Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.
I’ve got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i’ve got multiple raspberry pi’s running, and a synology diskstation, and i’m no stranger to ssh’ing into them to manage some stuff)
Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it’s still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.
First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i’d rather leave it disabled (although i assume that’s mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought “it’s probably some setting somewhere to change this”, but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares… Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i’d need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly… (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)
Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it’s not switching to the refreshrate of the video i’m playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn’t use a window manager that should solve it but doesn’t, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I’d give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you’ll find so little yet contradictory things…
Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought “i’ve got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let’s see if i can find something nice on ubuntu”, and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and … “no app installed for this file”… google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error
Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn’t replace it yet. Wouldn’t want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?
For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I’m missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or… right?
Not really sure what to think when I see posts like this. Maybe there’s some people it’s just not for. I don’t want to be negative, but I think some folks just might not be open to it.
I’ve been using exclusively Linux for all my computing for over 3 years now. My high-end gaming PC, my work laptop that I service multiple IT clients with, my Steam Deck, my entire home lab, even my phone runs GrapheneOS. And I love all of it.
I use a bunch of different distros, Manjaro, Nobara, Ubuntu, Alma, Fedora, Mint, Lubuntu, with different desktop environments, apps, services like SMB, NFS, DHCP, Apache, TrueNAS, Jellyfin, various gaming servers for Minecraft, Arma 3, Valhiem, etc.
I play scores of different games, online Mutiplayer, single player, indie, AAA, retro titles. I do all my email, ticketing, business accounting, invoicing, banking, Discord, matrix, social media, personal email, browsing, printing, scanning, streaming and editing on Linux. There’s literally nothing I do in my personal or business computing that runs on Windows, not even in a VM.
I just don’t really know what to tell folks that claim that Linux just doesn’t work for desktop use. My systems are more stable than Windows, more customizable, easier to update, configure, and troubleshoot. They run faster, and are quicker to install.
I just switched my parents to Linux Mint this holiday season and they’ve had no problems, all their basic computing needs Linux handles perfectly and runs better on their super old hardware than Windows ever did.
My friends and I love our Steam Decks, use them all the time, both in gaming and in desktop mode, all Linux there too.
Idk, it has been amazing for me to be 100% free of Windows forever. I don’t miss it an all, I just wish I had converted sooner. And I’m not some Linux god who lives in the terminal all the time either, but the documentation and help from the community is endless and has helped me solve any issues I’ve had.