this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Personally, the issue is ease of installation and configuration of programs.
Some things (edit: admittedly, most of the "important basics", such as web browsers, Steam and Office-suite equivalents) are just as simple as they are on Windows and iOS with just clicking a button and using a wizard of sorts, but some things need you to parse a series of terminal prompts and figure out how to rewrite parts of the instructions to fit your particular machine and setup.
Often I end up missing or misunderstanding some step and it doesn't work and I have no idea why.
It's not impenetrable and it's not a problem exclusive to Linux, but it does make setting things up a bit more of a chore.
I got Ubuntu on a laptop now to test out how to use that as my daily OS before I commit to figuring out how to swap over my Windows 10 desktop sometime next year and it admittedly is MUCH EASIER now than when I last tried around 2008, but I still run into problems.
I'm currently trying to schedule a weekend where I can diagnose why my raspberry pi won't boot after a power outage when it's survived that in the past and another weekend to figure out why the self hosted tandoor app I got successfully running a few months ago suddenly stopped and cannot run now, even after what I thought was a clean install.
I wanna switch. I do. But so many steps of it are full on projects. I'm learning a lot and it gets easier every step of the way, but it's still at a state where I need to schedule time to address these things that "just work" on Windows.
Edit: I understand why this is the case. A lot of these things are free, open source projects made by teams who don't necessarily have the time and resources to make their program out-of-the-box ready for every conceivable software and hardware set up out there. And I understand why someone might think that a corporate backing of resources might be able to address that issue, but I agree it isn't really isn't in accordance with the goals of Linux or helpful to the point of moving away from these corporate structures.
I disagree; I’d say the issue is HAVING to install and configure. Windows got where it is by coming preinstalled with a functional default configuration, allowing IT to set group policies to make and enforce configuration changes.
That can all be done with Linux today; it just isn’t.