I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Linux. It CAN be great at doing very dedicated tasks, but it can also be cryptic and difficult to use. I’ve even seen some Linux content creators on YouTube admit the truth: Linux SERVER is great and stable, but Linux DESKTOP is a flaming dumpster fire. Like most cults, Linux fanboys will refuse to admit the shortcomings of the OS, but it definitely has them. So here’s my rant, on a website no one will probably ever read, on an unpopular opinion about the Tech-Hipster’s Official OS.
My history with Linux started in 2005, when I was still in a trade school learning electronics and PC repair. The course mostly covered Windows since in practicality it would be in 99% of the desktop PCs we would ever work on, but we touched briefly on Linux to demonstrate how Windows wasn’t the only way of doing things (though we never touched Apple). It didn’t go in depth on Linux, but we were given a copy of RedHat that the school had licensed to install on a PC and play around with. I don’t think we even had time to do anything in it once it was installed, if the installer ever completed at all.
Fast forward a few years to around 2011. I had been out of school for a few years, and had built up a shameful hoard of old PC hardware. As an experiment I installed Ubuntu on one of these old systems to see if I can make it into something useful, and was fascinated by the different desktop interface. During my years in school I had dabbled with web design, and was intrigued by a desktop that felt surprisingly like a Joomla CMS backend. I think this was Gnome2, and I thought it was a pretty decent experience on par with using Windows at the time (though I wasn’t willing to make a full switch due to software compatibility).
Over the years I started delving into Raspberry Pi projects, and that’s when I really started to get a feel for Linux. Most of what I did involved copying and pasting commands from online tutorials; I had no idea what they actually did, but I could follow a tutorial like a cooking recipe. Over time I mentally reverse-engineered what a lot of these common commands were doing though. My last Pi project was a Plex server; when it struggled to serve more than one stream of 1080p content at a time, I upgraded to my first x86 server on a Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M73, and everything else I’ve done has grown from that.
The first iteration of my server ran Linux Mint, as I had seen many online recommend it as a beginner distro due to it’s similarity to Windows. I tested Ubuntu on a LiveCD, hated Gnome3’s desktop environment, so Linux Mint had me sold. The green color scheme was pleasing, and overall I liked the user experience pretty well. Even though the primary purpose of the system was to serve Plex media and function as a NAS, I wanted to install a desktop anyway just to play with it.
As I ran into issues I had to fix, I started to notice a pattern. Most of the problems I Googled for answers were leading me more to Ubuntu subreddits and forums than they were specific to Mint. Solutions I found on the Linux Mint forums were often old and outdated. This is when I began to learn the lineage of the distros; there are about 3 prime distros (RedHat/CentOS, Arch, Debian), and a handful of mainstream distros based on them. Everything else is forked off of the mainstream distros (like Ubuntu, Manjaro, OpenSUSE etc.) or the prime distros by smaller teams. Linux Mint is actually “third generation”; it was based on an older version of Ubuntu under a different desktop environment, which is in turn based on Debian. I started actively looking for answers in Ubuntu and Debian forums and subs instead, as they seemed to have a much larger userbase with more up-to-date answers. While building out my webserver and setting up security cameras, I kept running into fixes that worked on the latest Ubuntu but not Mint. Because of the larger support community rather than the Mint user experience itself, I decided I’d be better off just installing Ubuntu.
This is where things started getting difficult and controversial. I upgraded my hardware to an actual enterprise Dell server and installed Ubuntu for a fresh build with easier support. While I was able to find more specific answers to all of my problems, I ended up with a TON more questions to ask. I also started running into an interesting trend where I saw Ubuntu itself had been getting a ton of hate from the larger Linux community. At first I could understand it a little; Ubuntu had changed a lot since I had first used Gnome2, and any criticism I saw of Gnome3 was being met with “well you’re just looking at GUI design in an outdated way”. I thought maybe that’s where the hate was coming from, but actually it was just a ton of Linux users mad about snap packages because of their license.
