Leaving Linux

bigyabai

> For a good period of my life I don't think I had same Linux install on my personal machines for longer than three months. ...this seems like the obvious problem? Both of my NixOS installs are ~4 and 1/2 years old now. If you're using distros that break more frequently than Windows does, I can see how you'd get tuckered out.

ocd

I don't see the reason in this, especially now of all times with the current situation with software vendors and geopolitics. It's sensible to have an Apple laptop like a Neo or Air around, but giving up Linux as the primary or entirely? I think this is allowing an imaginary convenience at great cost to seduce you into thinking this is the solution to impulsive or compulsive behavior in hopping around between too many programs and distributions.

jujube3

Oh no! Anyway...

loloquwowndueo

> I'm 30 this year, Heh fun to see I’ve literally been using Linux since before this person was born.

VadimPR

I'm using Linux for exactly the opposite reason - it's less hassle than other OS's. And by that I mean every OS breaks, Linux is just simpler to fix when it does (and these days - Claude fix do it for me). It's not mandatory to customise Linux and mess with it the moment you get your hands on it - you can also run a stock Ubuntu install which will be a great working & gaming workhorse that doesn't add hassle to your life.

bsergean

I switched from Linux to Mac around the same age I think, I know Linux works much better now but Mac just works. I remember trying to connect a ThinkPad with an AMD/ATI graphic card I had paid extra to an external monitor on my ex-wife laptop, what a massive PITA and it never worked, it would just work with the Intel builtin GPU. I'm glad I suffered a bit with Linux it taught me vim and resilience and using the command line / shell, but for my day to day I'm happy with Mac. Ironically I just bought a Neo for my home laptop, I'm a bit annoyed by the keyboard because at work I have a 15/16 inches Macbook Pro but I don't do much on it so it's ok.

tambourine_man

Another shout-out for MacVim. My favorite editor for years, I use it in conjunction with Vim in the terminal. I’ve been trying to move to NeoVim but can never find the time. And regular MacVim/Vim is already awesome.

cube00

> These days everyone is just using the same five electron apps installed via flatpack anyway. > So a desktop environment with an bespoke suite of apps (text editor, video player, file manager etc), seem less and less important anyway. Can't say I've seen this, my main daily apps are all native and installed with a package manager. Even if we were all using the same apps why would that mean we'd all jump onto a Mac?

aljgz

> I'm Tired Boss > I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had. I'm 45 and computers are more exciting than ever. We choose what to get excited with, or oven nothing at all, which happens to most people at some point. I've never been a die hard fan of Linux, but in the past decade and half found the trade-off for me to favor using Linux. It's a device made by people like me (umm much better than me in some fields, but the mentality is similar), for people like me. It does not disrespect me in design, functionality, in PR talk, and my relationship to the system is not adversarial. For now, my incentives to use the system aligns with that of the system creators.

aleda145

I really wanted to like using a Macbook. I've given it a go a few times, amazing battery life and great build quality. But I can't get over how it locks you down completely software wise. I wanted a sane WM and tried skhd and yabai. They are a collection of hacks on the accessibility API, and they will break whenever Apple decides to. To me that's unacceptable as a daily driver

dlcarrier

tl;dr: The desktop environment the author is using is adopting mac OS unusability features, but doing so slowly, so jumping to mac OS will allow full unusability without the wait.

sicktriple

I somewhat sympathize with the poster here, I too am a chronic distrohopper and if you are just the type of person with shiny object syndrome it can be really exhausting constantly being yanked around by your interest in other distros. I've been on gentoo for a year now and that's the longest lasting install I've ever had. Planning on keeping it that way, but you never know. I also have a macbook that I use for certain proprietary apps that don't have Linux clients and it can be a weirdly peaceful experience just knowing you're locked into macOS's stack and there aren't a myriad of options you could install at any moment should you get bored. That being said, macOS sucks.

