but you're now wishing that person didn't make shit up so you'd had a chance to prepare properly, wear hiking boots, bring water, snacks and a rain jacket along.
Perhaps they meant well: you don't get outside enough so they wanted to coerce you to get your lazy ass out. That's not the right way of doing it though.
OK maybe that's a bad analogy, but you get the point.
Linux as a desktop is not entirely bad but it's far cry from what diehard Linux fans are trying to tell you. A lot of that is FOSS ideology and blind hatred towards Microsoft and proprietary software. Never mind that Linux is backed by billion dollar corporations such as IBM and its subsidiary Red Hat that contribute significantly to the Linux kernel and make shitloads of money in the enterprise selling Linux software and support contracts. Maybe in their heads Linux is really that good because they used it for so long that they completely lost any perspective.
I can see how Linux may work for some people but it will not work for most, at least not without some effort and adjusted expectations. I could use it, if I had to. And before anyone starts calling people "normies", and insulting their intelligence, read this please.
Linux as a desktop OS has problems and denying them won't make these problems do away. This is what I want to do: "adjust expectations", because what you often hear from Linux fans is not entirely true. Maybe they mean it and maybe they're really believe what they say. There is a very outspoken and large chunk of Linux community that is actually massively clueless, like in any other community. Also, like in any other community, there are seriously knowledgeable and helpful people there too it's just too often very hard to find them in all the trolling and noise. More about the Linux community later.
For a more thorough coverage of Linux for Windows user read this please. I go over pros and cons of Linux and I explain all the things like distros and desktop environments.
So, let's now talk about the three biggest problems with Linux as a desktop OS.
PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: LACK OF QUALITY DESKTOP APPLICATIONS
Adobe, Microsoft Office, Affinity Photo, DxO Photo Lab, Photoscape X, MusicBee, Retrospect Backup, Backblaze Desktop Backup, even something like Zhorn Stickies have no adequate equivalents on Linux, other than some light use. Linux desktop apps are half baked, half functional, lack features and aesthetics, UI/UX is poor, compatibility is poor. And specific, professional applications for trades like medical, legal, engineering or architectural simply don't exists on Linux.
OK, so Libre Office is OK'ish, I even use it on Windows, but for heavy Office users who need to collaborate it's a no go. I tried to use Krita and it's OK, but is not good enough so I bought Affinity Photo.
And no, GIMP is not "a Photoshop alternative" :)
This is the unfortunate aspect of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) since most of it is done by volunteers in their spare time who make no profit off of their time and effort and many are amateurs, inexperienced in UI/UX design or have really weird UI ideas.
Even large free software communities, such as KDE, are only semi-organized and lack clear vision and effective management. Though, at least their software won't just get abandoned overnight as it happens too often with apps from individual Linux developers. Software longevity and backwards compatibility are poor on Linux.
Don't believe me? Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME, said this 10 years ago in hist blog piece aptly titled What Killed the Linux Desktop (a good read despite being over 10 years old), and this has not changed much since then:
"Backwards compatibility, and compatibility across Linux distributions is not a sexy problem. It is not even remotely an interesting problem to solve. Nobody wants to do that work, everyone wants to innovate, and be responsible for the next big feature in Linux. So Linux was left with idealists that wanted to design the best possible system without having to worry about boring details like support and backwards compatibility"
And then:
What I mean with the title is that Linux on the Desktop lost the race for a consumer operating system. It will continue to be a great engineering workstation (that is why I am replacing the hard disk in my system at home) and yes, I am aware that many of my friends use Linux on the desktop and love it.
But we lost the chance of becoming a mainstream consumer OS. What this means is that nobody is recommending a non-technical person go get a computer with Linux on it for their desktop needs (unless you are doing it so for idelogical reasons).
Nailed it! While Linux Desktop Environments did improve a lot, KDE Plasma 6 is easily better than Windows 11 UX, the problem of lack of quality desktop applications didn't go away since then. Linux lost the race to become a consumer OS because people want applications not a platform for tinkering. They don't want to "have fun with their OS". Some Linux fans even like that, joke's on them.
Games run mostly well, but not as well as on Windows. Some Linux fans perpetuate falsehoods and myths that games run better on Linux which is just not true. They're usable, but many don't work well, work "just good enough" or don't work at all, many game technologies and features don't work well or at all in many games under Linux (DLSS, FSR, Frame Generation, GSYNC, Freesync) and many games just look worse. Modding on Linux is a pain too. But most people do more than games and web browsing on their PCs.
