devRant - A fun community for developers to connect over code, tech & life as a programmer

I just wanted to add my opinion about Linux. I have played around with computers since I was 5 and the last three years I have worked professionaly as a software developer. I have tried Linux many times and have to work with it regurarly on Raspberry Pi's, routers, servers etc. For two months ago I decided to try out Linux as my main desktop operating system. As my machine has some uncommon hardware (Celeron 3450) there was trouble from the start. Getting it installed wasn't as easy as just creating a bootable usb. I had to start a virtual machine and patch the iso with a script to make it bootable. I also had to install a third party bootloader, so just installing it probably took about half a day. To start off, I tried Manjaro, basically Arch with some extras. It looks great, was fast and easy on resources but I couldn't manage to install some essential tools that I needed. So I patched Linux Mint instead and installed it. I've tried all the DE's available, but unfortunatly everyone has some problem. Either it's sluggish or having screen tearing problems and/or buggy. I settled on XFCE as it seemed to work the best. Unfortunatly I have to live with horrendous screen tearing even though I tried many different window mannagers engines like compiz and metacity. Also whenever I plugged in a USB mouse, the keyboard died, requiriing a reeboot. Power settings were messed up so the laptop locked and asked for password twice sometimes and the battery life was 3 hours worse than Windows. The desktop theme bugged so window buttons (maximize, close) disappeared sometimes. I also had problems with the panel not showing when pressing the windows key, apparently that is impossible to fix. Firefox is also kinda bad, wasting like 15 pixels at the top for no reason and not offering many options though Vivaldi got this covered at least. Touchpad was weird too, didn't support gestures and had bad accuracy. During the install I was asked if I wanted to enccrypt my home folder, so I said yes. The other day I need to create a new partition and do some resiszing so I used gparted. Unforutnaly I managed to remove a partition that was encrypted, so after a reboot I coulnd't get into the OS anymore.

That was it, I used Linux Mint as my daily driver for 2 months and every single day I probably spent 0.5-1 hour fixing things. The OS was always in the way for me and what I wanted to do. Don't get me wrong. I love Linux in the sense that it is efficient and open (source) and it have basically taken over in alla areas except just desktops. The desktop experience (doesn't matter which DE) just plain sucks, or I just had bad luck.