Linux Problems

... many of these organizations are caught in a seemingly endless cycle of trying to keep up with the latest updates, often spinning their wheels and expending effort to fix issues within their own forks of the Linux kernel. The struggle comes when trying to find a balance between staying up to date with all the latest updates, or just updating the most "important" updates. Part of the issue here, Cook points out, is that even the stable kernel releases, which provide "bug fixes only", each contain close to 100 new fixes per week. As such, many organizations find themselves more and more out of date on their particular branch, creating their own fixes.

A common misconception about the Linux kernel is that it's secure, or that one can go a long time without worrying about kernel security updates. Neither of these are even remotely true. New versions of Linux are released almost every week, often containing security fixes buried among the many other changes. These releases typically don't make explicit mention of the changes having security implications. As a result, many "stable" or "LTS" distributions don't know which commits should be backported to their old kernels, or even that something needs backporting at all. If the problem has a public CVE assigned to it, maybe your distro will pick it up. Maybe not. Even if a CVE exists, at least in the case of Ubuntu and Debian especially, users are often left with kernels full of known holes for months at a time. Arch doesn't play the backporting game, instead opting to provide the newest stable releases shortly after they come out.

The Linux kernel is a security disaster, but so are the kernels in macOS / iOS and Windows, although they are moving towards changing. For example, iOS moved a lot of the network stack to userspace, among other things.

The userspace Linux desktop software stack is far worse relative to the others. Security and privacy are such low priorities. It's really a complete joke and it's hard to even choose where to start in terms of explaining how bad it is. There's almost a complete disregard for sandboxing / privilege separation / permission models, exploit mitigations, memory-safe languages (lots of cultural obsession with using memory-unsafe C everywhere), etc. and there isn't even much effort put into finding and fixing the bugs. Look at something like Debian where software versions are totally frozen and only a tiny subset of security fixes receiving CVEs are backported, the deployment of even the legacy exploit mitigations from 2 decades ago is terrible and work on systems-integration-level security features like verified boot, full system MAC policies, etc. is near non-existent. That's what passes as secure though when it's the opposite. When people tell you that Debian is secure, it's like someone trying to claim that Windows XP with partial security updates (via their extended support) would be secure. It's just not based in any kind of reality with any actual reasoning / thought behind it.

The traditional desktop OS approach to disk encryption is also awful since it's totally opposed to keeping data at rest. I recommend looking at the approach on iOS which Android has mostly adopted at this point. In addition to all the hardware support, the OS needs to go out of the way to support fine-grained encryption where lots of data can be kept at rest when locked. Android also provides per-profile encryption keys, but has catching-up to do in terms of making it easier to keep data at rest when locked. ... iOS makes it easier by letting you just mark files as being in one of 2 encryption classes that can become at rest when locked. It even has a way to use asymmetric encryption to append to files when locked, without being able to read them.

Really, people just like saying that their preferred software stack is secure, or that open-source software is secure, when in reality it's not the case. Desktop Linux is falling further and further behind in nearly all of these areas. The work to try catching-up such as Flatpak is extremely flawed and is a failure from day 1 by not actually aiming to achieve meaningful goals with a proper threat model. There's little attempt to learn from other platforms doing much better and to adopt their privacy and security features to catch up. It's a decade behind at this point, and falling further behind.

Also, all these things about desktop Linux completely apply to anything else using the software stack. It doesn't matter if it's FreeBSD or whatever. FreeBSD also has a less secure kernel, malloc, etc. but at least it doesn't have nonsense like systemd greatly expanding attack surface written with tons of poorly written C code.

...

There are literally hundreds of serious, game-over vulnerabilities being fixed every month in the Linux kernel. There are so many vulnerabilities that vulnerability tracking and patching doesn't scale to it at all. It has no internal security boundaries. It's equivalent to running the entirety of userspace in a single process running as full unconstrained root, written entirely in C and assembly code rather than preferring memory-safe / type-safe languages. Watch this talk as a starting point: Dmitry Vyukov's "Syzbot and the Tale of Thousand Kernel Bugs" (video)

...

> you've said Flatpak is flawed. is Snap any better as an app sandbox?

No, not really. They're both fundamentally flawed and poorly implemented. They're a lot worse than even the very early Android sandbox from a decade ago before all of the work on hardening it and improving the permission model. They're approaching it completely wrong and treating it as if they need to figure out how to do things properly themselves, by not learning from existing app sandboxes.

... It's a fundamentally broken approach to implementing a sandbox. It doesn't draw an actual security boundary and fully trusts the applications. The design choices are being made based on the path of least resistance rather than actually trying to build a proper security model. There's a big difference between opportunistic attack surface reduction like this and an application sandbox, which these are not implementing. They cannot even be used to properly sandbox an application no matter how the application chooses to configure the security policies, even if the app is fully trustworthy and trying to do it. The implementation is not that complete. It could certainly be done properly but it would require a huge amount of work across the OS as a whole treating it as a unified project, along with a massive overhaul of the application ecosystem. I can't see it happening. It requires throwing out the traditional distribution model and moving to a well-defined base OS with everything outside of that being contained in well-defined application sandboxes with a permission model supporting requesting more access dynamically, or having the user select data as needed without granting overly broad forms of persistent access.

[In the context of "why do people go back to Windows"]

I feel security is a massive burden put upon Linux developers. Linux was not made to be "the most secure" system in the world or even secure at all. Linux was made with portability in mind and with portability there can be conflicts with security mechanisms.

Take an actual look at the Linux kernel, for a long time it lacked security that Windows NT had since its release. It's important to know that the NT lineage of Windows is not based off of or even similar to MS DOS or OS/2-like Windows 95 and etc. The NT lineage of Windows is initially based off of VAX/VMS (now known as OpenVMS) and still largely is based off of that architecture as developed by Dave Cutler and his team. Windows NT from the get-go had users, roles, and groups as well as proper access control. NT contains discretionary access control lists as well as system access control lists which can be used for auditing in comparison to Linux which relied on rudimentary RWX permissions with an owner-group-world philosophy. SELinux finally brought discretionary access control lists to Linux as well as mandatory access control. SELinux is a great thing and should be treated as such - it implements a form of MLS. Windows later on added a form of MLS to known as mandatory integrity control. Nearly all objects in NT are securable with DACLs and auditing such as processes, threads, sockets, pipes, mutexes, etc., NT has an underlying unifying security principle. In later versions of Windows (such as Vista) UAC was implemented with the Administrator account so that even administrators didn't execute things as administrators, but had to explicitly grant permissions. It's stated that UAC is insecure because in normal implementations, it is just a "yes" or "no". This is largely untrue, UAC in its current default configuration is ran in Secure Desktop Mode which prevents software input emulation as well as keylogging. In Linux, if I want to run a program elevated, I have to use the terminal and on X11, I can just intercept the key events and then log the users password without any high privileges. Where is the security in that? Windows has exploit mitigation policies which are VERY similar to hardenedBSD and grsecurity/PaX. Many Linux distributions don't even want to use grsecurity/PaX and the kernel developers don't even want to support it because it may "break" some devices.

