I grew up hearing tales of how Linux is the best operating system, and how it’s used by all the computer gods.
“I’m perfectly happy using [proprietary operating system],” you mumble, and the local god unfurls their scroll of 350 retorts. Not only is Linux better, they say, but they claim your operating system is objectively bad in ways that you’re too obtuse to even notice.
“But Linux is scary and confusing!” you mumble. University doesn’t really help with that. For most students, the first introduction to Linux is mixed together with Bash terminals and Git and Vim and compilers — a whole world of software tools each named more ridiculously than the last.
“And the GUI looks bad —” you mumble, but the god interjects an overly-technical explanation about Linux distributions. Linux is just a kernel, they say. You don’t even know what Linux is, so you’re not entitled to have an opinion on it.
With little other option you grit your teeth and make your way through undergrad, surviving a chain of Linux encounters. CS student environments and research clusters. Docker containers and virtual machines and Windows Subsystems. Until some day, you no longer have to Google how to copy a file, and you finally feel entitled to have an opinion about Linux:
it is not good actually.
A little-advertised perk of being a CS grad student here is that you get a laptop (not to keep, of course) provided by the university. After getting fed up at Microsoft, I asked them to put Linux on it instead of Windows. I can handle it, I thought. The machine came fully loaded with default Ubuntu. Great, I could finally run my code on the system that the tech gods intended.
And then it crashed. Not even for any good reason. The graphics sometimes just fails to start when waking up from hibernation, so you’re left staring at a blank screen until you force-kill and reboot the entire machine. Thank goodness for open source graphics drivers!
Number of deaths: over 40
Middle-clicking in general is a stupid feature, because pressing the scroll button is one finger slip away from scrolling off the very thing you’re trying to click on. Sensitive mice also have a bad habit of triggering middle-click by accident. So guess what middle-clicking is bound to? PASTE! When I scroll through a document too quickly it gets splattered with whatever piece of text I had highlighted three windows away. Somehow, many Linux gods think middle-click paste is the best feature ever. The default is so ingrained in the system, that the official solution on the Ubuntu Wiki is not to disable the feature (you can’t), but rather to disable that mouse button entirely.
Time wasted trying to fix it: 11 hours
Anyways, once you wade your way through all of the dumb quirks of Ubuntu, you can finally move on to installing apps — if they’re supported at all. Often times, the Linux version of an app is just a crappy web browser in disguise that loads the app’s website instead. For example, if you search “Outlook” you’ll find not Outlook, but a small smattering of third-party email clients, each with a rating of 3.x out of 5 because all of them are sitting on a laundry list of unfixed bugs. I don’t think a single one supports the authentication method used by uwaterloo.ca, so they’re all useless to me.
Failed login attempts: 7
Before the gods shout back with all their various ways to fix these problems, I’d like to remind them that my job is to study and do research. This machine is a tool, not my wife. Writing an article complaining about my problems is still faster than learning how to install a different distribution and dealing with the potential consequences of it going wrong on a laptop that I don’t own.
(I haven’t even mentioned the swap thrashing and the emoji keyboard and the paywall for security updates…)
It’s a toxic relationship — no matter how badly Linux fucks up, it’s still somehow your fault for not trying hard enough to configure things or code the solution yourself. And when you want to quit, you’re pulled back by the thought of all the time you already wasted trying to make things work. They should really make that a warning when you start going down the rabbit hole of Linux:
it is not good actually.
tendstofortytwo has also written a great review of their attempts to get started with Linux, which you can find in v141i3.