There’s a phrase that gets passed around the tech scene: “Linux is only free if your time has no value.” Because, yes, Linux and other open-source apps are free to download and use. In a world driven by money, you’d expect the free version to overtake the paid one. The problem is, the paid option…just works.

Sure, until the paid option does something anti-competitive or gets too expensive or shuts down entirely, and you have to switch to a different paid option, sometimes burning dozens of hours in switching time (and/or hundreds of hours of work through lost or corrupted data) in the process. Not to mention the transition costs of just figuring out the new thing. Why not just switch to something that won’t go away, or be changed under your feet?

The problem is that it needs that initial time investment to get it working the way you want it.

Maybe I’m just enough of a tinkerer in any situation that I’ve put pretty much the same amount of time into fiddling with my Linux settings as I did with my last Windows computer.

If your hardware isn’t working properly, you have to find drivers that run on Linux; if the developer never made Linux-compatible drivers, you have to figure something else out.

People have been talking about this for my entire life, but in the past year of my switch to Linux, it has literally never happened once. I downloaded a new, open-source driver for my drawing tablet because it had some extra features that I wanted, but even it worked out of the box. I’ve never experienced this incompatibility. Honestly I’ve never even had trouble with software I wanted not being available for my distro.

Am I doing Linux wrong?

Windows doesn’t have this problem.

LOL.

Installers made for Windows don’t need any special TLC;

ROFL!

you double-click them and they work.

OH wait they’re serious?!

Once they’re installed, they work. If you need to install a driver, it works. You open a document in Office, it works.

Sure, if you don’t run into a permissions issue. And if the system registry doesn’t get corrupted. And if you’re not on an ARM machine. And if your TPM is the right version. And if you’re on the right subversion of Windows. And if a previous install didn’t leave some remnant of itself behind. And if you don’t want to do anything with an Apple device at all. And if sometimes you have the right fonts installed?

Honestly, I think I’ve had fewer problems installing Linux applications than Windows applications, but I can’t attest to that. I think I can be pretty confident in saying that they’re mostly equivalent. Both of them are pretty mature platforms with fairly minimal hiccups, in my experience.

And if something doesn’t work, we can yell at Microsoft until they publish a fix that makes it work again.

That’s a weird way of spelling “until they ignore it for six months and then lock the support thread for inactivity.”

Microsoft has gotten us into a state where we don’t need to think, tinker, or troubleshoot our software. We just double-click the icon and wait for it to “just work.” If it doesn’t, it’s someone else’s issue to solve, and we flood social media and support emails until the issue is resolved.

Here I have to agree with the article, because whatever the reality of installing applications on Windows, this is the fiction they’ve sold us. Apple, too. All operating systems have troubles, and all vendors try to downplay them and fix the stuff that causes problems for most of their users. Linux is just honest about the fact that they can’t make everything a perfectly smooth experience for everyone.