Back to Linux - Ep 10: My Opinion on the State of Linux Desktop

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

This video is a part of my series Back to Linux that I dedicated to covering my transition from my Apple MacBook Pro to a ThinkPad throughout the last year.

The previous videos in the series, in case you haven't watched them, will help you get context on this video, but either way, this is just a summary of what I found, so I guess it's OK to skip those?

So here goes my opinion on the state of Linux Desktop in 2021, or should I say 2022?

Before I start

As I said, this is just my opinion, which most probably is wrong, so please don't judge me on this, but do correct me if it happens to be the case so that I can learn from you. Also, please do not get mad at me just because I mention a few negatives about the Linux distribution you may be obsessed with. At the end of the day, these are just tools, and if you get offended by anything that I might have said in this video, I don't know what to say anymore. In the end, Linux is all about choices, so we need to hear more voices than just a few people gate-keeping the community and scaring the newbies away.

My Findings

With that out of the way, these are a few of my findings on resuming to Linux after a couple of years:

• Not to my surprise, whatever you need to do or achieve in Linux today, the options that are available to you are even more than what was available back when I first tried Linux somewhere around 2008.
• With the increased number of options, a few things have been long gone, but the tools that have stayed, have improved a lot. However, sometimes it still feels to me that we aren't there yet at least for me to be able to invite my Mac user friends and family members over to this side, or maybe I need to improve my marketing skills.
• One of the massive changes in the way people see Linux today comes due to Valve's proton, at least for the crowd that was hesitant to switch from Windows to Linux because they believed not "all" games run on Linux.
• Linux still seems to have issues with newer hardware but in almost all cases, there are multiple ways to solve the problem
• With the constantly evolving Linux kernel, especially when using a rolling release distribution, things may keep breaking. Moreover, a fix that might work today may not work tomorrow, even on the same machine.
• I learned that if one plans to use a machine to run Linux, avoiding Nvidia would be a better way to go. I know I'm stuck with it now on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme, but I'll keep this in mind in the future.
• Pretty much all Linux distros can help you get the job done unless the hardware you're running it on makes it difficult and possibly even impossible to run a particular distro. Some distros are better suited for some hardware more than others.
• If you ignore the supremacists and gatekeepers, most of the Linux community is more than happy to get you out of trouble, even go out of their way to help you, just in case you get stuck. This of course depends on the nature of the problem and given you're not trying to achieve something unique that no one might have come across before, like running a very obscure distro on alien hardware.

I'm a hundred percent sure some blessed soul will throw in a comment saying "Go to Ubuntu then!", to which I'd say: (a) That is where we all have started at a point in time, well, at least most of us have, (b) It doesn't work for me, (c) I can do whatever I like as Linux is about freedom, and (d) You never know!

My further plans

I've been reading your comments about BSDs, so that might as well be a series of adventures away from Linux, but that can wait. Before I step out, I'd love to explore as much as I can over to this side of the wall.

Outro

That's all that I have for this video, and if you found it helpful, you know what to do. Just be a little kind in the comments. As always, a subscribe will be helpful too. Thanks for watching it till the end, may the maker watch over you, see you in the next video!