2025-12-30
I have been using Linux as my main operating system since about 2002, and with the recent Windows 10 updates situation I am seeing lots of people talking online on how they now want to switch to Linux.
Being a longtime user, I am inclined to write down my perspective on that. It is not the perspective of most people.
In short: I believe most people are better of buying a new computer or a Mac.
Remark: This text went to several iterations, and it turns out that I am not very good at writing longer texts (or writing at all, that is). So please excuse the bad writing.
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome anyone who wants to get into Linux and I am happy to help with any problems. However, there are two main things which are - as I believe - reasons for my previous statement:
Let me explain.
The first thing is the lies about compatibility. That has occurred since forever, and I will explain what I mean by examples.
Over the last 20 years, I have installed and uninstalled countless distributions, and more often than not the installer claimed “LibreOffice is 100% compatible with your Word documents!”.
Everyone who has ever opened an MS Office file in LibreOffice knows that this is just not true.
Please understand that my goal here is not to disrespect the work of the Document Foundation that goes into creating LibreOffice. I think it is an amazing product with lots of capabilities - at my company, we use it to create all our offer letters, invoices, etc. that go out to our customers - and you can easily use it for your typesetting needs (or spreadsheeting, if that is a word). But it is not 100% MS Office compatible, and Microsoft works hard to keep it this way.
My point is that telling someone to install LibreOffice and to expect that he can continue working as usual will just lead to disappointment.
Another thing is support for Windows software. While Wine has come a very long way (I am a user of Wine since about 2005 and have contributed time and money several times), and gaming has evolved quite a bit thanks to Valve, it still will causes lots of headaches for any gamer who wants to move from Windows 10 to Linux. For instance, every once in a while Blizzards battle.net client gets an update and refuses to work altogether, or requires the user to apply the usual workarounds just to update World of Warcraft again. Several games on Steam requires the user to go to protondb to check which Proton version to use, and for a lot of other games the best approach is installing them via lutris (an amazing application, by the way).
Personally, I don’t mind these things, as I am used to them. I remember applying my own custom patches to Wine’s mouse cursor handler so that I could play Oblivion. But for a Windows user, that is a far cry from downloading an .exe and just running it. And this brings me to my second point.
I believe that only people who enjoy using a computer will enjoy tinkering with Linux. The reasons for this are a lot, and I will try to explain what I mean by stepping back a bit.
Think about cars. There are people who like to read about new cars, try new cars, modify their own car to various extents, and so on. At one point I even had a colleague who would built his own car completely from scratch, with parts he got at the junk yard. Nothing in the car matched, it was extremely loud, but it was his own. For me, however, a car just needs to drive from A to B without me having to think about maintenance or anything else. This is why I never owned a car, I always rent one. I absolutely do not care what kind of car I drive or what color it is. It just has to get me and my stuff from A to B. Let someone else figure out the rest.
Computers, however, are to me like cars to my colleague. I built my own and enjoy compiling my OS from scratch.
But for most people, a computer is a machine that automates annoying tasks so that they do not have to do these, e.g. adding numbers or creating a grocery shopping list for the next week automatically based on their preferences and their diet plan. Some people just use computers because they have to, and would never voluntarily.
The thing is: There are lots of interesting things that you can do on a computer that you might not even aware of. If you enjoy finding this out on your own, Linux might be for you.
The difference between Linux and Windows is that the Linux environment
offers lots and lots of opportunities to find out on what you can
actually do. This is a lot due to its transparency, e.g. /usr/share/doc,
man pages, the ability to look at the source, self-documenting
programs like Emacs, among other things. For the user who is intrigued by this,
and who enjoys trying things out, reading about possibilities, and
wondering what could be possible, this is a great environment. He may
discover that he can do things with his computer that he never deemed
possible, automating various things and allowing himself to actually
spent less time in front of the screen while accomplishing more.
For others, this is completely irrelevant. My partner is like that; her upmost priority is to spend as little time as possible using her computer, even if that means that it will take her longer to learn how to automate task X, because learning about it would mean spending more computer time initially.
If you just want to play your games, or just wtant to do your taxes, or just want to do some CAD work, and you don’t care how any of that stuff works under the hood, and you are not inclined on finding out how to improve things, and if you don’t believe any of this could actually be fun, Linux is not for you. Because it does not “just work”, even though it is sometimes advertised like that. Which brings me to my next point.
If you talk to a die-hard Windows user, they will explain to you how Windows is “professional” and “just works”. If you observe them using their computer (without saying anything) you will notice they actually run into problems all the time. The file they just downloaded is not where they think they saved it, the printer messes something up, Windows loses the connection to the internet and requires unplugging the cable and plugging it back in, they lose the mouse cursor, the keyboard suddenly switches layouts (because the accidentally pressed M-Shift and don’t know about this hotkey), files are opened in the “wrong” application, etc. etc. etc.
However, they are used to this. For each of these problems, they know exactly what to do and how to reach their current goal. Most of the time they don’t even realize these issues, because they are so used to them. It’s like a habit.
Now place a Linux computer in front of them, install a so-called “user-friendly” desktop environment. They will be at a loss.
This gets worse the more they are used to Windows (“power users”),
because they try to solve their problems the Windows way. Professionally,
I have had the pleasure of using all of Microsofts operating systems in
the past 20 years, and what struck me is that while for some problems
there are clear solutions, a lot of time there is wrong advice,
half-baked advice or advice that has nothing to do with the solution
whatsoever (just run sfc /scannow). This proudly includes
the official Microsoft support forums and MSDN, and I believe the reason
is that Windows is highly “opaque” (not transparent in its inner workings).
Most of the people don’t actually know what some Registry Key does,
they read claims about it on some website. There is no official documentation for
it either, so the usually way is to try 5 to 15 things until your problem
is solved, and in the end you don’t really know what solved it.
Try this under Linux and you are on your way to disaster (a non-functioning system). This is when the Windows user starts copying random commands in his terminal, not understanding what he is doing and calling this “cryptic”. He might not wreck his system to the point where he can’t login, but he might for example break gsd-xsettings, which causes his Browser to no longer respect his dark theme. Or he might cripple the bluetooth functionality of his laptop, not realizing right now, but only two weeks later, when the cycle repeats.
The proper way would be to read the documentation first - and I don’t mean watching some random YouTube video of some random guy who has no clue what he is talking about, or outdated reddit comments with the highest score, but the manual that came with the distribution. Is that what you want to do in there? Good, do it as described.
Is it not? Either, don’t do it, or ask in the help channels on how to do it in the best way for the distribution you picked. But that brings me to my next point.
The Linux community has a reputation of being very noob-unfriendly, and while this has improved over the last years, it is still very much a problem. I am subscribed to a mailing list for Debian questions, and every once in a while someone dares to ask a question, only to yield patronizing comments from users who - most of the time - don’t know the answer to the original question in the first place. More often than not they claim that XYZ is not possible, when it very much is.
Luckily, not every place is like that. I found IRC channels to be much more friendly than the typical forum. But you won’t find your solution in an IRC channel if you put your problem into google.
So again, the best way is to read the documentation, and this brings me back to my first point. If you switch to Linux, you should not expect to do everything you could do under Windows on Linux, and not in the same way. If you are a computer enthusiast, you may find that you can actually do a lot more in less time. For example, you might ditch multiplayer online games that are protected by DRM that does not support Linux for something else, e.g. using the plethora of free software to manage your personal research project. But this requires that you find this out yourself, and this very much requires that you find joy in just using your computer.
If that is not the case, then my recommendation is to just buy a new Windows computer, or maybe a Mac. At least those are supported a bit longer (I believe).