Again, Linux was made for portability, not security. It's not exactly "insecure", but it's not exactly secure either. Also, I don't run any anti-malware on Windows (for resource purposes I even disabled Windows Defender by setting -X on core files it requires), and my computer hasn't received any malware, and years back the only time my PC did receive malware was due to being socially engineered. There is nothing about Linux that magically prevents malware - nothing about its architecture as compared to Windows accomplishes this. When somebody can make an actual case about its architecture - I will change my mind. No, don't point out access control that Windows already has. Windows on the other hand has driver signature enforcement, kernel patch protection, AppContainers, etc. You can even configure Windows so that the only applications to run with administrative privileges have to be digitally signed. There is a lot you can do in terms of security on Windows systems.

Software from third-party repositories (like PPA's) and external .deb installers, is untested and unverified. Therefore it may damage the stability, the reliability and even the security of your system. It might even contain malware ...

Furthermore, you make yourself dependent on the owner of the external repository, often only one person, who isn't being checked at all. By adding a PPA to your sources list, you give the owner of that PPA in principle full power over your system!

> I'm sorry it's a bit of a rant and I might sound like
> a noob to you all, I'm really disappointed and not in a
> good mood at the moment. I've been using Linux only for at
> least 6 months and I've been in love with it when I decided
> to make the switch for good ... and I'm beginning to think
> it sucks. Tonight I had to do a simple slide-show for a client
> and I used mostly Shotcut but I tried Openshot and Kdenlive
> and the three of them was horribly buggy and a nightmare ...
> I really didn't enjoyed my experience and it pissed me off.
> I do not understand, most of that software has been in
> development for years and they look like in beta phases or as
> if only one person worked on it, but there's a big community
> and I keep seeing donations for open source I don't think money
> is really an issue. As for bugs I didn't even try to break them,
> they struggled with tasks such as fade in and fade out, transitions,
> adding texts, very basic stuff, I had to restart Shotcut like
> 4 times because it couldn't add the pictures on the timeline,
> and it's a well-known bug that is from around 2016. I'm on
> Ubuntu Mate and everyone says Ubuntu is a stable distro for gaming
> and doing work so I installed it. The only softwares that are
> stable to me is Blender, Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and Godot. As for
> Gimp it really is very powerful but there are some tools that are
> missing that Photoshop has, and if I go for the latest version
> it's very slow and not usable. I do a lot of multimedia and I
> don't think I will survive ... There's Natron, Fusion 9 that I
> didn't used yet but they are compositing softwares, I don't think
> I can do a lot with them as for video editing. It's already hard
> to not be able to play recent video games, if it also removes tools
> for working and being creative there's just no point to stay or to
> suggest it to anyone.

I think you have a wrong picture here. Most open-source projects indeed have only one (or very few) developers working on them, and get very few (if any) donations.

Ubuntu is mostly stable in the sense of "let's not change it after the release". That's great to avoid introducing new bugs, but not so great to remove old bugs.

As someone who previously used Windows and now uses Linux for 90% of my time now: If you are going to switch to Linux, be ready to deal with bugs, piss-poor UI design, hardware incompatibilities, and other issues.

Despite what you hear on tech sites about how great the Linux community is, it really isn't. If you complain about Linux you are most likely going to be met with one of the following:

• You just don't like it because it isn't Windows.
• It isn't Linux's fault, it's your computers fault.
• Distro X just sucks, Distro Y is what you should be using.
• You shouldn't complain because it's free.

Yeah it sucks but that's the current mentality of the Linux community. Be ready for it.

Around 6 months ago, I made the move to Linux. I am not a gamer, so it was easy for me. To make the experience more authentic, I installed linux on my main machine and didn't dual boot Windows. It was only linux for me. It has been an interesting journey, but sorry I can't take it anymore. Please note that I am strictly speaking as a non-developer, non-geek but a "power user". My reasons might not apply for developers and very technical users. Below are the reasons am going back:

1) Windows vs Package Manager Repo System : Repeatedly I was told that the software repository and package manager system of linux is much superior than the Windows system of downloading .exes from developer sites. This is such a lie that it's not even funny. The reason: age of software. Win32 .exe softwares get updates independently from the base OS. You can use Windows 7 and guess what, your favorite softwares will all run at the LATEST version. I repeat, you can use Windows 7 and your Blender and Krita will be at the latest version. What the version of Blender and Krita on Ubuntu 16.04 or 14.04? Is Ubuntu 14.04 even usable for normal desktop use anymore, consider its software repo age? And no, am not using any rolling distro or Fedora because their stability doesn't hold a candle in front of Ubuntu, mint, debian stable, win 10 or macOS. Also I shouldn't have to upgrade my OS just to get the next version of software. This is absolutely unacceptable and ridiculous. The fact that my softwares stays fully cutting edge, up to date on Windows while the base OS stays same is extremely important.

2) Security and BSODs etc : Contrary to FUD, Windows 10 is actually very secure unless you want to download softwares from crackedfreesoftwares.ru. You DO NOT need a separate antivirus, Windows Defender is now enough. It runs like a dream on most hardware. And Windows do NOT force upgrades in the middle of work. BSODs have long been a thing of distant past. Basically am saying that repeatedly using the boogeyman of security, bsods etc isn't working.

