Comment by andsoitis

My early Linux experience involved a ton of manual configuration, documentation, and head scratching. But for the past 10 years or so, using Linux has felt like less of a fight than using Windows, and things have tended to "just work" for me.

> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.

It depends. I've been running Debian since 2020-ish. I picked my hardware to run Linux. Nothing much changed for me between Debian 10 and 13 tbh.

> I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.

I would say Windows is a bit worse now. I find I have to use Rufus to enable some magic option to able Local user installation (I am not having a MS account), setup choco, install the stuff via choco and then set a desktop background.

> While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above

Most stuff just does work. If you are running exotic hardware, then sure. But if you have a bog standard desktop or laptop it will work.

The biggest problem with Linux tbh is that if you aren't using Gnome or KDE, the UI is just bit jank in some places.

I run Opensuse on daily basis for more than 3 years, and no it definitely doesn't require "week-end tinkering". like zero tinkering.

> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.

Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.

I think the ‘out of the box’ Linux desktop experience has improved a lot. To me the difference is in the long tail of software. On Linux the variety of toolkits historically available means depending on what software you’re using you may encounter a lot of inconsistency- I certainly do. On the Mac far less so.

The only tinkering I do on Linux now is to do stuff that I would not be able to do on other systems anyway (or at least def not as easy).

It definitely depends on your distribution. My relatives running Debian don't even know how to tinker with it or open a terminal.

My experience is just the opposite: Linux requires more up-front tinkering, but once you get it into a shape you want, it tends to stay that way and get out of your way. Windows, by contrast, requires much more ongoing active maintenance, and previous releases were prone to simply shitting the bed without explanation or recourse. MacOS is better about this than Windows, but not as good as Linux.

Now if you're talking Arch Linux... sure. The Arch devs love yanking the carpet out from under you and then telling you "you should have read that forum post from a week ago if you didn't want your system to break". But other distros, like Slackware, Debian, and Void, are quite stable across updates.