The story is long, it covers my experience with win7, win8, and two very different linux distros. It sums up a lot of frustration new linux users experience, so maybe some of you will find it an interesting read.
This story started with ubuntu 5.x or something, but that story was more like a game, where I just wanted something different, but couldn't (or wouldn't) switch entirely because I liked photoshop, and I also liked playing games (diablo 2 and quake 3). Which meant, that if I had to dual boot, it's a waste of time to constantly switch, when windows could do all things linux could. Plus I was sharing a desktop pc with my sibling, who didn't really see the point as well.
Later on, I played poker for a while, and none of the software at the time ran on linux, both poker clients, and stuff like holdem manager, so it didn't even cross my mind to switch.
3.5 years ago I got my own laptop with win7 preinstalled, and even I kept playing poker for a bit, it crossed my mind to give linux another chance. At that time, quake3 became quake live (played in a browser), and diablo 2 slowly faded for me. I also had to study a lot, and thought linux would be: a) a good break from all gaming and poker, b) give me some respect from coding/programing teachers, c) help me understand command line better, etc.
I don't remember what exactly didn't work when I dual-booted ubuntu back then. I think it was laggy mousepad, or some screen brightness settings that didn't work. But when these tiny things are experienced every day, it becomes annoying. And when it becomes annoying, it becomes unusable.
I soon upgraded to win8 (to my dismay), and forced myself to use that. I started to work in my internship, and it was not enough time to play around with linux when stuff needed to be done.
After 2 years of having a laptop - exactly when its warranty ended - it started overheating a lot. Being a poor student, and starting to freelance, I decided to pop linux in, and saw that temperatures are reduced by 20-30% under light use. I decided to try out the new and shiny Manjaro with xfce (which is still running on my laptop to this day), and to make myself a developer who uses linux daily.
Problems quickly arose. While it was great in browsing and coding, it was not that great with emulating a web server (I used xampp), and didn't work out of the box how it did on windows. Having spent countless hours of tinkering with various linux servers on virtualbox to just get my phpserver running and accessible, I gave up to deadline pressure, instaled win 7 over my win8, and went back to the world of windows. I agree playing with linux servers taught me a lot, but in a time where work has to be done fast, there's no time to learn the whole new thing, as there is no time to try and make illustrator work.
I moved countries, settled in a full-time position, with company's laptop, and slowly started using only linux on my home laptop. I was more experienced now, I could set up vagrant boxes, virtual hosts, change some things on the server, so it didn't scare me to use linux for personal projects anymore. That came at a price of a lot of time spent on it before.
At my work, I slowly got into a hate and hate relationship with win8 again, and all the bloatware that this laptop had preinstalled. I hated user interface with these stupid tiles, and I was thirsty for something new. And that's when I started to look into linux world for my work laptop as well. One of my col...
The story is long, it covers my experience with win7, win8, and two very different linux distros. It sums up a lot of frustration new linux users experience, so maybe some of you will find it an interesting read.
This story started with ubuntu 5.x or something, but that story was more like a game, where I just wanted something different, but couldn't (or wouldn't) switch entirely because I liked photoshop, and I also liked playing games (diablo 2 and quake 3). Which meant, that if I had to dual boot, it's a waste of time to constantly switch, when windows could do all things linux could. Plus I was sharing a desktop pc with my sibling, who didn't really see the point as well.
Later on, I played poker for a while, and none of the software at the time ran on linux, both poker clients, and stuff like holdem manager, so it didn't even cross my mind to switch.
3.5 years ago I got my own laptop with win7 preinstalled, and even I kept playing poker for a bit, it crossed my mind to give linux another chance. At that time, quake3 became quake live (played in a browser), and diablo 2 slowly faded for me. I also had to study a lot, and thought linux would be: a) a good break from all gaming and poker, b) give me some respect from coding/programing teachers, c) help me understand command line better, etc.
I don't remember what exactly didn't work when I dual-booted ubuntu back then. I think it was laggy mousepad, or some screen brightness settings that didn't work. But when these tiny things are experienced every day, it becomes annoying. And when it becomes annoying, it becomes unusable.
I soon upgraded to win8 (to my dismay), and forced myself to use that. I started to work in my internship, and it was not enough time to play around with linux when stuff needed to be done.
After 2 years of having a laptop - exactly when its warranty ended - it started overheating a lot. Being a poor student, and starting to freelance, I decided to pop linux in, and saw that temperatures are reduced by 20-30% under light use. I decided to try out the new and shiny Manjaro with xfce (which is still running on my laptop to this day), and to make myself a developer who uses linux daily.
Problems quickly arose. While it was great in browsing and coding, it was not that great with emulating a web server (I used xampp), and didn't work out of the box how it did on windows. Having spent countless hours of tinkering with various linux servers on virtualbox to just get my phpserver running and accessible, I gave up to deadline pressure, instaled win 7 over my win8, and went back to the world of windows. I agree playing with linux servers taught me a lot, but in a time where work has to be done fast, there's no time to learn the whole new thing, as there is no time to try and make illustrator work.
I moved countries, settled in a full-time position, with company's laptop, and slowly started using only linux on my home laptop. I was more experienced now, I could set up vagrant boxes, virtual hosts, change some things on the server, so it didn't scare me to use linux for personal projects anymore. That came at a price of a lot of time spent on it before.
At my work, I slowly got into a hate and hate relationship with win8 again, and all the bloatware that this laptop had preinstalled. I hated user interface with these stupid tiles, and I was thirsty for something new. And that's when I started to look into linux world for my work laptop as well. One of my colleagues was using linux for our daily development, so I figured I'm gonna try to dual-boot.
