My experience too: "Linux friction is unpredictable. The update tool freezing for no reason. System-wide slowdown I can't diagnose. Notifications telling me too many programs are listening for file changes and asking me to decide whether to increase the limit (a decision I don't understand why I'm being asked to make)."
I'm not a windows user anymore, haven't been for a decade or so, but it wasn't until a couple months that I finished the switch when I moved from windows to bazzite in my gaming rig.
Which is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
It is largely what one is used to but for me windows was always this unknowable black box, sure, you could get good at it but there was always so much, no source, many interlinked subsystems. when things work it is not so bad. when they don't... Linux was a lot better, especially if you use a more minimal distro, But even it is this huge confusing mess. What really clicked for me was when I tried openbsd, it was the first time I felt like I had a system I really understood. I started with a router, now I am one of those wierdos who use it on the desktop. I would not actually recommend it to anyone, like I said it is largely what you are used to. but for me linux always felt more knowable than windows.
You can just use Windows and run your required Linux distro inside WSL2. That's exactly my setup—I'm a heavy user of both, as I need both systems daily.
Yeah same but I'm out of options. I don't like Linux on the desktop but I like Windows' privacy stance and use-hostile behaviour less. My Mac isn't much better. What I really hate is being forced into this corner.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
What a quite absurd conclusion. If you want to use your camera then just use it and stop looking for excuses. I find people who moan about the OS UI are just nitpicking. Nothing is perfect and it's there to provide utility for the task at hand. Pick one and get on with life.
Contrary anecdote: I've installed and used Linux, mainly Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) on a dozen or so computers in the last ten years, including several older MacBooks, a Surface Go for my son and an HP I special ordered without Windows. I come from a Mac background and use the terminal, but I've never need to do so to get them to work. Sure I've tweaked them, but only cosmetic things like locales and default fonts. For install and use I haven't done anything special. Old MacBooks need wi-fi drivers, which usually Ubuntu will find. Besides that everything has honestly just worked for me.
The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me. For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence. This was with the install on a fast SSD. I tried a whole bunch of things and never figured out what the issue was. Then, one day, it just....went away.
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
Seriously! On my windows desktop, I have to let the computer sit a minute after booting before i touch the keyboard otherwise it completely wigs out and becomes partially unresponsive due to some weird issue with the AMD chipset drivers. I can see my mouse move, i can move windows around, but nothing responds to clicks and i can't open anything.
Even if Windows didn't have those weird things, there are a bunch of intended behavior things that make Windows a more frustrating experience than the occasional weird things a Linux system may do.
I'm glad it wasn't just me... the nice thing about those mysterious issues on Linux is usually you can actually fix the issue. With Windows I needed a hacky solution just to move the stupid taskbar, or wait for Microsoft to fix it.
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
>The idea that Windows doesn't have it's own weird, mysterious, issues is hilarious to me.
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
Sure - if one has some weird hardware? or need to use some specialist windows only software/workflow.
> they are just fucking annoying
> are either solvable without a comp sci degree,
with that argument - even ChromeOS is great. Just works. Especially for all the school kids without compsci degree or even Amazon staff (that use a modified form of chrome OS).
> Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking.
This is a great point. Years ago, when Microsoft Windows was much less stable, I noticed that Windows felt like you constantly had some small nagging issues, but you could still boot and workaround it.
I switched to Linux again because on this PC Windows suddenly just doesn't run stable anymore. Even a complete reinstall didn't fix it, I assume it is some driver issue or something like that.
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
>But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
This mostly means nothing because the hardware drivers between the 2 OSs are totally different.
For example you could have bad memory and Linux isn't sticking anything important there, whereas Windows is. Same with things like video drivers and storage drivers.
As someone that's salvaged a lot of old machines, sometimes some particular hardware is bad in a particular OS and replacing it with a non broken card of the same kind fixes the issue.
> For months my windows 10 install would take nearly 5 minutes to start up after a full shutdown sequence.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
Yeah, like key bindings in IntelliJ that might make sense on Windows or Macintosh, but conflict with Linux defaults. I switched to Linux couple of decades ago, but this second class treatment of Linux desktop is one of the reasons I'm still doing most of my work in the terminal.
Haven’t used Windows in a while, but I remember hating the seemingly completely random “restarting in 5 minutes for a system update.” Usually at the least-opportune time
Hell, MS's own "official" documentation for long-standing issues in Windows is to "disable this random key in the registry, we don't know what it is, but it 'works'"
Or "Disable IPv6".
