Of late there has being a series being done by LTT on YouTube called Switching to Linux Challenge! The concept is simple Linus and Luke both try Linux as their personal computer for a month. During this month they both complete task and challenges. As Linux user I find this very interesting and was looking forward to seeing their views. I knew it would not be all roses.
There is a few points that I am starting to see happen in these video and a some issue that I see in general with the Linux Eco system.
The first thing they are doing is comparing it to windows and expecting their Linux installs to work in the same fashion as windows. If you are coming from windows you are totally going to do that. You going to expect things to work how you know they work. For a personal example, a work project required I use a mac for a few weeks. I hated it. I found the UI not very intuitive, I found it hard to do the work I needed. My work laptop has the Gnome desktop, that's what I know, that's how I expected the mac to work. I can't blame them for thinking way they did. The take away has to be for anything new you do need to approach it with a opened mind. While not easy that maybe the approach we should have when trying anything new in life.
I also now don't know how I manage to switch years ago. After a rough start (which we wont talk about) Linus start the challenge using Manjaro Linux with the KDE desktop and Luke went with Linux Mint using the cinnamon desktop. Both of these I use. My personal laptop is Manjaro and the house has a netbook which is using Mint. To round it off my work laptop is using Fedora with the Gnome desktop. There is not a thing wrong with any choice but the choice does have an affect on how you use them. What do I mean by that? Well you need to know some history of the distro you pick.
Distro? A distro is a Linux distribution. Manjaro, Mint and Fedora are distributions. There is a lot of distros, there is even Hannah Montana Linux. Distrowatch.com is a good place to start looking and seeing what out there.
Back to what I was saying about the history of your distro. I know that Manjaro is based on Arch Linux so when need to search the web for a solution I know that answer for Arch may also help me. While answers around Debian which Linux Mint is based off might not answer my questions. I am sure Linus and Luke know this. But many people might not. I know when I started on Ubuntu I didn't know this.
This brings me to the biggest problem with Linux and why it will never be for everyone. And that is choice. Even in this every short article 7 or 8 different Linux distributions have being mentioned. For windows users this could have being "Switching to Mac OS Challenge" and they would still have issues. But money says they would have all be using the same version. And this problem of choice does not stop there. We have seen the mention of 3 different desktop environments. Short handed as DE. In windows you don't really have this concept, yes it has newer version have being shipped with different windows version but you don't get the choice.
And Oh boy, does Linux have choice. I mentioned Arch before, it's know as doing Linux in hard mode. You have to decide every that goes into it but their documentation is excellent and well worth having a look at. While thinking about this topic I was looking at the different DE's that Arch would support. Between officially and unofficially supported I counted 25 different desktop environments that you could use. To add to this choice, Linux is stacks of building blocks and the DE is build on top of a window manager. You could use these window managers as a desktop but being user friendly has gone out the window. They need work to configure and can be very powerful if done correctly. The list in the Arch wiki has 59 different window managers. That is a lot of choice and I think people forget how hard it is to learn this stuff.
Earlier I said I wouldn't talk about this but I think I have to say something. While Linus was first picking his distro he pick Pop OS. It did not go well, while installing steam something bad happened which end up removing his desktop environment. Not a great look for Linux. There is two stories I would like to try tell here. For a while I also had a windows 10 PC, it blue screened and died but that's a different story. During a run of the mill update to windows, windows decided to brick the 20 year printer that was attached to it. That printer never worked again. So these things do happen on every platform.
The second story is a much happier story. An update (again) broke the login manager on a OpenSuse laptop I was using when in college, the day before an assignment was due. Not good. All I had was the blinking cursor of a terminal. I tired everything I know at the time to get it working but no luck. At some point I said to myself the most important thing right now was the college assignment. I had to get that on to a USB key. Using a terminal in Linux is normal thing and this copying of files to USB was easy. I don't know if that had happen on windows would I have being able to get that assignment in on time.
This ramble is going on long enough I think I will close out with some final thoughts. I am truly enjoying series and looking forward to the next one. To much choice can be a problem but it makes for such an interesting world. Now I also want to install Arch and try out the nearly hundred different ways to show a window on a screen.