Now the problem (as some of you might have heard) is that win8 laptops come with some 'barriers' for the folks who'd like to dual-boot. Now I'm not technical enough, but EFI is something I started hating during the first few hours. Even booting from usb was painful and buried deep into bios. I downloaded maybe 5 different distros with several different desktop environments to just make one of them boot into desktop mode without getting stuck somewhere (mind you, this was a brand new laptop with intel/nvidia card, ultrahd screen, etc). Knowing I;d have to spend ages fixing those things, I figured it's faster for me to keep downloading and trying new distros until I find something that worked.
And that's how fedora 22 alpha with Gnome ended up as a dual-boot option on my work laptop. It had perfect scaling for my ultrahd screen (not even KDE did a good job there in comparrison), it had an intuitive installer, which detected my win8 partition for easy dual-boot install. Unfortunately, being alpha, it didn't have many things in repositories which I needed, and was crashing all the time, so I decided to wait until the release.
When fedora 22 finally came out, I installed it over alpha, and somehow managed to mess up windows bootloader to the point where I need a recovery drive. Which is kind of a good thing, because I was finally forced to set up my work environment there, without any chance to go back to windows (well, there's virtualbox, which I use for illustrator and photoshop, but it's probably 3% of my job). Buy boy it required a lot of patience. It appears Fedora's repos, compared to Arch and AUR, are, how do I put it.., crap. There's almost nothing there. You have to manually download and install a lot of stuff. You want google chrome? Can't have it easily. Same for virtualbox, skype, atom editor, you name it.
In the end I set up everything I needed. There are some cool tools that are useful for developers. My php/mysql servers are handled by vagrant, android devtools were easy to install. Time to time system freezes on startup, only power button solves that. Can't put laptop on sleep - same freezing issue. Had to downsample my laptop to 1080p in order for it to scale properly together with external monitor. There are also system errors everywhere, but I keep ignoring them.
The only way I managed to get a wifi office printer print for me was by printing from withing win7 VM.
So to sum it all up, I think the stuff linux is still missing is that it just has to work out of the box, on any machine, new or old.
So my list would be:
- You shouldn't spend countless hours setting up simple things.
- You shouldn't have to wait until flash is dead to listen to soundcloud.
- You shouldn't have to download a different browser than default to make webaudio work on some pages, or to watch flash videos
- You shouldn't have to install windows virtual machine to print a piece of paper even if it's an easier and less time consuming option than to find a solution for your linux box.
- You shouldn't have to reduce the resolution of your ultrahd laptop display, just to make dual monitor setup work with proper scaling. And speaking about display, have you tried to read anything in non-graphic environment on ultrahd screen?
So it's not only about getting linux on user's PCs. It should also be reliable system in the best possible way, so not only the most stubborn ones adopt it in their work and home environments. If at least one daily task fails (e.g. printing), it's already a failing experience. Btw, IMO if the developers could stop inventing new cool and shiny distros, and contributed to several main ones, maybe most of these glitches could be solved. Or at least I wouldn't have to spend so much time researching which one is 'cooler' and 'shinier'.
The story is long, it covers my experience with win7, win8, and two very different linux distros. It sums up a lot of frustration new linux users experience, so maybe some of you will find it an interesting read.
This story started with ubuntu 5.x or something, but that story was more like a game, where I just wanted something different, but couldn't (or wouldn't) switch entirely because I liked photoshop, and I also liked playing games (diablo 2 and quake 3). Which meant, that if I had to dual boot, it's a waste of time to constantly switch, when windows could do all things linux could. Plus I was sharing a desktop pc with my sibling, who didn't really see the point as well.
Later on, I played poker for a while, and none of the software at the time ran on linux, both poker clients, and stuff like holdem manager, so it didn't even cross my mind to switch.
3.5 years ago I got my own laptop with win7 preinstalled, and even I kept playing poker for a bit, it crossed my mind to give linux another chance. At that time, quake3 became quake live (played in a browser), and diablo 2 slowly faded for me. I also had to study a lot, and thought linux would be: a) a good break from all gaming and poker, b) give me some respect from coding/programing teachers, c) help me understand command line better, etc.
I don't remember what exactly didn't work when I dual-booted ubuntu back then. I think it was laggy mousepad, or some screen brightness settings that didn't work. But when these tiny things are experienced every day, it becomes annoying. And when it becomes annoying, it becomes unusable.
I soon upgraded to win8 (to my dismay), and forced myself to use that. I started to work in my internship, and it was not enough time to play around with linux when stuff needed to be done.
After 2 years of having a laptop - exactly when its warranty ended - it started overheating a lot. Being a poor student, and starting to freelance, I decided to pop linux in, and saw that temperatures are reduced by 20-30% under light use. I decided to try out the new and shiny Manjaro with xfce (which is still running on my laptop to this day), and to make myself a developer who uses linux daily.
Problems quickly arose. While it was great in browsing and coding, it was not that great with emulating a web server (I used xampp), and didn't work out of the box how it did on windows. Having spent countless hours of tinkering with various linux servers on virtualbox to just get my phpserver running and accessible, I gave up to deadline pressure, instaled win 7 over my win8, and went back to the world of windows. I agree playing with linux servers taught me a lot, but in a time where work has to be done fast, there's no time to learn the whole new thing, as there is no time to try and make illustrator work.
I moved countries, settled in a full-time position, with company's laptop, and slowly started using only linux on my home laptop. I was more experienced now, I could set up vagrant boxes, virtual hosts, change some things on the server, so it didn't scare me to use linux for personal projects anymore. That came at a price of a lot of time spent on it before.
At my work, I slowly got into a hate and hate relationship with win8 again, and all the bloatware that this laptop had preinstalled. I hated user interface with these stupid tiles, and I was thirsty for something new. And that's when I started to look into linux world for my work laptop as well. One of my col...
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