graemep

> Today the various desktop environments seem to have largely converged, sharing the same flat design language and icon styles. Go to settings and select something other then the defaults. >Customisation seems to have completely fallen by the wayside in favour of a more curated experience controlled by the desktop environment. Maybe true of Gnome. Not true of KDE or XFCE. Its also an odd reason to switch to Apple. > These days everyone is just using the same five electron apps installed via flatpack anyway I am not What isbhappenning here seems to be someone who has tired of tinkering but cannot resist tinkering with Linux so has chosen to switch to an OS that does not allow tinkering rather than use a Linux distro with its defaultsm

azuanrb

Looking through the replies, the theme seems pretty clear. Everyone has their favorite distro, which is great btw. But that is the issue imo. If you just want something stable and boring, Linux is just not it. Every distro has its own goals and target users, so a lot of the effort gets spread across the ecosystem. With macOS or Windows, for better or worse, everyone is working on the same platform. So more people are working on the same problems. With Linux, everyone is kind of doing their own thing. It is basically the same Android versus iPhone argument. More choice and freedom on one side, more consistency on the other.

pockybum522

Weird. I see a lot of my friends disenchanted like this, but a lot of the reason I'm not is Linux and more importantly, open source projects in general. The more of an effort I make to learn the open source alternative to whatever adobe or what have you I used to use, the more I enjoy computing. Are they quirky? As hell. But by and large, are they enshittifying like the big box software? No, most of them are getting better, and rapidly. Personally, I find there's nothing like actually looking forward to a software update like I did in 2005 and expecting new, useful, features and then actually getting them in an update to restore my sense of computing whimsy. Obviously do what works for you. This is just not my experience.

ranger_danger

The reason I left Linux was because I didn't want to be associated with the high-ranking developers that openly abuse and demean others with unprofessional attitudes for decades on end with impunity. I know this is an extremely unpopular position that many people will disagree with, but it's my decision and I made it. I'm not asking you to follow. Feel free to tell me how much of a misguided/stupid decision it is. I think if everyone were able to "separate the art from the artist", then boycotts wouldn't even exist. Same goes for OpenBSD, GNOME, GrapheneOS, Kitty/Calibre and many other applications... I have been personally attacked by several people from all of these projects just for asking simple questions, and I know many others that have gotten it much worse. What's wrong with going where you're treated best?

NoboruWataya

Of course you will get tired if you change your OS every three months. I have used roughly the same ArchLinux setup for years now, probably over a decade, and it is remarkably stable. Things break very occasionally but are easily fixed (and are usually a result of my own tinkering with experimental software). Also regarding everything convergence of desktop environments, there are plenty of more interesting options out there, but they don't call themselves "desktop environments" - tiling or scrolling window managers, for example, which are often infinitely configurable though scripts.

