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Off topic: since I've never developed apps for Linux, what is the popular language/API that people use for Linux (or better, cross platform) development these days? (Ha ha, I'm already feeling like the is hardly a question that there is a simple answer for.)
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Which distro? You might want to look into something less unstable. I've had arch running unattended upgrades in a Cron for years. Worst case I have to find my USB stick and do some debugging, not that an update has ever broken anything. There is some minor maintenance I run maybe once every 6-12 months to clear caches or fix up any configs that need updating but I've never run into anything that prevents booting.
Just Ubuntu though admittedly I use a lot more packages than average so there's more that can break across updates. Also a lot of things that have caused me problems over the years are getting more stable.
Are there only 2 desktops associated with Linux? Granted those 2 are from the early days, but there's a lot more. I'm writing this from a Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop, haven switched from a KDE distro because configuring a dual monitor setup on KDE doesn't work very well.
We have three choices for the desktop: -one that seems to treat anyone as an idiot and it's an walled garden -one that is broken -one that kind of works but is boring and it is kind of a new skin on a very old paradigma interested most in keeping backwards compatibility 20 years ago as an OS enthusiast, I was in Heaven. Apart from Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, we had a lot of new operating systems, each trying to work on…
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Right. I was going to comment "Reason #12 to switch to Linux: you love reformatting the entire system every once in a while, typically after struggling to fix a driver for hours and completely screwing everything up in a way you can't figure out how to undo."
I have updated my laptop across 4 major releases of Debian now, never reformating the system. And the copy of my home directory (think user profile in windows) is even older. If you don't know what you are doing, saving a full system backup to an external hard drive is actually easy so you can try things and revert if it doesn't work.
My home folder has files that have been with me since 2006 or so. This laptop is 7 years old and this is the third fresh OS install it has in its lifetime - With one exception, it's always been updated to the latest Ubuntu version as needed with the Ubuntu tooling.
What I have been doing to prevent data loss (that never happened) is to keep the interesting parts of my home folder on a separate filesystem and symlink them into my home folder. This allowed the previous fresh install to format the root partition and I didn't need to worry about my data being deleted.
As a counterpoint: Reasons to consider NOT switching to Linux https://corn.codeberg.page/notlinux.html
[1] https://corn.codeberg.page/aesthetic.htmlAs a counterpoint: Reasons to consider NOT switching to Linux https://corn.codeberg.page/notlinux.html
Right. I was going to comment "Reason #12 to switch to Linux: you love reformatting the entire system every once in a while, typically after struggling to fix a driver for hours and completely screwing everything up in a way you can't figure out how to undo."
I really like the Unix philosophy. And even if Linux it is not exactly Unix, it kind of shares the same philosophy. I tried very much to like Linux and to use it on the desktop. In the last 20 years I've tried countless times to use it as a desktop. But it always failed. It always reqyired lots of time for configuration as opposed to "it just works". After some time, it always broke something, which required again ti…
And the last and most important trick is to buy from companies which support Linux for enterprise customers.
Windows Terminal + WSL 2 has been a game changer in usability and convenience.
I really like the Unix philosophy. And even if Linux it is not exactly Unix, it kind of shares the same philosophy. I tried very much to like Linux and to use it on the desktop. In the last 20 years I've tried countless times to use it as a desktop. But it always failed. It always reqyired lots of time for configuration as opposed to "it just works". After some time, it always broke something, which required again ti…
I use Linux both at home and at work and over the last couple of years have been pleasantly surprised how much the software gap has narrowed.
A lot of this has to do with SaaS software which, ironically I don't like, but in a few circumstances it makes sense. Office tools at work, for example. If you're a G-suite shop Google docs and gmail will work regardless of your system, if you're a MS shop then Office, Outlook, Calendar and even Teams will run in a web browser.
But even for native applications this gap has narrowed. Zoom, Slack and Discord all have native Linux apps that just work for me. Google Chrome, which I wouldn't use for my personal devices but I need to use for work as a Web developer, has a Linux version that works as great as the Windows version. But the most important part is that all of these tools are cross-platform now. There is no relearning a tool unless you depend on a native Windows app for which there is no Linux version (which you likely do, from the sounds of it).
The desktop environments are where the real differences come into play. I can't even comment there since I switched to Linux Mint MATE when Ubuntu introduced Unity years ago. I like MATE a lot but I customize the hell out of it to suit my needs and I'm hardly qualified to have an opinion about what other people should be using.
I did, however, recently decide to go with KDE Plasma for a TV streaming device that I put together. It's a small, low-powered machine and I didn't think I'd consider KDE because it's kind of notorious as a resource hog. But I needed something that could give me a good UI for a TV and remembered that Plasma supports desktop widgets and is highly customizable. So I tried it and was pleasantly surprised how performant it was. That's how quickly things change. The last time I tried KDE on a desktop it was sluggish and I didn't care for it at all. But my information and pre-conceived notions became outdated. Not telling you to try Linux again. Use whatever works for you. Just sharing my experiences for conversation.