It's so nonsensical when it comes to Windows World that people put up with that shit
Something I noticed with long term windows user is that like victims of stockholm syndrome they are very often encountering weird unsolvable issues with windows but when you ask them they will tell you that everything is working well for them. They don't see any issue.
Like mouse or printer will not work when you are at home but will at work. So you live with it.
The funniest is you see the user use the computer and at regular occurence there are weird error popup showing up but the user is trained to click ok mechanically without even reading.
The worse is if like the author you use ms365 or outlook. You are in a world of pain and things suddenly breaking or with lot of unexplainable frustrations.
For example when you used outlook with an account/user and add a second one. And then delete the first one. And somehow there would be an email account associated with your whole computer that outlook is using in shadow. And like you would receive emails but sending will not work. And the only working solution in the end is to nuke everything and start again.
I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month.
So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still shows whatever it was showing when it froze, no USB mouse or keyboard does anything, cannot be RDP'd to cannot be pinged... hold-down-power-button only answer.
(I have swapped all the cabels, just to be sure.)
The only differences: moved it 20 meters physically, connected it to a slightly newer TV. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
I've had similar issues with Linux. Usually it's either put up with things breaking in mainline but use latest hardware or sit on LTS on older hardware with better stability.
Windows Performance Analyser and Windows Performance Recorder are pretty easy to use to troubleshoot boot performance and have a nice, simple GUI. For fairness, there's also systemd analyze on Linux
I haven't used Windows in ~5 years but at least with XP to 10 it used to be fairly well documented and not terribly hard to troubleshoot assuming you're willing to do some learning and leg work.
I'd say macOS is the worst in that department--things randomly break just like Windows and Linux but it's largely a blackbox.
I'll keep knocking on wood, but as a Thinkpad user who has used fedora as a daily driver since Fedora 19, I've rarely had any issues with Linux. Battery lasts way longer than the Thinkpad I use for work (windows machine), and mine is older. I don't game though, so there's nothing that I've wanted on windows.
I have some issues with docking and audio with Arch. Maybe I am asking too much to have a docking station work perhaps. I still don't feel the need to go back to Windows however.
Linux friction is “unpredictable” but windows friction isn’t, because you have a lot of windows experience and not much in Linux. I don’t think you’d feel the same after a few months of Linux.
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
I've never experienced what the writer has, and it would be interesting to know more about their system setup to diagnose the alleged network slowness. Package manager is a network app, so it sounds to me like there is something strange going on system-wide. Perhaps the writer has a new-enough network card from a vendor that doesn't have driver support?
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
I empathize with the frustrations with Linux, and I certainly used to have them. But about 5 years ago I just... stopped having any issues at all. I switched to Debian around then, which may or may not fully explain the improvement. Point is, I've barely thought about or actively maintained or troubleshooted my operating system for several years now.
It's not really applicable nowadays as you can just ask any agent to solve most linux issues for you, it's literally 1 prompt away and you can snapshot your FS to be safe prior and lock it down to avoid agent mistake.
This was my experience with linux the first times I used it years ago when I lived in a different state, but I tried it last year and it's night and day.
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
I'm learning that while Windows has a bad rap in some tech circles, its surprisingly still pretty well regarded. This past school year my daughter and niece both moved from Windows to Macs. A couple of weekends ago I asked them both how they liked it -- they seemed to transition well to the Mac. They both said the same thing -- Windows was better at basically everything except the Message app and iPhone mirroring, but those two things made the Mac totally worth it since, as they put it, phone beats laptop.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
The distro-hopping and vanilla installs are the problem imo -- with Linux it is possible to strip your system down to the basic functionality so that you can actually understand everything what's going on and not be surprised. What is so refreshing is to realize that you don't need to pull in some baroque package you don't understand because the part of it you want is just 3 lines of bash and one line in a config file or whatever. But to get there you have to learn how to use the tools.
Two thoughts (I was in the same situation, constantly trying desktop Linux then pinging back to Windows after hitting issues).
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
Genuine question, how is everyone else dealing with giving agents elevated permissions? Obviously the answer is "don't", but some things are pretty harmless, like journalctl and dmesg, and are pretty useful for debugging the system.
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with
I can second your comment about Fedora. One underrated point: Their drivers are always the best amoung all free distros. I'm not sure if there team is the most aggressive to upstream new drivers, or manufs target Fedora first. And I write this post as a regular Debian user. However, if I have a piece of hardware that has terrible drivers on Debian, almost always it will work fine on Fedora. (Grumble!)