whalesalad

I am doing the opposite. I have been a Mac user since ~2005. My first Mac was actually a Quadra 610, but I was a wee little lad back then. I started my career on a G5 Power Mac with dual 23" cinema displays (studio displays? can't remember what they were called back then). Then the intel Macbook/MBP, etc. I think my favorite mac of all time, or the one I look back most fondly on, was my 2012 Macbook Air. In 2022 my M1 mini started to die due to what I would call SSD abuse. I absolutely punished that box - rode hard, put away wet. The SSD began to show signs of failing. I was doing way too much with it - so I took a spare R720 2U server I had and turned it into my remote dev box. Thanks to VSCode's SSH remote feature - you can hack on a project like it is on your box. My workflow is usually my IDE for coding and then a separate terminal running tmux for interacting with the box. I did this locally at home, with the R720 down in my basement. The cool thing about developing like this is that if you are traveling, the dev-ex is no different. Tailscale or some other VPN and boom your workflow continues to work, albeit with varying amounts of latency. Mosh helps here. 2x CPU's (albeit old Haswell gen), 256GB of ram, 2x NVME mirror with pci-e add-in ... it performed really well as an always-on remote dev machine. Quickly I realized I was kinda outgrowing the R720, though, and so in 2023, I built a beast Linux workstation (Debian 12) with 128GB of memory, 13900k, nvme mirrors, etc and after fine tuning KDE and getting it all dialed in, I started to really enjoy it from a hacker standpoint. Everything for the most part "just worked" including my new Apple Studio Display that I am typing this message on right now. Took a little while for the kernel to catch up but at this point it is working over Thunderbolt, the camera works, speakers work, built-in hub works, etc. I can even do brightness control from my kb. Meanwhile, my mobile dev box has been an M2 air. With the 'all compute is happening on a remote node' the M architecture Air devices are really quite incredible. I am just running an IDE and an iTerm window (with all compute happening on the main host), so battery life is measured in days. I will work at my desk in my office for a while, then pivot to the deck or the couch or a coffee shop and thanks again to ide-over-ssh (I am on Zed now, no more VSCode) and tmux ... everything feels exactly like it does at my desk with zero interruption. It also means I can slam my laptop shut at any given moment to do other things, while software and agents continue in the background. Combine with a 1500VA ups under my desk to mitigate power blips and this is a dream setup. But the more I used KDE and Linux ... the more I started to ask myself if it was time to pivot to a Linux notebook too. The only qualms I had was knowing that no PC will ever beat 1) the battery life and 2) the touchpad performance of a Macbook. Then the Framework 13 Pro was announced. I watched the release announcement and immediately preordered one. I went back and forth about cancelling the preorder many times, thinking to myself that my trusty M2 air was just fine for a 'dumb terminal' type of laptop. But the 120hz display and the desire to dogfood a modern Linux notebook, combined with the fact that the market/prices for RAM etc were skyrocketing and I was locked-in to a good batch 1 price kept me on the preorder. Also ... I have 2 german shepherds and they shed a lot. Hair gets into my macbook keyboard which is very difficult to get out. Removing and cleaning key caps is tedious. The fact that I can replace the entire KB on the Framework (or entire top cover) for like $100 is hugely compelling for me. Combined with their track record to continue supporting and offering upgrades for older gear - it was a no brainer really. Modern Mac notebooks are unfortunately wear items (like brake pads) - at some point you throw them out. The tide might be shifting with the new Neo and its' repair-ability, though. Glad I did. The framework has been really really good. Not gonna lie, Apple still wins on battery life. But I enjoy having a freeipa-domain-joined box that is 100% open source, running all my familiar KDE tweaks, 120hz, etc. The keyboard and trackpad are actually incredible. Keyboard surely beats any notebook I have ever had. So now I am sort of spiraling on Linux toys. I just got a Chuwi Minibook X ( https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230 ) and its running Fedora, like my Framework Pro, and it's quite fun as well. For less than $300 it has 16GB of memory, 512gb nvme, 4 cores, and a touchscreen display that is quite decent (still fine-tuning the auto rotate stuff, which is fun in and of itself). I can't believe Fedora 44 'just works', with suspend, and wifi, and speakers, and bluetooth, and full disk encryption, .... less than $300! I've been using Linux on servers and for software dev since ~2005 but never felt like "the year of the linux desktop" was really here. That totally changed a few years back and now I am all-in. Still love the Apple ecosystem (and use an iPhone) but very very happy to be driving Linux on all my computers. I even updated my gaming rig (7900XTX) to run CachyOS. With the exception of anti-cheat games like COD or BF6 I have zero qualms. It runs everything else really well. And it doubles as a local AI inference machine thanks again to the beauty of open source and Linux.

AlienRobot

>I'm Tired Boss >I'm 30 this year, and computers don't have the same level of whimsy and excitement as they once had. When I was young everything was new and interesting, it felt like there was so much experimentation and innovation. Today the various desktop environments seem to have largely converged, sharing the same flat design language and icon styles. Customisation seems to have completely fallen by the wayside in favour of a more curated experience controlled by the desktop environment. It's funny. I share the same thoughts but it sent me from Windows to Linux. And I'm very, very tired as well. I wouldn't recommend you to install Windows, because Windows is spyware. But I wouldn't recommend you to install Linux, because Linux is crap. You know what I would recommend instead? Not use computers. If there is a way to avoid them your whole life... just do that. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life having to deal with... you know... all of this.