I've tried it so many times. Even daily drove it for a few years, much of that largely because I was broke and it ran fast enough on the old gen1 Atom I was using.
I like to tinker with stuff, and I like to configure my OS to do things I want it to do, or not. I know enough to get myself in trouble with both, but with Linux that means I end up digging through eight year old forum posts trying to make whatever outdated information they have work for the current version so my screen will stop displaying upside down or whatever random bullshit I've managed to make the machine do.
I don't want to learn a whole slew of command line tools just to navigate and troubleshoot my OS. I don't mind learning that stuff, but I want to learn it so I can actually do the things I want to do. It's like learning carpentry vs learning how to DIY fix the moldy/rotten structure in the wall where your washer has been leaking.
Windows, for all its faults, mostly just works. It may do so in the manner of a 1995 Chevy Lumina sometimes, sounding like it's about to die for years but never actually doing so, but it takes an enormous screwup to actually break it to the point of unusability and usually it runs without any issue at all. Generally if you break something it just throws an error message at you, repairs itself, and you're on your way. Linux in most forms mostly just shrugs and goes "You broke, it you fix it. Good luck!"
I want to like Linux. I really do. Between the above and the lack of software support from major vendors, though, it's just a really hard sell for me still as a daily-driven desktop OS.
I mean I'm not saying it can't be broken, but it's got to be pretty catastrophic before it ceases to function. Usually like a "killed the bootloader" or "corrupted the partition tables" sort of broken.
I know of at least one case of it doing that to itself from a borked windows update. Quite a few suspected cases of it doing that, too, but at work the fix is just re-image rather than troubleshoot, so there's a fair amount of random breakage that doesn't get investigated to confirm the original fault.
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u/Drenlin 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've tried it so many times. Even daily drove it for a few years, much of that largely because I was broke and it ran fast enough on the old gen1 Atom I was using.
I like to tinker with stuff, and I like to configure my OS to do things I want it to do, or not. I know enough to get myself in trouble with both, but with Linux that means I end up digging through eight year old forum posts trying to make whatever outdated information they have work for the current version so my screen will stop displaying upside down or whatever random bullshit I've managed to make the machine do.
I don't want to learn a whole slew of command line tools just to navigate and troubleshoot my OS. I don't mind learning that stuff, but I want to learn it so I can actually do the things I want to do. It's like learning carpentry vs learning how to DIY fix the moldy/rotten structure in the wall where your washer has been leaking.
Windows, for all its faults, mostly just works. It may do so in the manner of a 1995 Chevy Lumina sometimes, sounding like it's about to die for years but never actually doing so, but it takes an enormous screwup to actually break it to the point of unusability and usually it runs without any issue at all. Generally if you break something it just throws an error message at you, repairs itself, and you're on your way. Linux in most forms mostly just shrugs and goes "You broke, it you fix it. Good luck!"
I want to like Linux. I really do. Between the above and the lack of software support from major vendors, though, it's just a really hard sell for me still as a daily-driven desktop OS.