Comment by beAbU
18 days ago
You appear to have forgotten the state of linux until fairly recently. For literal decades, MacOS "just worked" and it meant that the user did not have to fight their OS to get shit done.
In the professional world where "I did not get any work done today because an update fucked my wifi card" is not a valid excuse, MacOS (and Windows to a lesser degree) triumphed. Large orgs who can afford a whole IT department might be fine deploying linux on their fleet of desktops, but there is always a tremendous amount of testing and validation behind the scenes to ensure that everything "just works". This just was not the case for the indy professional, or small tech startup.
Now, in the past 5 or so years two things happened: 1) linux reached a state where a "normie developer" could take a chance and install it on a work machine and be just fine, and 2) MacOS has regressed enough where OS updates are risky now, and the "it just works" slogan does not really apply any more.
It is still hit and miss on laptops with Linux, even those from Tuxedo, System 76 or XPS, plenty of forum comments to search for.
2 days ago I saw a colleague not using his dock. Turns out he can’t update the dock firmware under Linux, and has to live with having a 20% chance of his laptop detecting external displays.
He recently gave up trying to have a wake from sleep that works well too.
I mean, Linux is great, but the paper cuts are still very numerous.
Although I fully agree that the papercuts are sill numerous, allow me a counterpoint:
Recently I bought a cheap epson inktank printer/scanner, with built in wifi. Getting it working on my work Windows PC was a huge faff, struggling to find the right drivers and all that. The main installer for some asinine reason needed location permissions, which was disabled by MDM, so the default route did not work. Let's not even begin talking about getting scanning working...
On my Linux Mint personal laptop, the printer just appeared after I connected it to my network, and it worked perfectly. The built-in scanning app detected the scanner and allowed me to scan without any configs.
This is the first time for me where linux "just work"ed, and I was truly delighted.
That’s taken it from a paper cut to a limb amputation.