3) Atrocious Desktop Environments : My main reason of ditching linux. Linux DEs are such a sad joke compared to Windows (or Mac) DE that it is not even funny. Let's start, shall we:

i: GNOME: The DE suffers from MEMORY LEAK for god's sake. Performance is pathetic, much much worse than Windows 10 or mac DE. This is also the main default desktop of linux world, which actually says a lot about linux. It's absolutely unthinkable for us to even use a DE which suffers from extreme memory leak, and developers doesn't even shows any intention of fixing it. It is just unthinkable on Windows. GNOME is also unusable out of the box, and you have to use random 3rd party hack job extensions just to get a basic fully functional DE. You need to download a software to get simple minimise button. Simply Unbelievable. And you guys, like a bunch of callous users, continue to support it and use it while happily doing ALT+F2 -> r. Lame.

ii: KDE - So, so many small random but crucial bugs that it is really impossible to list them all. They try to emulate Windows, and does a pretty poor job. For example, just use the "hover option" on KDE task bar. See the quality of preview. Does KDE devs even know how important that single function is? Small random bugs like this simply makes it inferior to Windows DE.

iii: Xfce - Thanks, but no thanks. Its 2018, not 1998. No hover option btw. Too basic and limited.

iv: Cinnamon - Too strongly tied to Linux Mint, a distro indulging in many questionable practises. Bad aesthetics. What up with that huge square-like menu? And why does the menu size increases when I add favorites?? It's already too big anyway. It just looks like a cheap rip-off of Windows XP.

v: Mate - Still too basic compared to Windows.

vi: Tiling windows managers - Unusable and irrelevant for non-developers, non-geeks.

Anyway, for me default DE matters. Even if the perfect DE exists somewhere in the wild, if a distribution chooses a subpar DE, it says a lot about them and their focus on user-friendliness. And since most of the linux world has enthusiastically opted for GNOME 3, a pathetic subpar incomplete DE, it says a lot about you guys.

4) Sickening Hypocrisy of the Community : Let's start, shall we - i: Saw multiple caustic rants about how MS Windows 10 provides a poor inconsistent UI because of 2 settings menu (legacy and metro). And you guys say this while primarily using a piece of jewel like GNOME 3. /s ii: Linux is all about control. Just don't expect a fcking minimise button by default on popular DEs such as GNOME and Pantheon. OK got it. iii: The arrogance and know-it-all attitude of GNOME devs and Elementary OS devs will put the arrogance of MS and Apple to shame. But i guess that's okay cause they are your own. iv: Continuously compare Windows from 2002 to Linux from 2017 and try to prove your point about how linux desktop is superior. Continuously attack MS for telemetry and control and while happily using Google services and FB. Giving Apple a pass cause they are unix. The list goes on and on ...

5) Last but not the least, atrocious softwares - Yeah guys, accept it, LibreOffice and GIMP sucks balls compared to MS Office and Photoshop. Krita gives MS softwares a run for their money, but LibreOffice and GIMP are simply cringy embarrassments. You will get fired if you dare to make a presentation with LibreOffice Impress in a corporate environment. It is so bad. VLC Media Player is out right bad compared to Pot Player on Windows. Nothing on linux compared to MusicBee on Windows. I won't even embarrass you guys by talking about JRiver Media Center. Most linux desktop softwares simply lacks the features, polish and finesse compared to their Windows counterpart.

And no, it is not MS or Adobe's fault that those softwares are not available on Linux. You guys continuously rant about evil proprietary software. Upstream major distros like Debian and Fedora doesn't even include proprietary softwares in their main repo. Then why should proprietary software companies release their softwares on linux? What sort of a weird entitled demand is that? Why should proprietary software companies accept second-class treatment on linux and hear some caustic remarks from GNOME devs and Debian greybeards? It was up to you guys to provide a real 1:1 alternative to MS Office, Photoshop and various other proprietary softwares, and you guys failed.

And yes, hardware support and display quality is much better on Windows. The fault again lies with Linux. If you treat proprietary drivers and firmware as second-class citizens, don't expect hardware developers to go out of their way to support Linux. That's an unfair demand.

Bye. After experiencing Linux, my respect for Microsoft and Windows 10 has increased by a 1000 times.

IMPORTANT EDIT - REASON FOR WRITING THIS POST - This problems have bugged me since the beginning. But I came to linux at a tumultuous time, when Ubuntu has abandoned Unity (so Ubuntu Unity 16.04 is a dead horse), and Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10 are only interim releases. So I cut linux desktop and Canonical some slack and waited for the next LTS. Today I tried Ubuntu 18.04 Beta and guess what? Lo and behold, the glorious memory leak is still present. And my head just exploded in rage. :/ So much effort, so much time spent tweaking, so much distro hopping, so much anticipation to permanently shift was all for naught. That's why I made this salty post.

I have the same experience as you. This is my first comment on this sub, but a lot of users here are living in their own universe. I see so many posts on the various Linux subs describing issues that are simply unthinkable. Windows just works, Linux just breaks. I still try learning Linux though just to increase my skill set. But going from win10 to Linux is like going from a Mercedes to one of those old cars you have to hand-crank to start up. It's just ridiculous.

So many users here are willing to spend an entire weekend fixing an issues with their Linux setup, but give up on Windows the first time they f*ck up something basic and get an error message. This sub has really turned me off from Linux in general. When they talk about Windows, it's like one of those infomercials showing someone trying to crack an egg and having it explode all over the place. Just ridiculous exaggerations with no bearing of reality.

... The most important point that he made (in my opinion) is that if you install a distro like Ubuntu 16.04.x LTS (a distro that is supposedly designed for non-techies, non-geeks, non-developers, you know regular computer users), a lot of the software in the repos is not the latest versions of things. If you want to run the latest versions, you probably end up Google-ing and finding out how to add PPAs. This is not hard but, it takes more effort and learning than downloading installers on Windows or Mac and then getting update notifications. Why should a user of any current version of a desktop distro not at least be offered to be updated to the latest version of apps? It's a valid criticism and it should be listened to and addressed. ...

The GNOME thing is an embarrassing. Looks like amateurish I don't understand what's going there in the GNOME HQ.

But truth be told: Linux has never been really polished, optimized and focused for desktop. The focus on Linux has been: servers, IT networks and now embedded/mobile, where the money is. In the desktop department Linux is OKish it can be used just fine, but I would agree that macOs and even Windows are better in that department.

Bluetooth audio is a pretty messy scene on Linux. For a long time I couldn't get any headset to work consistently on Kubuntu. You would have to go through this painful connect-disable-disconnect-connect-enable loop every single time.

Now I have things working on Fedora ... except for my laptop, which now consistently gets very out of sync. It didn't do this a month ago. It didn't do this on a previous version of Fedora. The whole thing sucks.