Software development on Linux is developer-centric and there is no concept of user satisfaction and customer support. Most software outside of the big ones like Mozilla and KDE are pet projects written by hobbyists coders with little or no proper UI/UX training and background who are driven by their own preferences and experience. The general attitude is: "if you don't like this app then write your own". So, naturally, the interfaces can be very off-putting for a desktop user who is not a coder. As long as the devs are happy, that's all you'll get.
"Every GNU/Linux distribution at the moment (including Ubuntu) confuses system software with end user software, whereas they are two very different beasts which should be treated very, very differently."
-- Tony Mobily, editor of Free Software Magazine
Incidentally, Mac OS X (now macOS) was one very likely reason why Linux desktop ecosystem never evolved. Back in the early days UNIX was very big in the academia. I remember those blue SGI boxes running Irix, sitting in every scientist's and engineer's office next to their Macs running Mac OS 7.
Mac OS and Windows were quite primitive back then and UNIX had a huge edge for lots of scientific uses and SGI was the king of advanced graphics. But then Mac OS X happened and all the blue SGI boxes disappeared overnight. Mac OS X was UNIX based on FreeBSD (macOS still is). A Mac could now run their scientific UNIX software but it could also run Photoshop, Word and PowerPoint, same box, same Desktop! Sure, there was some Linux uptake too, but Apple now ruled the academia and SGI was history (Jurrasic Park anyone?) If Mac OS X never came along who knows where Linux would be now.
PROBLEM NUMBER TWO: HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY
Another big one is poor hardware support. Linux has a huge problem, which is by design, and the community pretends it does not. They'll deny anything. The problem is that hardware drivers are baked into the kernel. What does this mean? This means you can't simply buy a piece of hardware and simply install new drivers for it like you do on Windows. Your new hardware must have compatible drivers in your Linux kernel already. This is particularly problematic for stable distros like Debian that come with kernels that could be couple of years old.
There are ways around it: install a newer, unsupported kernel, switch to a rolling distro or actually install newer drivers if they're available. The first option, installing newer, unsupported kernel, means tinkering that most people don't want to do. It also comes with the risk of breaking something or even rendering your system unbootable. The second option, distro switch, may simply not be an option for many users. The third option, installing third party drivers, is only possible if the driver is available, like NVIDIA's, and it's a risky process on Linux because it involves rebuilding of the kernel during installation. The installer does this but it may fail for mysterious reasons and if you reboot too early, and sometimes it's hard to tell if the process has completed, your Linux computer will no longer boot and you're in for lots of pain.
Another problem with drivers being baked into the kernel is that a faulting driver will bring your entire system down. A game that crashes the GPU driver will either lock up your system or give you a nice BSOD (Black Screen Of Death) and hope you have a reset button on your PC, like in the Windows XP days. The Linux kernel maintainers have been adding mitigations for this but they usually don't work.
Graphics drivers are the type of drivers that are most susceptible to crashes for some reason, on all OSs, maybe because they're very complex, I have no idea, I don't care, which makes Linux graphics subsystem annoyingly fragile. Installing or updating NVIDIA drivers, or pretty much any new drivers, requires a reboot, sometimes two, sometimes ends in a BSOD if the process fails or if you reboot too early. Do not try to complain about this on the Linux forums because they will blame you for being a noob.
Windows had the same problem... 20 years go and Microsoft got around the fragile graphics drivers problem by making them a user process. This means drivers in Windows, including graphics drivers, run like any other process invoked by the user, not as part of the kernel, but like a web browser, a word processor or a calculator app. If graphics driver crashes on Windows it will simply get restarted and everything will go back to normal without restarting your PC, you will get few seconds of black screen and even most of your application will be still opened. I don't remember the last time I had to press the Reset button on any of my PCs. When running Fedora for four months it happened almost every day. It was bizarre.
This is why NVIDIA GPUs are a problem on Linux: NVIDIA does not contribute their drivers to the Linux kernel, AMD does. But the problem is not NVIDIA here, the problem is Linux faulty design. Even with an AMD GPUs, your kernel may be too old when you buy a newer GPU and you will have to upgrade your kernel or switch distros.
Linux fans will literally bent backwards trying to prove why drivers in the kernel are awesome and why NVIDIA is bad. Some of the mental gymnastics can be amusing, but in the end you will be the one banned from the forum for complaining about Linux sucking. I don't know, maybe there is some advantage to having drivers in the kernel where Linux matters most: the server space. But from a desktop OS user perspective this is utterly inconvenient and annoying.