This brings back all this nostalgia. I used to be all linux everywhere I could. The CD linux loaders on random machines work would make me use with work. Linux distros you'd get in a book from Borders. :) Loved it all. But then I had to edit video and images in a 24 hour film festival. And the pain. It just couldn't work constitently. Had to find someone with a mac to get it done. I know these days are so different with better image and video editors and many years of improvements. But still kind of shy from adopting linux again as a daily driver. Too stuck on Apple and OSX now
I really want to use linux but for me its the software. Games I play use anticheat that doesn't work. Software I use for 3d printing doesn't work without hours of workarounds. VR is poorly supported if at all. Usually every year I'll try linux, use it for a month or so, then be forced back to windows after running into a hard block, with the dozen ads forced down my throat welcoming me back. Hopefully one day I can commit to it.
this resonates with my experience. once every 3 years I try linux as primary OS for my home PC, I do small stuff with C/python, browse web and play factorio. I use linux in VM on my job daily, so I am not a beginner, but gosh, linux sucks. Everything breaks constantly even when doing NOTHING. Nothing ever works installing first try, you always end up googling stupid error message and stumble upon 250 other idiots that try to solve same issue. after trying 5 solutions, one (or combo) will hopefully work.
Then, you can hang-up entire system by a stupid python script or your own buggy program and I miss unkillable always working task manager that can recover almost every hanger (and just stfu about reisub) without needing to restart the whole system and killing my FKIN FLOW! ugh. I just use WSL2 for rare cases where I need my unix build tools and forever abandoned the idea of switching to linux. Life is too short wasting it on googling some nonsense shit that just have to fucking work.
113 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadWhich is why this statement is surprising. Not because I disagree with it, Linux friction is indeed unpredictable even for those of us that customized our own installation ad infinitum and know intimately the architecture of the system.
It's because friction in windows is even more unpredictable, at least with the limited interaction I had with it recently. Peripherals will disconnect randomly and removing them in order to reconnect fails. You still have to use decades old interface like regedit end device manager often to fix those issues. Random update reboots, updates that fail without useful logs, only generic error codes. And the whole culture of downloading and installing execs is the worst if all. There is the windows store, which is terrible, and chocolatey which is nice, and they aren't a full replacement for going online and downloading random binary blobs, which is a huge source of unpredictability, because suddenly every software needs to implement their own private supply chain to deliver their updates.
So all in all Linux has less friction than windows. It breaks down with updates, you go online and can usually find resources to help you fix it. Windows breaks down and it usually takes someone inside to acknowledge the problem, fix it and release in the next update, because there are some classes of problems that just aren't fixable in windows, and those that are will usually take you through a journey into the system registry that, if you asked me, didn't age too nicely.
Instead of dealing with this I have taken to doing activities where I don't need to use the computer now. So for example photography is a major hobby for me. I went back to film just to get away from the bloody computer.
https://massgrave.dev/faq
I'm not trying to make much of a point other than that: anecdotes aren't going to get you very far.
My problems with linux have nothing to do with the quality of the OS itself (which I personally haven't had many issues with), but rather with software support from companies that don't want to put the engineering effort into making their linux version as good as the windows version. And I can't really blame them, but some software I just need.
Funnily enough, I have that exact issue but the opposite. It takes nearly as long to shut down. Which I do often because still, in 2026, even on the Snapdragon surface laptop, I can't trust Windows to actually sleep when I close the laptop lid.
I've had less issues with Linux, even sleep, than any modern windows box, and even less issues (pretty much none at all) on my daily driver MacBook Pro (plenty of annoyances and quirks here too though)
That's not what the author said. And anecdotes are perfectly fine - in fact, they are literally are all we have to write about.
In this case, everything I've experienced and heard from others suggests that the author is correct. Linux distros are amazing, and their issues are generally fixable with experience, but the problem is that their issues are usage-blocking. Windows issues are much more common, but they are just fucking annoying. They are either solvable without a comp sci degree, or (and this is the important part) simply ignorable while still being able to use the computer (albeit with varying degrees of misery).
What?
Sure - if one has some weird hardware? or need to use some specialist windows only software/workflow.
> they are just fucking annoying
> are either solvable without a comp sci degree,
with that argument - even ChromeOS is great. Just works. Especially for all the school kids without compsci degree or even Amazon staff (that use a modified form of chrome OS).