Once every few years, I try to give Desktop Linux another chance just for the kick. Here's my recent experience with Linux Mint 18.3. Enjoy :)

• In a test VM with Linux Mint as a guest, VirtualBox guest additions can't be installed (some strange compilation error).

Installing Mint on real hardware then went quite smoothly, but:

• USB Wi-Fi interface won't be found on boot, only after plugging out and back in. Need to manually add modules to init scripts. Not what granny expects from a desktop system.
  
  
• Installing Chromium is quite flaky: Clicking on "Install" in the Software Manager doesn't seem to do anything (nothing happens) -- after multiple attempts, it somehow magically appears in the Start menu.
  
  
• Software installation through the Software Manager is hit and miss in general.
  
  
• Suddenly, I get a "Busy spinner" as a mouse cursor all the time, everywhere, forever.
  
  
• Chromium: Switching themes gives huge graphical glitches, a mixture of all previously selected themes is used for various slices of widgets.
  
  
• Chromium: All taskbar buttons show the default Chromium icon, not the one belonging to the Chrome app.
  
  
• Chromium: Each taskbar button has a strange vertical line before the window's title.
  
  
• File Manager: Situations can arise easily where the File Manager recursively tries to copy a folder into itself, yielding an infinite "Preparing to copy: 4298742398743298423789234789234 files (42723484329742389423 GB)" dialog.
  
  
• VirtualBox installation (as host): Entire computer simply freezes (last seen outside of Linux in Windows 95) when launching a Virtual Machine.
  
  
• Installing current NVIDIA graphics drivers is impossible except if you're at least 3 rocket scientists.
  
  
• Even if you manage to install them, nvidia-settings forgets its settings on each reboot (yes yes, I know you can put them in a "Startup script" with special voodoo command line options, but Granny doesn't want to do that).
  
  
• Mounted samba shares simply stop working after an update ("Input/Output error"). 2 hours of Googling and trial and error reveals that the default protocol version simply changed from one version to the next and there's no mention about that, no useful error message, and no fallback, anywhere.
  
  
• Desktop compositing is much, much slower and laggier than on Windows with exactly the same machine, graphics card, and official NVIDIA drivers (verified to be working and in use). I mean, REALLY slow. Like 10 FPS. Dragged windows lag visibly behind mouse cursor.
  
  
• OpenGL is extremely slow. 12 FPS on Linux, 20 FPS on Windows, exactly same machine and test (WebGL Aquarium, browser doesn't matter).
  
  
• Lots of obscure character set problems when mounting network shares, too many details to mention.
  
  
• Some apps don't "see" network shares mounted in certain ways. For example, FreeFileSync simply doesn't list SMB shares mounted via the "Files" app, which makes it unusable except if you have mount -t cifs and fstab voodoo (which aunt mary doesn't have).
  
  

And this is exactly why Linux desktop share is still ~2-3% (and not because it doesn't come preinstalled on laptops, as Torvalds instead assessed: ChromeOS is an already popular Linux only because it "just works").

Not that Linux doesn't work, it works perfectly (significantly less troublesome than Windows and macOS, efficient, lightweight, secure, performing, versatile, free, portable, privacy-keeping and well documented), but you need to learn how to use it. And relying on GUI stuff only is not the right way of using it. Linux is CLI. You may use Graphical apps all the day long, and that's perfectly fine, but system administration, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting requires you to type commands in a terminal or on a virtual console. And most people don't like the idea (or are too afraid) of getting their hands dirty on terminals.

Here lays the explanation for the fact that all the people I know who attempted Linux (even ~ 10 engineering, physics, IT, computer science students forced to install it by University) but a single guy, dropped it after a while.

However if you bear it for the first 6 months you'll get accustomed to it, start appreciating it better and see reality for what it is, and probably never look back.

Hey everyone,

I've been using Windows since I was 4 in 1993. We had a Windows 3.1 box. I've worked in IT for a decade and I still do, but I have next to zero Linux experience.

How ... how does anyone do this? I tried to install Ubuntu server 16.04 raid 1 and every single step from partitioning on required googling and a restart of the entire process. I tried for eight hours just to get a bootable system on raid 1 and things just kept going wrong. Half the information I was looking up contradicted itself, documentation is incomplete and advice is anecdotal and missing important information. Screw it, I thought. I'll install desktop and get used to it before doing crazy stuff. Raid 1 was kind of a nice but not necessary thing. Surely a regular desktop install will allow me to learn and I can try again in a few months.

But holy sh*t, every single thing I want to do that would be as simple as "Google thing I want, Grab newest version from their website, Install or launch the exe" in Windows is a tedious stress-inducing headache in Linux.

As example: Google for a program to show sensor output like temperatures. Open hardware monitor looks cool. Oh it has dependencies. I don't know what mono is. Will it take up a lot of space or break anything else? Sh*t, I don't know. Oh, this forum post has another person trying to learn Linux and he wanted to use this program. Everyone is being rude to him. Oh, Linux can't interface with open hardware monitor very well. Why the f*ck was it the first answer on Google? There's no hardware sensor app like hwinfo for Linux? Okay, I'll search the Ubuntu apps for a temp sensor at least. There's only one. The only notes say that it needs something assigned in terminal to work. Why the f*ck doesn't the installer do that? Oh well, now I typed what it said to in terminal and it didn't take. I don't understand why. Oh, the official page on the app is misspelled for this command and I copied it directly. Okay, FINALLY I have a temperature sensor. And it doesn't display anything beyond the current core temp. Great.

As opposed to: "Google temp sensor. Find speedfan or hwinfo. Install. It runs."

Is the problem me? Is my windows brain just too stuck in a rut to understand why all this tedious BS is necessary?

I think at the least I need a decent explanation of why these are so different so I can maybe understand and work within my limitations better. Any guides I've followed are very straightforward "do ___ then do ___" so I haven't really learned anything about why Linux is the way it is, which seems necessary to functioning in it.

Thanks to anyone who read all that and can help.

I just had to set up Linux on my new machine for work, took 4 different versions before it would actually install then started booting to a blank screen when I installed the software I needed, took me 2 days of non-stop frustration but now I can finally do something productive.

Basically IMO Linux shouldn't be compared with Windows or Mac, it's made by engineers for engineers, it's not designed to be user-friendly, rather it's designed to give power to the user and assumes the user knows what they're doing.