I can't find anything at the time of this writing, but a while ago I came across someone saying that that there are voices inside the Linux community that are pushing to change that, and move some drivers to the user's space. That would significantly improve Linux's appeal as a desktop OS. But, if Wayland is any indication, this will likely take decades, so don't hold your breath as Linux development moves at glacial pace.
Realtek is a similar story. Last time I checked they did not contribute to the Linux kernel. They offer some Linux drivers for download but they're buggy and hard to install, and so most of their drivers have to be reverse engineered by the FOSS community. This is clearly not a Linux fault, but most people do not care what's inside their computer and why it does not work. On my three PCs only two audio jacks out of four or six work and on one mobo SPDIF is not recognized at all. Two of my Realtek on-board 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet chips auto-negotiate 100 Mbps instead of 2.5 Gbps and they reset spontaneously if I set them manually. This is huge problem since pretty much any motherboard made in the last decade will have some Realtek devices. The problem is worse with newer motherboards or laptops.
Again, another general attitude in the Linux community is that "fixing things is integral to The Linux Experience". Except there are many that can't be fixed at all or are just too time consuming and too impractical.
I normally insist that car analogies don't work for computers but I can't hep myself here.Who would want a car that you have to regularly take apart just to fill it up with gas or add windshield washer fluid? Even just opening the hood is too much for majority of car owners. Where nothing fits in place, because someone decided that square cap holders are better than round ones, and where you have to jerry rig the simplest things to make the fit?
People want cars to take them from here to there with no fuss and no effort. It's unreasonable to expect anything different from computer users. Computers are tools, devices, not lifestyle, for most people. People do not define themselves by the Operating System they use or the brand of their microwave oven. Sure, people may prefer one brand of car over another, by why? Because it works better for them, it's more comfortable and reliable.
PROBLEM NUMBER THREE: THE LINUX COMMUNITY
"The biggest killer of putting penguin software on the desktop is the Linux community. If you think the Apple fanboys are completely barking, they are role models of sanity to the loudmouthed Open Sauce religious loonies who are out there. Like many fundamentalists they are totally inflexible — waving a GNU as if it were handed down by God to Richard Stallman".
-- Nick Farrell @TechEye
Ouch... ouch... ouch!
Though I was unable to find and cite a concrete source of the above quote, it is hurtful, but true.
The community is still elitist, combative, often outright disingenuous and delusional, overrun by clueless but aggressive trolls. They'll ridicule you and blame you or your hardware for all your Linux problems. It's like their purpose in life is to torment people because it makes them feel superior. You see the same people in all forum threads talking people down, never actually helping anyone. It's all they do, all day long.
Then they go on to Steam and other forums, butt in into unrelated topics, where Windows users are simply trying to solve a problem and screech "Windows is garbage, switch to Linux!". Look at their post history and that's all they post. This is so irritating.
The nonsense they regurgitate about Windows would be funny if it wasn't tragic. They bring up non-issues, things that haven't been true for 10+ years. Most of them have no clue what they're talking about they just, well... regurgitate. Certainly Windows has problems, but they talk about some random nonsense like they never even used Windows. Their obsession with Windows bashing is irrational and irritating.
Then they go on Reddit asking why so many people hate Linux... Really?
You may get several different answers to your problem, eventually, and some may even work, after three pages of irrational arguments and how this is all your fault because you're stupid or a normie.
They even fight tooth and nail among themselves, Arch users being the worst, they look down on people using Mint or Ubuntu like they were idiots.
Torvalds himself said few times that Linux has many problems that prevent if from being a viable desktop alternative for normal people, that went unaddressed for decades, because the community, the devs in particular, is basically too full of itself, but the faithful deny it all.
CONCLUSION
Problem number one is insurmountable at this time. Without it, problem number two could be worked around in various ways and problem number three could just be ignored if problems number one and number two didn't exist. If software and hardware worked as expected, there would be no need for the Linux community.
This is how many average computer users feel about their Linux experience:
"I am amazed that literally, if the past 7 horrible days and nights of trying to get Linux working are any indication, literally every single piece of Linux advice on the internet leads not to the promised solution but to errors that are never explained, and when you google them, the solutions, rather than working, lead to errors which are never explained, so you google them, and try the fix, but instead of working, it leads to errors that are never explained, so you take a sledgehammer, bring it down on your laptop as hard as you possibly can, and get on with your life much happier for never having to try to troubleshoot Linux again."
Henry Lootgraab's Blog 
