A regular Ubuntu update on my XPS 13, an officially supported combination, broke my wifi. Since then it has also somehow broke itself in some other fun way such that there are now package conflicts and it's unable to update itself anymore as a result.
And that's ignoring all the general usability issues like the subpar battery life, the dreadfully terrible state of video playback, the touch screen constantly causing gnome to glitch internal state and get confused, etc...
On my Debian desktop I had a webcam completely take out the USB stack. Like all ports just dead, had to yank the power to reboot. I also had a btrfs array just go read-only for seemingly no reason after restoring from standby, and it wouldn't tell me why. After a reboot all was suddenly fine. Also it took an awfully long time to get that machine working after having been powered off for 3 months. If you go too long without updating, it seems all the package migrations just bitrot and break.
But yeah, year of Linux on the desktop. Any day now.
I saw some of those problems with Ubuntu 20.04 on my recent XPS13. I shifted to 20.10 which resolved almost all of them, and once 22.04 came out there are no more issues. Admittedly, I did a fresh install vs an upgrade.
I run dual monitors on docking station with lots of peripherals.
> I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it.
In this case it's literally the OS offered by Dell for the XPS 13. It's as official an option as you will ever see, so the fact that such a pairing is still a broken disaster is pretty significant.
I could switch to a different distro, and I might. But distro hunting is exhausting. And it itself represents a never ending treadmill of churn. Like right now it seems like Fedora is a good option, and so are things like PopOS or Manjaro. But rewind the clock 5 to 10 years and some of those didn't even exist, or were not nearly as good of choices for "regular consumer usage." Whose to say I'm not just going to be stuck with yet another "oh, that distro used to be good but now it sucks, switch to foobar instead" in another few years? I'm more likely going to just switch it back to Windows if I'm going to get over the "back everything up & reinstall from scratch" hurdle. I at least know with Windows that I won't have to do a reinstall dance on this machine pretty much ever again. Having Linux for the better development options is nice, but with how good VMs are (and with things like WSL), running it bare metal kinda isn't all that necessary.
> Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021.
Keep in mind though that it was branched and package versions frozen ~6 months before that.
I like debian and use it on some things, but for a personal computer I always found it frustrating that the software was already half a year out of date on release day. Software getting released today wont be in Debian stable until 2023.
I have no problems with Debian, but I think their release deltas should be cut in half. Firefox is deprecated on Debian, and that is their officially supported browser.
I know that the whole point is stability, I just think that for home desktop users it's not a great experience.
Fully agree and I had similar experiences with framework. I think the majority of folks posting here are not typical users and find it natural to jump in the terminal, edit some setting, restart a service and tinker without realizing the effort involved and that that normal users don't -- can't -- do this.
My family is happily using only Linux since 10 years, I since 15 years ago. But there are a lot of "but", without my support (I'm a sysadmin) they could not, but half of the issues are not Linux only, so they needed support even if they were using Windows. The real question should be "why even non technical users should use Linux?" You should not give a supercar to drive to a novice driver, it could be dangerous for him and for others. Every OS has its use, maybe I'm snob, but if you're not able to manage Linux rough edges use MacOS or Windows, Linux natural environment was and should be datacenter. I won't trade server features, robustness for having a Linux desktop at all cost.
If you think Linux Desktop is in decent shape, your hardware choices must line up with those of your platform maintainers. Good for you -- but your experience will be very far from universal.
Some Ubuntu LTS highlights:
Ubuntu 14: By default, Dell display backlights toggle on/off 30 times a second
Ubuntu 16: By default, BIOS boots broken due to boot files landing in too high of a sector
Ubuntu 18: By default, Solid State boot drives break because /dev/sda was hardcoded
Ubuntu 20: By default, Bluetooth and fans broken. Never fixed. Sleep broken but fixed.
Ubuntu 22: By default, NVidia graphics get 100% screen saturation after install.
"Then don't use Ubuntu"
Ubuntu isn't my daily driver. It isn't even a majority of my installs. I'm using it as a benchmark for conservative linux choices because smaller distros tend to be worse, not better. I know this because I daily drive a less popular distro, and I also distro hop for fun, and these all tend to be worse, not better. Besides, many hardware and software vendors target Ubuntu, and "works on Ubuntu but nowhere else" is a very common problem. Across the board, the Linus Tech Tips linux experience is the rule, not the exception. Many desktop linux users just have selective community-enforced amnesia.
Look, I am super thankful for the maintainers. I have gotten so much more value from them then they have asked in payment, but Linux is nowhere near Windows in the "just works" department. That is to be expected, given the price, but the rhetoric has gotten out of line with reality. Desktop linux still has a lot of rough edges and new rough edges appear at a rate that is not converging to 0.
I've been using Ubuntu since 8.10 as my only OS. A HP nc8430 until 12.04, then a HP ZBook 15 since 14.04. Both laptops came with Windows (XP and 7.)
I had my share of problems but none as bad as the ones you wrote. Currently there are two problems
1. Poweroff is reboot, so I press the shutdown button when the BIOS starts. It has been like that for ages through more than one LTS but I shutdown very few times per year.
2. The fn brightness control keys don't work so I made two hotkeys to run a X11 brightness control program that steps up or down the backlighting by 5 points, 0 to 100. This is probably on NVidia's driver.
Everything else is fine and that's great considering that probably HP never tested these laptops with Ubuntu.
Two nuisances is still better than the alternatives: the very same hardware with Windows or an Apple machine with OSX (I can't stand the UI.)
Don't you need very specific hardware to get Mac OS to work too? I think it is useful when comparing OS environments to make sure you are comparing on the hardware that is optimal for each OS. And you can get Linux optimal hardware from a lot more sources than Mac OS optimal hardware.
The biggest issue is that on the Mac side, it is really easy to get the OS and the optimal hardware together, and know that it "just works". For Linux, we have several small vendors, and a couple larger ones, that have Linux-advertised hardware, but most of the Linux optimal hardware doesn't advertise itself as Linux (Android phones/tablets, Chrome OS, etc).
Same is true for windows, but due to prevalence of windows and the effort of MS (certified for windows program), most hardware tries to make itself work on windows. It also makes sense given that Windows still has 78.5% share in the market.
So, it is not that linux does not work with a lot of consumer hardware. It's that most consumer hardware cannot be bothered to work with linux and invests itself in working with windows.
There is also a factor in-kernel vs out-of-kernel drivers.
Nope. I can understand how you might prefer that I had been writing about workarounds, but I was not writing about workarounds. I was writing about the incorrect and alienating rhetoric coming from the Linux community.