It really sucks that there isn't really anything between over-priced and underpowered macs with *nix power and free-but-held-together-with-duct-tape linux.

So I stopped using [pirated] Windows a year ago since it was problematic. Buying is not an option. So I switched to Linux since it was free, open source, and I am a Science student so I thought it would be pretty useful. A year have passed and I am still a noob (was very busy with my exams already, learning Linux would have been a burden). I have a Dell Inspiron Laptop with Intel HD Graphics 5500, 4 GB RAM and 1TB Hard Disk. I have been switching distros and these are the experiences so far:

1. Ubuntu 16.04 - Was good but it was a little slow. Plus it wouldn't detect my headphone half of the time.
   
   
2. Elementary OS - Was extremely slow. Took 30 minutes just to boot to login screen.
   
   
3. Return to Ubuntu 16.04
   
   
4. Switching to Ubuntu 16.04 Budgie Remix - Was good. Better than the default Unity both in looks and performance.
   
   
5. Ubuntu 16.04 Xubuntu - Thought this would be lightweight, so installed it. The performance was OK and the look was really bad.
   
   
6. Ubuntu 17.10 - tried to install. My laptop crashed. Couldn't even get past booting screen.
   
   
7. Switch to Ubuntu 16.04 - Performance became slower day by day.
   
   
8. Ubuntu 16.04 Lubuntu - thought that my laptop is low spec, so why not switch to the lightest distro? Well, surprise, Lubuntu encountered issues. The screen flickered often, especially when coming out of suspend.
   
   
9. Finally, now I am in Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia - The performance is OKish, lags sometimes, hangs out of nowhere.
   
   

I will not talk about gaming experience, but in short it is awful.

So, those of you who are new to Linux, this is my message: be cautious before installing Linux and understand Linux very carefully. Linux, as an interface for personal use, is terrible.

Some advice: Slow down on switching distros, and find out where your performance bottleneck is by looking at your system usage. It could be the drivers you're using, or applications that aren't properly optimized to run on your OS. Dell offers some Linux driver support; look into that and see if you can replace some of the generic ones with Dell's suggestions.

...

Sounds like some poor configuration or hardware interaction (5400 rpm disk?)

...

The slowdowns and hangs are probably something to do with the disk. At a guess is it made by Seagate? They just love to stall for ages.

The other obvious hang is after doing a large disk write then flushing it to disk. There is a few turntables for this. I wish the distro's would fix these by default. Which is to limit the dirty cache relative to the performance of the disk.

...

Your problems are originating from "Intel HD Graphics 5500"

Re: Windows vs Linux:

Over the course of the past ten years, I have tried Ubuntu on three separate occasions, on three separate laptops. Each time, I ended up going back to Windows because I couldn't get Wi-Fi to work.

...

Linux is great if you're a dev. I've found that it hits hiccups any time you are trying to do something a bit more consumer oriented, and have to interact with the world of Windows and macOS systems, as well as proprietary software.

Linux was also so customizable, and you could set up some pretty impressive desktop environments, however if something went sideways it would be quite a bit of work to get it sorted. ...

...

Windows just works.

Linux is buggy and unstable, regardless of what people say (I'd rather use macOS over Linux everyday).

I've tried Linux multiple times and distros and never takes more than a day to find a major bug on the system or a problem with software.

...

It depends heavily on the hardware, just like Windows. It's also heavily distro and version specific. I haven't been able to get Fedora to boot from USB without failing in 10 years, but Ubuntu runs every time.

Laptops are another issue ... if you want a Linux laptop, you're best off buying one from System76, Pine64, or Dell/HP with Ubuntu pre-installed. Wireless support has always been iffy if you try to install it on a laptop that was designed for Windows.

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As someone who uses Ubuntu quite often - The Non-LTS releases are effectively betas. The newer, bleeding-edge ones are there for those who want them, but you're a lot more likely to find bugs outside of the LTS release.

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[Currently with LTS] the Ubuntu Store doesn't even work, as a major bug but was reported on their channels.

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I used to use Linux as my main OS. What happened is that I found I was needing to go into Windows more and more because of the lack of support of programs and hardware I needed for working which became a much more present issue in my life as I got older and spent less time casual computing. There were a lot of alternative software options for Linux but I found most of them to be unpolished and buggy. If you're okay and enjoy the whole troubleshooting aspect, then Linux might be right up your alley. I got to a point where I just wanted everything to work though and spend less time trying to make it work myself.

Linux can often break more frequently than Windows - no one likes to hear this and I'm sure people will say the problem is the user etc etc.

esp for rolling release distros, or point release when you do e.g. dist-upgrade, and other times with just regular updates, things can break.

With Linux it then becomes a cycle of 'hope you can find the answer on google, try it in terminal, see if its fixed, try something else' unless you are an expert. This is because of package dependencies in Linux, if you break one others break too. Often you can need to compile from src etc.

Windows has its own version of dll hell, but each program gets its own dependencies managed via WinSxs so you can't get global breakage due to a package. People will tell you that Windows Updates can cause problems but that's really rare - they can be slow though.

You get all the benefits of open source, choice, no ads etc but lets dispel a myth - Linux isn't any more performant or stabler than Windows 10. Windows is rock solid stable, supports every hw ever made and is very fast. It also has better battery life (I've tried both powertop and tlp).

I love Ubuntu, but have no more time to resolve the endless bugs it creates.

I adore Linux (Lubuntu is my current distro of choice) and have been using it for more than ten years. It has taught me a ton about how computers work and even created some professional opportunities for me writing about tech.

But as an increasingly busy small-business owner, I no longer have an hour a day to spare sifting through the endless amount of bugs that the OS throws up and am reluctantly about to switch to Windows. I love customization, but at this point in my life I also need something that just works and doesn't impair my productivity.

This week alone:

• Oracle VirtualBox has become basically unusable for me. I launch it and just see a black box basically. Some weird theme-related bug that even the good folks over on AskUbuntu have been unable to help me resolve. I don't trust VMWare not to randomly break down again, as it has done in the past, so like keeping a VM on VirtualBox as a backup. Now I've zero backup and there's a good chance that I won't be able to run a Windows VM at all at some point in the near future.
  
  
• Simple Screen Recorder no longer works. The Continue button is missing. I spent hours trying to install the very-latest version only to continuously run into problems compiling the package with Cmake.
  
