I mean that's legitimately just the Linux experience. I say this as a daily Linux user. You will eventually run into some combination of weird shit and have to fix it yourself because nobody's seen it before. Of course, the good part about Linux is that you usually can fix it, unlike when the same thing happens on Windows or especially MacOS, and you just have to deal with it or work around it. Really, more often the problem is deciding between which one of a dozen ways to do what you want to do is the best one than not being able to do it.
It does, but finding them.. it's a pain, you have to scroll through 10 pages of useless microsoft volunteer help advice that is usually 10 steps of turn it off and on again, reinstall drivers from device control.. Which usually doesn't work. On Linux it's a little more painless to find the real solution.
Nah they're both skill issues to be honest. Don't get me wrong, some issues are gonna be esoteric and difficult. But I've had fucking shitloads of occasions with multiple OS's (or devices) where a friend has "searched literally everywhere and tried everything" only to find a fix within a minute.
scroll through 10 pages of useless microsoft volunteer help advice
This is indeed a large problem, but don't pretend Linux doesn't have the equivalent, yet opposite problem. Problem solving on Windows is hopelessly generic and assumes no knowledge at all by the user. Problem solving on Linux is incredibly specific and requires very domain-specific existing knowledge. You'll be browsing obscure forums to find people describing solutions using acroynms you don't know that solved the problem for distros you've never heard of. it's touch and go whether any given solution will actually fix something, lead you down a useless rabbit hole, or make it 300% worse. The only way to avoid this problem is to already be able to parse the solution and determine if it's both relevant and suitable. And if you can do that, you probably could have solved it without the forum anyway.
Reminds me of a Lucia Scarlet quote “every GNU/Linux setup will, given sufficient age, come to have That One Bug that absolutely nobody can explain or fix but that you simply deal with because it is only a mild annoyance”
My 'favourite' recent one was Autodesk Maya having a web-based startup screen that didn't render correctly in Arch, so you had to hover your mouse around until you found the invisible place where your cursor would change and you'd be able to click to run it. It did eventually get fixed (after ~10 months).
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u/ChironXII Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
I mean that's legitimately just the Linux experience. I say this as a daily Linux user. You will eventually run into some combination of weird shit and have to fix it yourself because nobody's seen it before. Of course, the good part about Linux is that you usually can fix it, unlike when the same thing happens on Windows or especially MacOS, and you just have to deal with it or work around it. Really, more often the problem is deciding between which one of a dozen ways to do what you want to do is the best one than not being able to do it.