A bit of Linux hate

Linux evangelists, please don’t read this. It is entirely my opinion and my experience.

So, I will be talking about Linux as aн end-user operating system. Well, end-developer, to be precise. And yes, I know, since I’ve used mainly Ubuntu, I should definitely switch to Debian/Slackware/your-favourite-distro. But I won’t.

Ubuntu is said to be the most end-user-oriented distribution, so I started with it. I have used 3 versions on 3 different machines (I won’t tell which, because you’ll say “oh, yeah, those had these nasty things, check [another version]” ). And all of them sucked. I had to reboot quite often, the UI got stuck when there was intensive disk I/O, there were no compatible drivers for (W)LAN cards, often it just lost the border around different windows when doing alt+tab, alt+shift+tab actually didn’t work for some time. And some more minor inconveniences that stacked up to build my quite negative opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, it is workable. I’m still using it at work (perhaps because I don’t have the time to install Windows again). But even for a developer it is tedious. I know I could google for an hour, find an answer, go to /foo/bar, remove a line from some file, and suddenly something starts working better. But that’s the problem. No end user will do that. Even I am reluctant to do it. And all these things kill productivity. And perhaps neurons.

So I’ll be using Windows 7 on my machines, which works like charm (yup), and only use Linux on servers. Yeah, it’s the best there. But for end-user machines – not yet.

Linux evangelists, please don’t read this. It is entirely my opinion and my experience.

So, I will be talking about Linux as aн end-user operating system. Well, end-developer, to be precise. And yes, I know, since I’ve used mainly Ubuntu, I should definitely switch to Debian/Slackware/your-favourite-distro. But I won’t.

Ubuntu is said to be the most end-user-oriented distribution, so I started with it. I have used 3 versions on 3 different machines (I won’t tell which, because you’ll say “oh, yeah, those had these nasty things, check [another version]” ). And all of them sucked. I had to reboot quite often, the UI got stuck when there was intensive disk I/O, there were no compatible drivers for (W)LAN cards, often it just lost the border around different windows when doing alt+tab, alt+shift+tab actually didn’t work for some time. And some more minor inconveniences that stacked up to build my quite negative opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, it is workable. I’m still using it at work (perhaps because I don’t have the time to install Windows again). But even for a developer it is tedious. I know I could google for an hour, find an answer, go to /foo/bar, remove a line from some file, and suddenly something starts working better. But that’s the problem. No end user will do that. Even I am reluctant to do it. And all these things kill productivity. And perhaps neurons.

So I’ll be using Windows 7 on my machines, which works like charm (yup), and only use Linux on servers. Yeah, it’s the best there. But for end-user machines – not yet.