  
• Shutter has taken to not starting on system launch and occasionally crashing the system.
  
  
• Pulseaudio has mysteriously decided to stop recognizing Chrome as an output stream, meaning that although I can connect my Bluetooth headset through Bluetooth Manager, I can't switch audio over to it - at least with this GUI.
  
  
• Autokey has been great except when I try to add a new Unicode-based phrase, which crashes the whole system. I've wasted hours trying to come up with workarounds and attempting to debug with people on its users' Google Group.
  
  

I'm certain that there are a few more. And that if I knew more about Linux, or had more time to devote to resolving these issues, that I could fix some of the above. But I don't feel like I should have to.

Why do things have to be like this? It occurred to me yesterday that I would be more than happy to pay an annual subscription to a service that both guaranteed a level of customization that neither Windows nor MacOS offers, but also had some inherent stability so that bugs like this aren't par for the course. I'm not a poor student any more. But I still love Linux and the philosophy that underpins it.

Or perhaps asking for both stability and what we love about Ubuntu is chasing after the impossible.

... the Mint devs do many things badly.

Rather than type out a long reply here is a Debian dev explaining it:

"Linux Mint is generally very bad when it comes to security and quality.

First of all, they don't issue any Security Advisories, so their users cannot - unlike users of most other mainstream distributions - quickly lookup whether they are affected by a certain CVE.

Secondly, they are mixing their own binary packages with binary packages from Debian and Ubuntu without rebuilding the latter. This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable. With the result, that the Mint developers simply decided to blacklist certain packages from upgrades by default thus putting their users at risk because important security updates may not be installed.

Thirdly, while they import packages from Ubuntu or Debian, they hi-jack package and binary names by re-using existing names. For example, they called their fork of gdm2 "mdm" which supposedly means "Mint Display Manager". However, the problem is that there already is a package "mdm" in Debian which are "Utilities for single-host parallel shell scripting". Thus, on Mint, the original "mdm" package cannot be installed.

Another example of such a hi-jack are their new "X apps" which are supposed to deliver common apps for all desktops which are available on Linux Mint. Their first app of this collection is an editor which they forked off the Mate editor "pluma". And they called it "xedit", ignoring the fact that there already is an "xedit", making the old "xedit" unusable by hi-jacking its namespace.

Add to that, that they do not care about copyright and license issues and just ship their ISOs with pre-installed Oracle Java and Adobe Flash packages and several multimedia codec packages which infringe patents and may therefore not be distributed freely at all in countries like the US.

The Mint developers deliver professional work. Their distribution is more a crude hack of existing Debian-based distributions. They make fundamental mistakes and put their users at risk, both in the sense of data security as well as licensing issues.

I would therefore highly discourage anyone using Linux Mint until Mint developers have changed their fundamental philosophy and resolved these issues."

Source

Read the comments for more fun examples of how bad the Mint dev team are.

If you want to run a Debian-based system, run Debian or Ubuntu.

Edit: No they have not resolved any of these issues in the last few years since this was posted.

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The main issue is that Mint doesn't care about security. To quote glaubitz again:

"On Debian, I open up Google and type "Debian CVE-2015-7547" and I am immediately presented with a website which shows me which versions of Debian are affected by the recent glibc vulnerability and which are not. You cannot do that on Linux Mint which therefore disqualifies itself for any professional use."

Due to the frankendebian issue mentioned in my previous post the fact that Mint uses Debian compiled packages (they don't compile themselves) they are reliant on Debian for any and all security fixes. If their frankendebian isn't compatible with the security patches made by debian (due to dependency issues) then you have to wait for Clem et al. to actually patch it themselves. Given their history of rejecting patches and their general security stance I don't have any faith in them to actually do things properly.

Mint also blacklist packages from updates, this means they won't get patched if there is a security update for them. While there is an option buried within Mint to allow these to update, this is not something a noob would be doing. This means your system could be vulnerable even when you think it's fully patched. That is unacceptable.

Mint's selling point is it's ease of use; unfortunately that ease of use comes from the devs having a willful disregard of licencing issues. They ship their ISO files with pre-installed Adobe Flash, Oracle Java packages as well as multimedia codecs (which people want) which violate intellectual copyrights and patents. Unless the maintainers of a distribution want to violate copyright laws intentionally and make themselves attractive targets for lawyers, there is nothing they can do to alleviate that. Debian and others aren't not shipping those packages because they want to make life hard for their users, it's because they cannot, legally speaking.

(This is the reason Debian forked Firefox and Thunderbird and distributed them as Iceweasel/Icedove.)

In this respect Ubuntu actually has licencing agreements which allow them to distribute third-party software through their official third party repos without violating the license terms of the software.

There's a class of reasons that I dislike Ubuntu specifically. Ubuntu has at least three completely different installers, all of which use different sets of preseed commands. Documentation for Canonical's own installers is pretty bad. Automating Ubuntu installs for a large environment can be difficult, as a result. I think Canonical is a bad community member, with a history of competing with the community rather than contributing. They repeatedly offer applications which aren't as well supported as an application developed by the broader community, and then after a few years, shut it down. (Examples: Mir, Unity, bzr, probably snaps). If I build something new on top of a solution from Canonical, I'm probably going to have to rebuild it from scratch in a few years' time. Partially as a result, if you look at contributions to almost any major software project for GNU/Linux, Canonical is either very small, or absent completely. They're more of a consumer of Free Software than they are a contributor.

I was a full time Linux user for over a year (even bought a Dell Precision 5530 with Ubuntu preinstalled, to support the movement and have HW fully supported by Linux). But after all that time I had to go back to Windows. I just got really tired of tinkering around with my system. I just want something that is standardized and works fully out of the box.

On the effing Laptop, those were some gripes I had:

• I used my machine as primary machine on work. That means I needed often go to meetings with the machine, internally and externally. Just take your Laptop, close it and throw it into a backpack, right? Noooo. Suspend doesn't work reliably, even after countless tweaks from the internet. Often times it initially appeared as if it was fully suspended, but after a couple of minutes it turned itself back on again. In my backpack. In a sleeve. It overheated so bad, I couldn't touch it for more that a fraction of a second without burning my fingers.
  
  
• Wanna watch a movie over BT speakers? Well, sometimes BT worked, sometimes not. Oh and also it liked to turn the screen off after the normal timeout, despite me watching the movie in full screen on VLC.
  
