2025 is the year of Linux desktop for me

Microsoft finally declared my machine obsolete and keeps bugging me that I should buy a new one to finally experience the joy of Windows 1.

I decided that this is a good opportunity to finally ditch Windows altogether and move to Linux.

Why even use Windows? 🔗

I've always used Windows because I like when things are working by default, and I don't want to fiddle with my computer too much. I have too much work to do, and I don't want to spend extra time debugging why screensharing is empty or various other problems with the base system.

This was always a trade-off. Linux is better for various development things, because it's a primary target platform for what I do. PHP, Node, Rust, NPM, Docker are all tools that work better on Linux. Most notably, they are faster because they use Linux idioms that are slow on Windows. I've always accepted this trade-off because I wanted a working system first.

Windows didn't age well 🔗

The problem is that Windows is getting more and more broken, and we are getting to a point where I have to fiddle with the system either way.

I have a file called windows-garbage-knowledge.txt where I collect little hacks and workarounds for various issues that keep coming up on Windows. I created this file because I couldn't keep all these obscure commands and menus in my head.

I can't even keep the file up to date at this point. I didn't realize how much of this brokenness I'm encountering every day until I actually used the Linux machine for a while and then came back to the Windows one.

If you want to get a taste of all this suffering, I've included a list of some examples I regularly encounter at the end of the article

Now, to be fair, many similar issues exist on Linux, too. Password input on Ubuntu randomly switches input language, sometimes my screen FPS drops to like 1, and there's no way to get out of that without a restart. Wi-Fi was broken when I tried to install Ubuntu.

In the end, that was always the reason why I didn't want to use it as default.

But while Windows is now somewhat similar (or worse) when it comes to this system stuff, it's worse for actual work I do. As I come back to my main Windows machine, I ask myself: why do I deal with all this crap and on top of that get slow build times, slow editor, slow terminal, and missing unix tools?

There's also a question of a general direction. Windows doesn't seem like it's going to get any better. Every update just messes up something new, make something slower or more broken, more bloated. I don't see Microsoft doing meaningful improvements anytime soon.

The year of Linux desktop when? 🔗

On the other hand, the Linux ecosystem is still messy, but it's slowly getting to a point where you can get a pretty decent default experience. Notably because there are now companies like Framework or System76 that provide first-class support for Linux, and there are also changes in the ecosystem (e.g., the broad move to web-based tools).

I think we might be remarkably close to the actual year of Linux desktop.

The missing piece is what I mentioned in the beginning - some reasonable default experience. Even though I bought Framework, which has first-class Linux support, I had to install Ubuntu myself and almost immediately ran into issues - Wi-Fi connection was weirdly broken in the wizard, and it didn't stop there, I still encounter issues that I can only fix because I'm a power user.

At this point, all it takes is some of those companies to focus on this for a while, eliminate all these little hiccups and make a nice package I can buy and be confident that it'll mostly work out of the box (until I start messing around with it).

And it's not like they are not trying. Framework has employees in charge of their Linux support. System76 already sells machines like this. Valve's work on SteamOS is particularly interesting because they don't target power users.

Either way, I'm slowly migrating my workflows, and so far it's been great. The QOL improvement on my work is pretty big and outweighs all the Linux quirks. I should've moved sooner. I'm still a bit not sure how this will compare when I migrate my primary machine, but I'm already noticing that I gravitate towards the Linux machine more and more.

Windows user experience report highlights 🔗

Here's the list as promised:

• Windows settings. Apart from the fact that every interaction in it has like 2-second latency, it almost never starts up first time. It's getting to a point where almost every time I open it, it's stuck on the splash screen

• Start menu. There's this funny process called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe, and I can tell you - what an experience this Start Menu is. First of all, for something that is one of the primary navigation tools, it has incredibly high latency. 1s to respond to a click is just crazy. But more importantly, it's just broken so much of the time. Sometimes you click search and nothing happens. Sometimes you click the start button, start typing to trigger search, and nothing happens. Sometimes all icons disappear. Sometimes the popups for different windows don't work. I have to kill explorer.exe and restart it. I don't know how non-technical people fix this.

• WI-FI - I use ethernet cable because I have no patience for this crap. But before I did, every few days, I had to restart the driver or trigger the funny troubleshooting dialog, which would sometimes do something and sometimes not. Sometimes just triggering the dialog fixed the issues before it actually did anything. Sometimes it found an issue but couldn't fix it. Sometimes you have to trigger this two times to fix it.

• Bluetooth settings say my headphones are connected even though they are not. If the headphones are connected to another device and I disconnect them, It's impossible to connect them to a Windows machine because it says they are already connected, even though they are not.

• I can't keep the machine idle for a while, because then Windows decides to fry my CPU and fans go nuts.

  • Whenever this happens, I instantly stop whatever else I'm doing and go move the mouse, just to stop this nonsense.
  • I understand that it's doing some security scans or whatever, but is it really necessary to cook my computer for that every time I don't touch it for a while?

• If you put the computer to sleep, it randomly restarts itself, probably to update?

  • Two times in my life, we thought a robber broke into our house, and then it turned out that windows just restarted my computer in the other room and resumed some podcast playback.
  • Everytime I install Windows, I have to go dig out the extremely obscure command to re-enable the hibernation and use it almost exclusively to make sure that Windows doesn't restart the machine and do something unexpected.

• Windows consumes so much space, it's unbelievable. 100GB disk was not enough to keep the machine in a working state, because the OS just keeps filling the space. Even if you have another disk with plenty of space, there's too much stuff that has to be on the primary disk, so you still have to spend a ton of time fishing for various methods to free up some space to keep the system working.

  • This is especially infuriating when you find out how much of that space is consumed by garbage, e.g., 5GB of uninstalled Windows apps that you can't delete without going through obscure permission settings for each file separately.
  • This is pretty irresponsible of Microsoft, because they sell machines with just 32GB drives (soldered!). My sister had one, and it was constantly broken because it couldn't update itself. The system was bugging her that she needed to update, but every update would tak ages and run out of space, and there was no way to fix it.