It is a LOT of work indeed! In fact I even commented on that hours ago in https://lemmy.ml/post/36231170/21124115

… but as you mention the alternative is ALSO a lot of work PLUS frustrations.

So between learned helplessness and tiring empowerment the choice remains obvious.

FWIW whenever it feels like it’s “too much” I reminder myself how I browse through obscure man pages decades ago… to still find them useful today! It’s crazy that so long after learning about tools like more or grep is useful on :

• a desktop
• a console (SteamDeck)
• a mobile phone (which basically didn’t exist back then)
• a VR headset (yes, via termux)
• the “cloud” (as in fine it’s just a server)

Your complaining about linux in the title and windows in the post

I think windows users would still use windows even if windows broke into their house and raped their grandma. I can already hear their justifications.

The nice thing is that Linux is always improving and Windows is always in retrograde. The more users Linux has, the faster it will improve. If the current state of Linux is acceptable enough for you as a user, then it should be possible to get your foot in the door and ride the wave upwards. If not, wait for the wave to reach your comfort level. People always say <CURRENT_YEAR> is the year of the Linux desktop but IMO the real year of the Linux desktop was like 4 or 5 years ago now, and hopefully that captured momentum will keep going until critical mass is achieved (optimistically, I think we’re basically already there).

It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.

Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son’s laptop, because that’s what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs… and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.

It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.

It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.

I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

Linux IS a lot of work to keep up with. But it’s also way better to use after that work is done. And won’t be enshittified against your will with every update, unlike Windows.

The bloatware alone pushed me off. I am actually making a new build just to not deal with Nvidia anymore also.

Do an atomic distro like bazzite, all the nerds are basically open sourcing IT with it by preconfiguring everything for you for every update.

I use an easy out of the box linux so its not much work even before comparing to windows. This is why my advice for people talking about dual booting to install linux on their old laptop if they still have it as I find linux on your last machine is faster than windows on your current. It also makes it easier to always have linux available for people used to windows who need to use the linux enough to realize how nice it is nowadays.

Today on my win11 work system, the windows menu stopped producing output when I typed into it and webpages stopped loading. Had to perform a full system restart to get it to work again.

Sure is. I have to change my display driver from one version to another, to be able to play different games. Otherwise, some games freeze my system within few seconds of launching the game (also happens during local video full-screen playback). The linux guys will tell me, “oh, it’s just because your distro install was corrupt”, or “definitely a hardware issue”, “PSU failing / GPU failing”, etc. but no, that’s just how linux works. there will always be some system configurations that are bound to have these problems. this is similar to linux users “choosing” not to play the games that don’t work on linux distributions.

I never understood why windows updates take so long.

I can format and reinstall a linux distro in 10 minutes. I can update everything after that reinstall in 5 minutes.

On the same machine a windows update takes almost an hour. A format and reinstall can take several hours.

What is windows doing that takes so much longer?

I got a new laptop with Windows 11 at work yesterday. This is the first time I’ve used 11. I must say, it’s not really that bad. Once you cut out all the enshittification, which our IT department does, it’s pretty decent. I would never dream of putting it in any of my own machines, of course.

I was raised in the xp/windows 7 era. I switched to Arch Linux this year and have never been more satisfied with my computer. If i get stuck, the wiki and other nerds are happy to come to the rescue.