this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Windows saves me prescious time to do other things. I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does. I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by modern Linux.
Most hardware works out of the box. You don't even need to do an automated install. For other things, I can plug in a printer and it'll do the hard work for me. Ditto with Nvidia cards (AMD and Intel work out of the box)
As for games, Linux can now run something like 90% of Steam games and for the vast majority, there's no ****Ing around to do. Just install Steam and download your game. You may want to check ProtonDB to ensure your title is supported but in general the only games with showstoppers are those that use anti-cheat.
Linux distros have been rocking the app store model for a long time now, with the option to do things the Windows way if a vendor really wants to go that way.
None of that takes time or learning on modern distros.
If you had used Linux or MacOS for most of your life and then switched to Windows, it would get in your way. The reason you feel comfortable with Windows is because you've spent a lot of time learning Windows quirks.
I believe that both MacOS and Linux, once you understand the groove of the "unix" style, makes more sense and are smoother to use. I have a lot of experience with all three operating systems.
All three systems have weird quirks that will take up your time. These days all three handle stuff like drivers for sound cards, network cards, printers, etc perfectly well. For example on my Fedora install my printer/scanner worked right out of the box. All I had to do to use it on a new install was go into my terminal and type in "scanimage [outputFile]" in order to scan something.
I didn't have to mess with any drivers at all - generic open source drivers were able to communicate with the printer automatically. For Windows, I would need to install some sort of driver or software to work with the printer.
That's an example where Linux is a much smoother experience than Windows.
These days, for consumer hardware, you'll get perfectly adequate drivers automatically via Windows Update, so the days of needing to download drivers from the manufacturer are gone on Windows, too. There are a couple of features my printer has that need the vendor's driver instead of the Microsoft one, but they needed the vendor's proprietary Linux driver instead of the FLOSS one from the kernel last time I looked, too. The one win I think Linux has here, though, is that it's much more likely the FLOSS Linux driver will still work on an up to date system in a few decades than it is that there'll be any driver compatible with Windows in that era.
As far as I know, you still need to install some sort of 3rd party application in order to scan things. Printing to a "normal" printers handles just fine on all OS's these days, even the mobile ones. This is why I mentioned scanimage. It's a terminal utility that comes with a lot of different distros.
The user of the OS doesn't have to do anything. Just go into terminal and type in "scanimage" - don't have to worry about downloading an app, don't have to worry about setting up drivers, etc
It was just an example I thought of to show that Linux in certain areas is going to be simpler and smoother than Windows. It "just works". The main crux is familiarity with the terminal.