#the pipewire transition is also a thing

[ailurinae]

Eh, I trust the kernel. And low-level and CLI userspace is ok too. The realm of the GUI though? It don't got me.

if nobody else got me i know linux got me

can i get an amen?

[ailurinae]

The Linux desktop is a disaster right now. It was overall in a better state in 2008 TBH.

Wayland is clearly the future and the better option overall, Xorg is getting bare minimal maintenance, but right now the only real options for Wayland are barebones ones like Sway, which need things like menus, taskbars, notifications set up independently, or KDE or Gnome which are truly obnoxiously large and heavy. KDE in the Plasma era also has an obnoxious amout of churn in libraries.

Aside from X11/Wayland issues, we are also in the pulseaudio/pipewire transition, though that should be rather faster and easier. There is also the mess of flatpak/snap/appimage. There are theoretically some benefits of that style, but all of them have major issues, plus the fragmented landscape between the three of them.

And last but not least, the ongoing move to the "portal" system, which again can have theoretical benefits for functionality and permissions, but right now the transition is pretty rough.

I honestly wouldn't recommend the Linux desktop to basically anyone right now. The one exception might be for people with super minimal needs and skills on the computer, who have family who can set it up and fix it for them. People who just do email, some web browsing, video, maybe some Word/Excel (if they can use Libre Office instead or use Wine for MS office)

Games are probably the best they have ever been on Linux, with Valve's investment, but the rest of the desktop experience is just too obnoxious right now IMO. So I just keep going with cleaned up Windows 10, and WSL and VMs

(I used Linux as my primary desktop for over a decade, from about 2002-2014ish I think? I used KDE and various lightweight window managers, including tiling WMs. I could do the full setup needed for getting all components working together for Sway or others, but I simply no longer care to)

I hate to be the annoying person who recommends Linux to everyone but like... how could you not switch to Linux at this point.