  
• Wanna have proper RAW image previews in the file manager? Download this package from the official repo. Oh, it's broken and crashes every time. Just manually install a newer version from a ppa and manually configure the thumbnailer service.
  
  
• Oh you tried to use more RAM than the System has? Apparently the OOM manager in the kernel is buggy and without additional software like earlyoom, your system will just come to a screeching halt.
  
  
• Oh hey, you wanna use more up to date packages than those from the standard repos? Either use a rolling release distro, which might break more often (I tried to boot manjaro and it crashed on hecking boot, even with failsafe graphics enabled). Or use a more recent version of (for instance) Ubuntu, which comes with GNOME which doesn't work anywhere as smoothly as Unity7 and also has random crashes for some reason. Oh, and the touchpad tapping doesn't register as reliably as on Ubuntu 16.04 on any other distro, even Ubuntu ones. Oh and don't get me started on KDE. It don't like its default appearance and I don't want\ to spend a couple of hours tinkering with my system to not have it look like trash.
  
  
• Use a standard Logitech MX Master on your laptop over BT? No problem works fine. For 5 months. And then it suddenly starts lagging extremely with no remedy besides reinstalling the entire OS (or maybe debugging it for a couple of days but I don't have time for that or any interest).
  
  
• Let's try out ElementaryOS since aesthetics of my system is important to me and it looks promising. Boot the live CD. Whoopsie, when I click 'reboot' nothing happens and when I click 'shutdown' I get a kernel panic. The heck?
  
  
• Copy lots of large files to a USB drive. The progress bar moves instantly to 99% percent and you have no clue, how long it is going to take. Also, the progress bar may reach 100% and the file manager say "operation completed", but when I try to safely eject the USB drive it takes another 10 minutes! before I can unplug it since the data has actually only been copied 10%. During that time, a lot of file operations will be painfully slow or just not begin at all, since the disk scheduler or what do I know is pinned 100%. Apparently it's an issue with the buffer sizes or something. So just copy some configuration options into your sysctl.conf and now it actually works. But now some copy operations take waaay longer than before (even accounting for the 10 minutes additional waiting time) and always more time than on Windows.
  
  

Don't get me wrong. I still have a soft spot for Linux and think it is promising. And I fully understand and support you, if you are running it on your own systems. I love it as a software development platform. But I'm just tired of tinkering with my system and just want it to work. While having it not look like trash and have recent up-to-date software available and being stable. Windows has it's own slew of issues, but none of them are so nagging as the Linux ones. At least for me.

Disclaimer: Two months ago I had to swap my mainboard, because apparently the Intel GPU was defective (maybe an effect from the heat incident, who knows) and Windows (I was dual-booting at that stage) kept crashing because of it. So it may very well be possible that some of those issues appeared because I had a bad mainboard. But the thing is, I only discovered it because Windows clearly stated the crashing module in the BSOD - so I very quickly found the culprit. I have no idea if I would have found the source if I stayed purely with Linux.

Some flaws in Linux [I omitted some items which are outdated IMO]:

• Lack of video game support.
  
  
• No error feedback: "When you run a program through the panel or start menu in Linux and it fails for some reason, you are not notified at all. You have to run it through the terminal if you want to see the error messages ..."
  
  
• Software installation: "packages - of which there are many variants, all incompatible with each other."
  
  
• No actual firewall: "In Linux, any application can connect whenever and wherever it wants to, while you are none the wiser. ... Windows has had better firewalls such as ZoneAlarm for a very long time ..."
  
  
• And of course, choosing a distro is a struggle in itself that Windows users don't have to deal with.
  
  

[In email 10/2019:

Linux security is pretty much an illusion. An application can do what it wants in the folders it has permissions in - which usually is your whole home folder. Many distros run sshd by default on startup which allows any shmuck to try to crack your password. And some distros have really weak default passwords for root, which presents a real danger. I actually had it happen recently since I guess I didn't even think the root user is enabled on Slackel. Why the f*ck would you have sshd on by default though? It provides nothing but an entry point for hackers.

My article is old and since writing it I've had way more stuff to add in:

• GTK3 apps don't look the same as the GTK2 ones. Add Qt on top of that and you've got three different looks. Terrible.
  
  
• Editing the bootloader is a nightmare.
  
  
• PS Vita [Sony PlayStation Vita] does not properly work with Linux.
  
  
• Neither does Nintendo Switch ...
  
  
• Or smartphones.
  
  
• Certain applications use different save dialogs than the system-wide one. Which means your bookmarks will be ignored (I think it's the GTK3 vs GTK2 issue again, but not sure).
  
  

Many, many more. Windows is still worse though, so whatever. Not that it justifies this stuff, just shows how much of a swamp we're in.

]

I went from macOS to Ubuntu last year, then came back to macOS. This year I gave a chance to Arch Linux and loved it! Stayed with it for about 4 or 5 months then ... I came back to macOS.

When it comes to specific desktop usage some things are really off on Linux. Some points that made me switch back:

• The lack of good (imo) proprietary software. Apps like Devonthink, Banktivity, Omnifocus and Logic are really polished and unfortunately mac-only. Office apps and Adobe Suite are a huge deal too. This won't affect you if you don't care for non-FOSS apps.
  
  
• Xorg is a hot mess. Remapping keyboards in linux is HELL! The following is based on personal experience: I've spent a whole week and a few more days learning about setxkbmap, xkb, xcape and xmodmap. Set up everything? Good! Want to switch from X to Wayland? Goodbye to all your cool keyboard hacks that you spent hours (maybe days?) programming. Nothing I know is even closer to Karabiner Events. It actually came to the point that my keyboard workflow on macos is way more productive than using i3/awesomewm. Example: my Caps Lock is a 3 mode modifier (Esc when I tap and release, command + control when I hold Caps Lock. This in combination with any other key becomes any function you want, and when I double-tap it and hold it becomes Control (very useful in vim, since this would be Esc and Control instantly). Regular keys can act as modifiers without disrupting the standard function key. e.g: If I press "S" key it outputs the "S" letter but if I hold it and press h,j,k,l it controls arrow keys. "D" letter in combination with h,j,k,l becomes my mouse cursor. Sane way of making custom deadkeys for accessing common characters used when I'm programming and the list goes on.
  
  
• GUI fragmentation. I use the terminal a lot but Apple set really good Human Interface Guidelines for graphical applications. It makes the experience of using macOS more polished than the constant battle of GTK vs QT on Linux.
  
