I don’t agree with this article. Besides the point about the big distros getting all the support (which is bad). It doesn’t affect me as much, since I use a niche distro (Void Linux FTW!). I’ve happily been running Linux for the past 5 years (which is slightly past the date range of this article…)
I can’t think of one experience where I couldn’t build an old version of software I needed on Linux. If the project has a makefile, I have full confidence that I’ll be able to make && make install without trouble.
Granted, most of the software I run is CLI based, but this it’s still true for all the graphical applications I run.
While I don’t use Windows (at all) and rarely touch my Mac, I can’t really say the experience is as good with them. Some of my friends have found the Wine runs old Windows software better than Windows does (ironic, considiering that Linux is a better Windows than Windows). And the reason I switched from Mac to Linux was because the development experience was being crapped on with every update.
This does all come from the perspective of a developer, but I still use it as a desktop user and would be restricted if I had to use OSX.
Old but relevant. I gave up trying to run Linux on the Desktop for about the same group of reasons. It isn’t any one particular problem, more that the whole thing would break in new and creative ways on every update. Weird problems constantly coming up, particularly with sound and video. I can fix any one of them, but the constant stream of work required to keep the system up and running just wore me out. I just spent all day dealing with tech problems, I want to come home and watch a video, not do more debugging.
And so, to Windows/MacOS/ChromeOS I go, and have no desire to return. They all have pretty good unix-y command line environments now as well as having the rest of the OS be stable and reliable.
I don’t agree with this article. Besides the point about the big distros getting all the support (which is bad). It doesn’t affect me as much, since I use a niche distro (Void Linux FTW!). I’ve happily been running Linux for the past 5 years (which is slightly past the date range of this article…)
I can’t think of one experience where I couldn’t build an old version of software I needed on Linux. If the project has a makefile, I have full confidence that I’ll be able to
make && make installwithout trouble.Granted, most of the software I run is CLI based, but this it’s still true for all the graphical applications I run.
While I don’t use Windows (at all) and rarely touch my Mac, I can’t really say the experience is as good with them. Some of my friends have found the Wine runs old Windows software better than Windows does (ironic, considiering that Linux is a better Windows than Windows). And the reason I switched from Mac to Linux was because the development experience was being crapped on with every update.
This does all come from the perspective of a developer, but I still use it as a desktop user and would be restricted if I had to use OSX.
Old but relevant. I gave up trying to run Linux on the Desktop for about the same group of reasons. It isn’t any one particular problem, more that the whole thing would break in new and creative ways on every update. Weird problems constantly coming up, particularly with sound and video. I can fix any one of them, but the constant stream of work required to keep the system up and running just wore me out. I just spent all day dealing with tech problems, I want to come home and watch a video, not do more debugging.
And so, to Windows/MacOS/ChromeOS I go, and have no desire to return. They all have pretty good unix-y command line environments now as well as having the rest of the OS be stable and reliable.