I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was until I learned that, like most things in life in the past 10 years, the computer OS world was also being destroyed by politics and idealism. Personally I like FOSS and appreciate it’s advantages, but sometimes I just want to get a job done and don’t care how the sausage is made. Rabid Linux fanboys can’t just USE software though, they have to be able to apply their personal code of ethics to how the software was packaged and licensed or they’ll screech endlessly about it. I’m pretty sure these same people would spit in the face of anyone who admitted to working for Nvidia, but I digress.
Eventually I picked up a second server to play with, and decided to run Kubuntu on it to see what it was like. My first impression was that KDE was finally the beautiful, Windows-killing, more advanced desktop experience promised by Linux fans everywhere….until it broke. And kept breaking. I couldn’t get KDE to boot up the same way twice, and the widgets I found most fascinating were usually the cause of system-wide crashes. Eventually to stop the crashes, I managed to break a bunch of KDE stuff while removing it and got a mostly stable Gnome desktop running on it instead. A couple months ago that server managed to finally kill itself with a kernel update that borked GRUB. When I spent two days struggling to get it back up, I eventually moved all the services I had on that server to my primary server and retired it. With my two biggest projects being killed in the past few months anyway, luckily losing the extra server hasn’t done much but save on my power bill anyway.
This brings us to the last couple of nightmarish weeks. Microsoft has always been shady about taking control away from the user where it comes to Windows connecting to their servers and forcing updates, but I think they’ve now peaked at the worst user experience since Metro. Windows 11 has been a mess since launch, and Microsoft is doing their best to ignore all user feedback on it and continue pushing changes everyone hates. The taskbar removed all customization features and is now a hulking mass of ugly they force down our throats, and control panel settings are all over the place under the hood. Some Windows 10 settings screens still exist in 11 but don’t have an intuitive way to access them; you have to open them from the Run dialog since Microsoft wants to hide the fact they’re still using parts of 10. I’ve been using ExplorerPatcher to make 11 behave more like 10 to eliminate all the stuff I hate, but Microsoft has been pushing updates that break it every couple of weeks. The EP devs have a GitHub to report issues and request features, but they’re hostile to most users who post there. I decided it was time to play with alternatives.
Long story short, I’ve spent the last few weeks fighting to get a Linux desktop working on my main PC as a dual-boot option. It took 5 reinstalls and 2 distros to find something that works (mostly). No Linux desktop is able to properly support different monitor sizes and resolutions. I had hoped that better hardware would handle KDE performance better, but it’s just as broken, unstable, and prone to crashing as it was the first time I tried Kubuntu on older hardware. I describe KDE as like a politician’s promise: pretty on the outside, but hollow and fake on the inside. No distro was able to correctly detect my HDMI connections to output correct refresh rates, even though everything worked as it should in Windows. I eventually discovered I could halfway get functional display scaling working with my monitor setup using Cinnamon, but a lot of the fixes I tried with X11 would fail because Cinnamon has an internal override watchdog daemon that overrides X11 custom settings. Xrandr has some possible solutions, but they don’t work on Nvidia GPUs. There’s plenty to criticize with X11 being old and bloated, but Wayland was the only thing that would absolutely crash the entire system to a black screen at random.
Of all the different configurations I tried, I found a decent experience finally with Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 23.04. I started at 22.04 for the long-term support, but found after upgrading that 23.04 handles my monitor setup a LOT better with more stable display settings. Scaling still does this idiotic thing where it changes the representation of the monitor’s physical size in the layout settings, but I can at least work around that by getting in the habit of moving between monitors at a specific spot on screen. Sound never worked after boot until I physically unplugged and replugged my HDMI cable, until I found a stupid fix for Pulseaudio by enabling an option from a missing add-on settings screen that outputs audio to all ports simultaneously. A few overpriced replacement HDMI components later and I’m able to run 4k60, though I have mixed feelings about being locked into RGB mode instead of 444 mode. Sometimes it’s better, but sometimes I wonder how bad my color settings really are since I suck at calibrating them. I’ve discovered I’m actually liking the experience more as I get things fixed, except for a persistent issue where video playback stutters after waking my monitors from sleep.