It took me a while to convince myself it wasn't a hardware defect. I had very frequent single tab crashes in any browser I used. And regular bluescreens, sometimes multiple a day. But it runs entirely stable on a parallel Ubuntu installation with the same hardware.
If you're unlucky, you can run into weird issues that are hard to impossible to fix as a regular user.
This mostly means nothing because the hardware drivers between the 2 OSs are totally different.
For example you could have bad memory and Linux isn't sticking anything important there, whereas Windows is. Same with things like video drivers and storage drivers.
As someone that's salvaged a lot of old machines, sometimes some particular hardware is bad in a particular OS and replacing it with a non broken card of the same kind fixes the issue.
I know you're not asking for tech support here, but I wanted to share that a friend's laptop was doing this, and the problem turned out to be a massive amount of files in %TEMP%. So many that I had to write a little PowerShell script to remove them all.
Or "Disable IPv6".
It's so nonsensical when it comes to Windows World that people put up with that shit
Like mouse or printer will not work when you are at home but will at work. So you live with it.
The funniest is you see the user use the computer and at regular occurence there are weird error popup showing up but the user is trained to click ok mechanically without even reading.
The worse is if like the author you use ms365 or outlook. You are in a world of pain and things suddenly breaking or with lot of unexplainable frustrations. For example when you used outlook with an account/user and add a second one. And then delete the first one. And somehow there would be an email account associated with your whole computer that outlook is using in shadow. And like you would receive emails but sending will not work. And the only working solution in the end is to nuke everything and start again.
I had this gaming PC — and once a year doing excel and dropbox exchanges with my accountant, but other than that, gaming PC — and it never had an issue, from 2020 or 2021 to last month.
So I decided to move it to the living room, and connect it to our big TV, instead of the small TV — same LG manufacturer, same 4K res, mind you — and now it just freezes every 3-4 days. And freeze means just, the screen still shows whatever it was showing when it froze, no USB mouse or keyboard does anything, cannot be RDP'd to cannot be pinged... hold-down-power-button only answer.
(I have swapped all the cabels, just to be sure.)
The only differences: moved it 20 meters physically, connected it to a slightly newer TV. ¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
macOS and Linux also do suck, but both are AFAICT way more predictable, and less random
Windows Performance Analyser and Windows Performance Recorder are pretty easy to use to troubleshoot boot performance and have a nice, simple GUI. For fairness, there's also systemd analyze on Linux
I haven't used Windows in ~5 years but at least with XP to 10 it used to be fairly well documented and not terribly hard to troubleshoot assuming you're willing to do some learning and leg work.
I'd say macOS is the worst in that department--things randomly break just like Windows and Linux but it's largely a blackbox.
FWIW I am essentially full-time Linux on all my devices for the first time in my 20 years since first using it (Ubuntu 6.06). The only issue I had is with a wifi card that is a brand-new spec without Linux support - I happened to have another wifi card that has a more open chipset that is also wifi7 that works great.
Here's my quick intro to anyone interested in running a Linux machine for gaming and everyday use.
https://docs.zeropolis.net/doku.php/tech:cachyos
Missing : good old debian :)
Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE plasma desktop) is quite windows-like without the advertising and crappification. KDE is doing a great job honestly.
But I found it interesting how, for non-technical users, they both really found the Mac still unintuitive and buggy compared to Windows.
But as a Linux user, who had a stint on OSX because it's closer to Unix, I hated it.
Simple things like keyboard shortcuts doing the entirely opposite of what I expected (which is my fault in reality) but doing stupid things themselves
I'm honestly surprised why it's taking the rest such a long time.
1) Fedora is really worth a try, it's extremely polished. The best thing is the packages in the repo are generally much more up to date that debian based distros, which maeans less random PPAs to work around it, which cause issues.
2) The biggest change is having Claude Code/Codex able to diagnose and tweak things extremely quickly. If something goes wrong, I ask claude code (in a specific folder with various docs about workarounds) and it goes and fixes it 99% of the time very quickly.
Coding agents being able to fix Linux actually makes it _more_ stable than Windows for me. In my experience Windows is less buggy _in general_ than desktop Linux.[1] However, once you hit random issues you are basically screwed if basic attempts don't work. With Linux you can have a coding agent go thru all the reams of logs to find the issue and even clone the underlying source code to find issues.
[1] For example, there is some ridiculous problem with wayland and notifications on GNOME at least, see this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/work_items/358?... which has to be disabled with an extension unless you want to go insane
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with