Back in 2001, I discovered Mandrake Linux, and fell in
love with it. It was on a cover disk for a Linux magazine,
and I ended up buying it to try it out.
I started with KDE 3, and that was an amazing desktop. I
had /no/ problems getting the thing up and running, even
with the ass-old Compaq Presario tower I had at the time.
It ran like a top, never wanted to drop, and that's a
miracle according to some people I know. Regardless, I
used it for a while, then moved onto Mandriva once that
became the upgrade path.
Then I moved to Slackware...
Then Red Hat and Fedora Core...
OpenSuSE?
Knoppix!?
Kanotix! (I miss klik)
Then came Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and I stuck with that for years.
Upgraded quite a ways...until things started happening.
The community was getting more toxic, KDE 4 and GNOME 3
made myself and other second-guess our decisions, bad
decisions all around were being made by high-ranking
members of varios distros, and the whole Unity/GNOME fight
left a bad feeling for many users who actually liked the
desktop as it was.
Eventually, one of my lovers suggested I give Gentoo a
try, and I won't say I fell in love at first sight, but I
do love the distro. It takes forever to set up, but it's
basically a self-made LTS (Long Term Support) release in
some ways.
That kinda came to an end in 2012, when I lost a /lot/
of data due to file system corruption from a bad update.
It also corrupted the backup drive I had at the time (I
didn't exactly have money for a 1-2-3 system back then),
so I lost quite a bit. Basically anything that I hadn't
burned to DVD or CDs at the time.
I was so devastated, and to add onto the fire, I lost my
mother to cancer not long after. However, she left me some
money, and I ended up buying a 2011 Mac mini to replace my
desktop. I also installed Windows 7 on the thing, which I
had on my laptop at the time as well, and honestly, I
just didn't want to look back.
### So, why not Linux? ###
Before I point out anything else, I'll start with this:
Linux is the most online-required OS for software
installation, though not by nature. It's /extremely/
difficult to get software installed on Linux without
access to the Internet these days. You're pretty much
expected to have a broadband connection to use a package
manager, to handle all of the dependencies, or deal with
constant updates via Flatpak or Snapd. There /is/ a
solution where you don't have to use a package manager,
called AppImage, but much like its predecessors, it's
barely used by projects in favor of online-first options.
Then there's the updates. I mentioned above the botched
update that killed my Gentoo install, and thanks to
Windows 10 and modern Linux, I've become somewhat paranoid
and traumatized by bad updates screwing over my systems.
Even worse, forced/background updates really irk me, and
more so when the stability of your OS depends on keeping
everything constantly updated with the potential to just
lose days of work because you're treated like an unpaid
beta tester whether you want it or not. It's a horrifying
experience, and makes me miss the days of dial-up when I
didn't need to worry about it as much.
Next up: core software. I've not had a single really good
experience with Wayland, despite getting it shoved down my
throat harder than Windows 11's spyware. Pipewire is just
as problematic for me as PulseAudio, and sometimes even
more so. KDE Plasma and GNOME are both following the very
same modern UI designs as Windows and MacOS that I dislike
in their recent iterations. And that's not counting the
hell I've had with `systemd` since /that/ got shoved down
my throat as well. And sure, there /are/ distros that
don't use most of these things, but the software is moving
toward requiring them, so it's not like I can really avoid
any of it if I wanted to.
On top of all of this, the Linux and FOSS communities have
become increasingly hostile toward anyone who doesn't
/conform/ to how they work. The playful little flamewars
between Vim and Emacs users have grown into flat-out
disdain, elitism, and /othering/ those who disagree in any
way. It's frustrating to seek help from a community that
actively hates anyone who /"doesn't think for themself"/.
They'd rather people just RTFM and figure it out on their
own as a form of gatekeeping.
There's also a growing trend of political /hacktivists/
who will claim people are "facists" or something else for
not using Linux. That just makes me want to point toward
a certain set of Linux YouTubers who support the very
thing they're trying to claim I'm part of for not using
the OS, but... Not like they'll listen.
And finally, the non-core software. There's very little I
like using with a GUI on Linux, and what I do use is
either outdated, needs /old/ Linux libraries to work, or
may become busted completely if Wayland takes over.
I don't like the paradigms of KDE Plasma. I don't like new
GNOME, and none of the other compositors interest me in
any way. I like my Trinity Desktop, or GNUStep with
`windowmaker`, but still nothing I would use in terms of
GUI apps. It'd all be on the terminal, because it's the
only place in Linux where things aren't constantly being
changed or broken by updates. And there's nothing wrong
with terminal apps, but I'd like something more graphical
on a machine where I have that option.
### Thing is, I DO use Linux ###
I still use Linux, but I no longer trust it as the basis
for my daily driver OS. The hostility, updates constantly
breaking things for me, and rocky upgrade path with newer
technologies are just too much for me these days. I need
/stability/ in my actual work environment, and modern
Linux just doesn't offer that anymore. I use it a VM for
things where I /absolutely need/ something more modern, or
on a server for things where I need a /server/, but then I
just go back to doing what I was doing on Mac OS X
afterward.
Linux just doesn't provide what I want out of my general
productivity machine right now, and I'm not going to try
to force myself to use it. I already attempted that, and
I began to start hating computers as a whole because of
that little experiment. I want to enjoy using my system,
not throw it against a wall and go back to a typewriter.
Wordgrinder is a great word processor, but I much prefer
something like Scrivener that's made specifically for my
needs as a long-form writer. `mutt` is fine as an email
client, and new Thunderbird...exists, but old Thunderbird
has a better UI for me. `newsboat` is fine as an RSS feed
reader, but NetNewsWire just does it better for me. And
so on, etc, etc.
In the end, it comes down to preferences. I've come to
prefer something that isn't Linux, and that's fine. We all
do our own thing. It's why they're called /personal/
computers, after all.
