Asklemmy

Last time I tried Linux was about 10 years ago. I installed multiple different combinations until I found one I liked (I forget which though). I was attending university at the time (chemistry) and had it dual booting so I could switch back to Windows as needed. I really tried, but everything on the Linux side was just so buggy or complicated.
I was using Open Office or something similar, mainly for spreadsheets, and I just kept needing to switch back to Windows so I could spend my time getting the actual work done, rather than trying to figure out how to make the computer work. It was so long ago that I don't remember the details, but I vaguely remember it repeatedly freezing up on me for relatively simple spreadsheet tasks.. the kind of stuff they teach in beginners or maaaaybe intermediate Excel tutorials with 10-50 rows of data.
Eventually, I gave up on trying to do any of my work in Linux and figured I'd come back to it when I had some free time. When I finally had some free time, I decided to wipe the current Linux install and try something else. I had gone through the installation process so many times before that I thought I remembered the steps. Well, I didn't, and I managed to delete something super critical and couldn't even boot to Windows anymore. After much trial and error, some kind internet stranger offered to help walk me through it.. the only problem was that they were only familiar with Arch (?), so that was the distro we were going to use to get me back up and running. We got it fixed so that my computer dual boots, but I have to supervise the boot process every time since the default boot is Arch, and I'm just not ready to deal with that.
I've casually looked a few times to see if I can figure out how to change the boot order, but I'm too scared I'll end up worse off, so I've just left well enough alone since then.

I have an Android phone and rooting it is always the first thing I do, so it hasn't scared me off tinkering altogether, but I hardly touch a PC outside of work anymore, so there's just no motivation to try again.

FIFA23. 22 was working great on linux but they added a new DRM so the new one doesn't work anymore. Hopefully someone can get the next one to run on Linux so I can ditch windows again.

Gamepass and Minecraft Bedrock mostly. Gamepass is something that I use a lot that will never work with Linux, and my friend group is split between console and PC for Minecraft so Bedrock edition works best for us. I still use SteamOS on my Steam Deck and enjoy it, but switching operating systems on my main computer just to play games is a bit excessive

Hate to say it but, laziness.. bought a new gaming laptop with windows 11. My old laptop was running Mint for a couple of years and I really loved it. Software wise everything I needed just worked.

My main system is Windows, I'm a Windows developer. My older machines are Linux - because Windows runs like a dog on them and no longer supports them.

I never tried Linux, but I consider it every few years. However if I weigh that

• O&O Shutup10 and group policies can remove all the telemetry and intrusiveness from Windows +
• most of my work involves Adobe products +
• my main hobby is gaming, with the vast majority of my games not having a Linux port

there are simply too many factors that would make Linux to be more hassle, have less performance or downright impossible to serve as a substitute for Windows, while for me personally not really offering any practical benefits over Windows.

Linux desktops are horrible. I like linux servers a lot, I have several running in my homelab.

Basically photoshop and games. I was dual booting and when I switched computer it wasn't worth reinstalling because I spent most of my time in windows. This was a long time ago.

Now that windows is moving into subscription basis I keep thinking I should try getting into linux again but I don't have the time to fiddle around making stuff work.

I use autodesk products and other electrical engineering industrial products that require using windows. I'm mostly happy with being able to live in the mingw environment provided by git bash. Gives me most of what I need for a POSIX environment.

To switch to Linux full time I'd need to change jobs, lol.

I think o went back because I wanted to play LoL? And I kind of became complacent?

Building WiFi kernel drivers myself where on Windows its a double click, finding a desktop environment that lets you add a 2nd taskbar in the GUI without losing certain important items like the start menu, system clock, or system tray (I always lost something), finding replacements for certain niche Windows programs is frustrating (VoiceMeeter -> PipeWire), or completely absent, as my Oculus Rift and the Adobe Suite (which I need for my job) was unusable, and my Razer, Logitech, TourBox, Xence, and Elsra devices aren't programmable, missing or bad support for basic features like multiple monitors and HDR, having to manually set AppImages to run as an application and not open like a file (I know it's a file), but in the end, needing 2 GPU's to virtualize a Windows machine officially ended my Linux dreams for the near future.

games just don't run as smooth and I can't use gsync with how xorg works, also everything on windows just seems to work unlike Linux. although I've been running a Linux server for almost a year for myself and I'm now quite comfortable with the terminal

A few apps like Photoshop and Fusion360 keep my running Windows. The graphics card situation is also a giant pain in the ass, my laptop has a Radeon and a RTX 3080 and I can't get any kind of prime offloading to work. I'd really like to use the radeon unless i'm running something intensive that needs 3d acceleration, but i think I'd likely have to reboot to switch between them.

That leaves me running the RTX chip the whole time so the laptop draws about 40W at idle, when running windows it's more like 10W because the nvidia chip is completely off.

My OS kept stalling/crashing on boot-up a few months into using it and I could not figure out why or how to fix it. Couldn't log in or input any commands into the terminal to try out anything so I just gave up.

Luckily my important data was backed up and I had Windows on another drive. I thought the drive might have failed, but it hasn't had any issues since on Windows. I'd love to return to Linux in the future but I think that experience wil haunt me for a while.

Laser cutter control software is windows only, just haven't had the time/energy to rip out the entire control system and rework it to be open source.

Arch Linux based distros (arco, Manjaro, endeavor) have my favorite package manager in the world (not pacman) but yay. I've tried every package manager and for me nothing comes close to yay. But the sad part is arch updates have completely destroyed every arch based distro I've ever had. The last one (endeavor os) literally made me hate Linux for awhile, because I put a great deal of work and love into setting up a desktop environment, configuring the hell out of my terminal and my dev environment and one update just destroyed my whole desktop. It takes me more than 2 days to completely get my Linux desktop configured to where I like it, and endeavoros just breaking my desktop environment really demoralized me from trying to set up another Linux box again for a long time, so I just went back to my super stable MacBook that wasn't as fun or ergonomic but at the end of the day it's never given me serious issues. Of course I'm back to using Linux, this time with stable old Ubuntu.

There is no AMD Adrenaline software so I can't properly use my AMD card

My main issue was trying to get two monitors to work. I followed some guides on how to update the drivers and each time it broke to the point that it would only be a black screen. Not even a terminal to help troubleshoot.

I have a 3080 12GB and can't use it on Linux. After about a week of trying I gave up.

I'm actively trying to switch to Linux, so it's not from a lack of effort.

The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I'm a photographer, and I'm scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There's no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.

As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I've got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn't save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.

On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.

My Xubuntu server won't let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.

Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.

Mint's settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it's back to the default size again!

The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!

Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I'm doing. They're the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?

I left windows because of the unauthorized data stealing and forced updates. linux has been a god sent and haven't look back.

Games (Blizzard and Riot) I have a linux laptop that I occasionally use. It is far better than it was years before, yet there are still occasions when it just does not work, or it refuses to update.

I could never get my bluetooth microphone to work under Linux, and I was having to input my password many times every day just to accomplish simple tasks. Couldn't even make the password into a PIN, that wasn't allowed for some reason.

LSB dependent printer driver (Epson M100)- (Debian has a love hate reatioship with LSB - Compat package), Display Link - official drivers available only for ubuntu LTS, and Hikvision CCTV cameras IVMS is not officially supported by linux. Basically corporates making bad decisions.