  
• macOS has a great integration with iOS. I hate this phrase but things just work.
  
  

So after seeing posts and comments along the like of "I installed linux on my grandmas PC and shes never been happier" I decided to try out linux on the desktop and boy did it make me appreciate windows more.

So off I went to get Ubuntu, right off the bat my wifi radios were dead, no issue. Let me just troubleshoot it in settings, but no linux has to use the fancy-pants terminal. Honestly why in 2020 am i expected to edit a text page with a bunch of commands just to get my wifi to work. If linux really ready to go mainstream why does support use the terminal so much?

They tell you about how linux runs on everything but that certainly isn't the case, there are compatibility gaps and telling people that it runs on everything is dangerous as people will only realize that after the fact they've installed it. Its not just the community even canonical the company that runs Ubuntu said the same thing in their post.

Then there's the issue with the peripherals, most things should work and it does but if you have anything a little bit specialized it doesn't. In my case the printer worked but the scanner did not and fixing all of these issues requires you guessed it going into the terminal.

Now this is fine if Linux is being pushed as an enthusiast OS but its not. All over the internet you see videos along the like of "I switched to Linux and you should too". Or comments along the line of "I installed Linux on my grandmas computer and shes been so happy". A cursory glance across YouTube and blogs makes you think that the rest of the world is full of idiots for sticking with windows.

But what they don't tell you is that linux breaks (all operating systems do) and when it does you're gonna be up the creek without a paddle, because there's no customer support line that you can call. I dont understand how people can push linux as a mainstream OS when there's no customer support. The best option you have are forum posts, but they've seen the same thing a million times and they ask you to read the effing manual (there are some great people on the forums), but forum posts are not a substitute for customer support. In the case of windows or mac you can at least call up a relative that uses the OS and get their help. But with ubuntu you might be out of luck.

Lets go back to that grandma example for a sec, Zoom is pretty common right now and gam gam wants to install zoom on the Ubuntu install you so graciously installed, she goes to the download page (linux one) and it needs you to put in the name of your distro, your architecture (64 or 32) and the specific version, on other OSes its as simple as hitting download and double clicking the installer. I mean you can walk your grandma through that process over the phone, "hey grandma hit that blue download button, hit that icon at the bottom and just click yes for everything else", but on linux its more convoluted.

I mean linux has had decades to become a fully matured desktop OS and at this point it just hasn't. And most of the benefits of linux dont even apply to everyday users,

Security, IMO windows is secure, if you dont do dumb sh*t on windows youll be fine windows defender is gonna take care of you.

You can get windows for free now from the Microsoft web site, sure you can't see the source code but most people dont care.

Privacy, Sure I'd love it if people were more privacy-conscious but looking at how popular facebook is most people dont care about privacy (they should). But for me I'd sacrifice a bit of my privacy to apple or MS to have a good reliable OS that does everything, if that's the price then so be it.

Wrapping up, Windows and Mac cater to the user, they work for the user, where as with linux it expects the user to do all the work. If you have old hardware that you'd love to keep using, then by all means try out a linux distro. But if you have modern hardware remember the grass is greener on the other side.

This is what happens when you allow engineers to act as designers. Everything "works", but nothing is easy to use or configure.

And when you do have an issue, a swarm of angry, frothing at the mouth hobbyist programmers will emerge from the walls and take three paragraphs to call you stupid but not at any point engage with whatever problem it was that you were having.

I wanted to make a 'Linux Flaired User Bingo' card with spaces like:

• Ultra specific use case that's only applicable to 17 people on the entire planet
• Linked to a 15 year old github project with only 2 contributors and 34,000 pull requests
• Jargon used that has no google search results
• User laughs about Windows not being able to perform some vague, unclear task
• Actual help!
• Stallman quote
• Post history is 10% linux, 10% windows, 80% /r/conspiracy
• Unbelievably knowledgeable 3 day old account that posts three times in one thread and never again

Sending people to the terminal to edit config text files in Vi/Vim/Nano/whatever just to get things to work is insanity, and I just want to make this point: Anyone who says they never had to google how to use a terminal text editor is lying, and if you have to google how to use a text editor, your text editor is sh*t.

No one ever googled "How do I write text in notepad".

Re: Biggest problems / frustrations with Linux ?

Linux has been seriously going on my t*ts lately, so...

• Localisation is a f*cking mess. Some apps seem to use the system language, some seem to use the formatting locale, even though it's not set as a LANGUAGE but only as a format. And some just use whatever f*cking language you have installed, regardless of priority. If you're 100% English, it's fine, but if you mix locales or want to use additional languages, you're better ready to jump through some hoops.
  
  
• Japanese input (and other Asian scripts, apparently) is an unmitigated disaster.
  
  
• If I see one more app being described as "lightweight", I'm going to scream. It's just code for "awful UI". I have 32 GB of RAM and a 2080 Super. I don't need my PDF reader to be "lightweight", I need it to have enough buttons to be usable and not look like it was made in 1992.
  
  
• Windows is like a pile of building blocks. It's kinda messy and inconvenient but if one block is bad, you just pick it out. Linux is like a tower of building blocks. Much nicer to look at and more stable but God help you if one of the bottom blocks fails. If Windows fails, you just ignore the error message and keep playing games. If Linux fails, you better don't have anything else planned this weekend.
  
  
• Sometimes, sh*t just goes wrong without rhyme or reason. I wasn't even changing the volume, why did the sound stop working all of a sudden?
  
  
• The community is obsessed with command line. Rearrange PDFs with a GUI-less command line tool? Have you been smoking crack?
  
  

On the other hand, I have to say that gaming on Linux works much better than I thought. I just wish there was a Linux version of Occulus Link.

freedesktop.org is a project, which aims to reduce the fragmentation of Linux desktop. They work on interoperability and "host" software such as systemd and wayland. It used to be called X desktop group (XDG), but now they are killing off X11 ("death of Xorg" will be beneficial for the Linux desktop as a whole), so they "rebranded" themselves. GNOME and KDE work with them.

You don't send bug reports about anything to them. You can discuss "standards" stuff, e.g. new wayland protocols on their mailing lists.
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GTK and clutter are GUI libraries developed by the GNOME team. Qt is a GUI library developed by the Qt company (KDE is using it). These libraries are used by various GUIs. Usually, the programmers using them are those who file bug reports about these.