As a former Arch/Debian enjoyer on all my rigs in between 2012-2017, I can say several things but they might be outdated as of now. I haven’t rechecked it so here goes the list of things at that age:
Anything remotely related to Nvidia, especially if you had switchable laptop graphics. Running games was a nightmare and a coin flip. Sometimes you can get games to work, but you got an awful screen tearing even in OS, sometimes it’s vice versa.
PulseAudio was problematic. Sometimes booting the pc up resulted into missing audio output or input, or both. Sometimes, under heavy load, lots of audio was crackling until PulseAudio server was rebooted. Rebooting PulseAudio required restarting many apps so they even produce sound.
Drove away for like 2 months, came back to dead Arch install after updating it. Switched to Debian cause I realized I value stability over newer stuff. Until I bought newer hardware which just didn’t work at all, can’t recall what that was to be honest.
At least during 2012-2015-ish, any browser scrolling was jittery. Like, any. I heard it’s fixed right now but every time I used to boot Windows, it was completely different web experience.
As soon as I started using laptops, I noticed that my battery was draining like 2-3 times as fast. Shouldn’t be an issue nowadays I hope.
Printing was hell of a nightmare. Especially when I tried bringing my laptop to the office printer.
Probably also related to Nvidia, but still: connecting external monitors never yielded out-of-the-box experience I expected to see. Nothing used proper resolution, scaling or refresh rates. Lots of things required manual configuration every time.
Office software in general. Thank god most people switched to web alternatives right now.
Back in 2012-ish years, Flash was still common and it generally refused to work in many distros. Especially with Nvidia graphics.
There are plenty more reasons I decided to ditch Linux on my workstations and the ones above are just “honorable mentions”. The biggest thing I found myself doing is tinkering with my setup much more than doing actual work.
So currently I just use a Windows laptop and WSL when I need local Linux. And of course I monitor and configure hundreds of Linux machines at work. I also have a Macbook Pro 16 mainly for iOS apps debugging and watching movies in bed.
I can say I’m currently neutral to Linux, Mac and Windows these days. They have their own use cases for me and they all allow me to reach my goals in their own way. Just getting best of each world, I guess?
As a former Arch/Debian enjoyer on all my rigs in between 2012-2017, I can say several things but they might be outdated as of now. I haven’t rechecked it so here goes the list of things at that age:
Anything remotely related to Nvidia, especially if you had switchable laptop graphics. Running games was a nightmare and a coin flip. Sometimes you can get games to work, but you got an awful screen tearing even in OS, sometimes it’s vice versa.
PulseAudio was problematic. Sometimes booting the pc up resulted into missing audio output or input, or both. Sometimes, under heavy load, lots of audio was crackling until PulseAudio server was rebooted. Rebooting PulseAudio required restarting many apps so they even produce sound.
Drove away for like 2 months, came back to dead Arch install after updating it. Switched to Debian cause I realized I value stability over newer stuff. Until I bought newer hardware which just didn’t work at all, can’t recall what that was to be honest.
At least during 2012-2015-ish, any browser scrolling was jittery. Like, any. I heard it’s fixed right now but every time I used to boot Windows, it was completely different web experience.
As soon as I started using laptops, I noticed that my battery was draining like 2-3 times as fast. Shouldn’t be an issue nowadays I hope.
Printing was hell of a nightmare. Especially when I tried bringing my laptop to the office printer.
Probably also related to Nvidia, but still: connecting external monitors never yielded out-of-the-box experience I expected to see. Nothing used proper resolution, scaling or refresh rates. Lots of things required manual configuration every time.
Office software in general. Thank god most people switched to web alternatives right now.
Back in 2012-ish years, Flash was still common and it generally refused to work in many distros. Especially with Nvidia graphics.
There are plenty more reasons I decided to ditch Linux on my workstations and the ones above are just “honorable mentions”. The biggest thing I found myself doing is tinkering with my setup much more than doing actual work.
So currently I just use a Windows laptop and WSL when I need local Linux. And of course I monitor and configure hundreds of Linux machines at work. I also have a Macbook Pro 16 mainly for iOS apps debugging and watching movies in bed.
I can say I’m currently neutral to Linux, Mac and Windows these days. They have their own use cases for me and they all allow me to reach my goals in their own way. Just getting best of each world, I guess?
I am glad that you are at peace with your workstations now, but just for updates on current situation in Linux Desktop world:
Glad that Linux have noticeable progress in its lifespan