After getting everything set up, I learned more about Microsoft that has me really wishing Linux offered what I need to use it full time comfortably. Apparently Microsoft has access to open and read all of your Office documents whenever they like, and if they politically disagree with anything you wrote or created, they can terminate your software license. They’ve been actively taking actions like this on Xbox accounts based on actions you take OUTSIDE of their services and unrelated to them. While I don’t use Office (I use Google, which is absolutely no better, but at least it’s free), I’m strongly opposed to big corporations having the right to invade privacy like that. If the same thing isn’t baked into Windows 11, current trends point toward it being in the near future that if you have the “wrong” opinions Microsoft may disable your Windows license whenever they feel like it. At least Linux people understand this, and since anyone is able to make their own distro whenever they like, tech-savvy coders keep Linux’s nose clean when it comes to respecting privacy.
What kills me the most about the whole situation is that there IS no good option when it comes to operating systems anymore. Apple has a walled garden that fails to innovate; they have bulletproof hardware that runs at specs PC users had 10 years ago, and everyone is too busy sniffing their own farts to consider holding the company accountable for substandard performance. Microsoft I’ve already covered, but I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT recommend Linux desktops to the casual PC user as a viable alternative. It’s loaded with bugs, simple tasks require a bunch of cryptic console commands instead of a simple GUI option, and it’s loaded with opinionated politics that often take precedence over useful functionality. Not only is it difficult to get the software working in the first place, but the plethora of file privileges and privileged execution tasks means your PC will be fighting you every step of the way that you try to use it. As shitty as Microsoft is, and as shitty as Windows 11 may be, there’s no competing with it’s ease of use when you just want to get the job done rather than tweak a bunch of config files in a terminal. There’s a reason it stays on top, even if the company is evil.
The most tragic part of it all is that I’ve found the Linux community essentially gave up on trying to make things better. There’s so much potential, but the norm seems to be to get to 80-90% of that potential before giving up and making excuses for continued problems. The very people who love it the most tend to be the worst part of everything Linux. When I first tried Linux around 10 years ago the experience was fairly on par with other offerings. Now that hardware has advanced, Linux fanboys will justify never changing or improving the desktop experience for the average user by saying stuff like “Linux isn’t supposed to be user friendly, it defeats the purpose” or “akchually desktop GUIs are going to be obsolete in a few years anyway, then everything will be a text terminal”. I’ve even seen one guy, who I assume probably abuses puppies in his free time, argue that having a GUI is bad for your health and constantly typing everything with ALL of your fingers DECREASES your chance of carpal tunnel. Any justification at all must be given to explain why Linux must always stay a difficult experience to use, logic be damned. Essentially the permeating attitude I’ve seen is “if we don’t keep things cryptic, how can we act like an elitist, gatekeeping cult who tells ourselves we’re smarter because our software is hard to use?” I can accept that Linux isn’t an open COMPETITOR to Windows since it’s not a single business trying to compete for profits, but at least if you’re going to develop something, be open to actually improving it.
A lot of huge Linux fanboys will read this and say “oh well I’ve never seen that attitude in the community”. If it’s a vocal minority, they sure have invaded every single social platform like Reddit or YouTube. I don’t think I’ve ever posted a question in a major Linux discussion platform that wasn’t met with arguments for why I shouldn’t be using Linux that way instead of offering an actual solution. That’s so weird to me; arguing that you shouldn’t do a computing task in an operating system at all because it’s not something they want to do on their own system is like if they hated grapes, so they argue that you shouldn’t live in a house because houses aren’t meant to harbor people who eat grapes.
I’m going to keep trucking with Ubuntu Cinnamon for a while, at least until I want to play most of my Steam library, or I just can’t stand the bugs anymore. Fortunately I have a dual boot setup so I can use either one as needed. I guess I just wish we would go back to when technology improved with time, instead of everything getting worse every day in the name of corporate greed or political grandstanding.