Comment by tombert

1 day ago

I've had wifi drivers not work with fresh installs of Windows as well, so that's hardly a unique Linux thing. I've also had to reboot Windows into special modes because apparently a driver from a Broadcom WiFi card was "unsigned", so I had to disable the check for that.

I've also had registry corruptions, and I've had unprompted updates brick my hard drive because Windows Update is a terrible piece of software, because as far as I can tell the Windows "repair tools" have never worked for any human in history, and neither has System Restore.

I've had updates in Linux break things but never so thoroughly as the time my mom got an automatic update where she literally could not boot in at all (because I think that the automatic update to Windows 11 that she did not want or ask for screwed up the boot keys).

I haven't had a Widows driver not work in decades.

On the other hand, Linux doesn't try to copy my home directory to RedHat's cloud, or force some AI assistant that I don't want onto me.

As much as I am a nixOS user myself, I think regular users should be directed to use atomic, immutable distros (as is the case with most of the distros growing in popularity) because of the robust update system along with the ease of rollback should something go wrong. Regular distros (really comes down to the package manager of choice) are much more brittle, perhaps even worse than Windows Update.