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Linux GUI App Stores are so shit, its unreal. They dont even let you install normal packages most of the time.
Linux Desktop Sucks (Terminal IS OK)
UnOrdinary i must admit that I wholeheartedly disagree. I use Gnome together with 5-6 extensions to customize the UX to my liking and nothing comes close.
The Gnome app store UX is far from optimal I agree but this is mostly irrelevant to me as I seldomly install any apps anyways.
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trashaccount They either look awful (kde discover) or look good, but are functionally unbelievably horrible (gnome software). The one single exception that I have found is Linux Mint's software center. It's not the prettiest, but it looks good enough and actually works properly. Sadly it's not really available on e.g. Fedora because Mint is ubuntu/debian-based.
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I use Windows 11 Education with Telemetry turned off, Security Baselines, some stuff from the restricted traffic baselines and some other group policies applied. For my linux usage I use WSL and a Secureblue VM. I monitored the outgoing traffic for about a month and privacy wise I'm okay with what is sent.
fid02 one thing always makes me angry is automatic update!
Don't know why? It never works for my case
If i try to update via "rpm-ostree upgrade" it will say its running in background! At least 30m to 1h later if i run command again it will start downloading then create a new ostree base. But that simple thing wasted almost 1hour
GrouchyGrape have you ever used file manager with lots of copy or moving files? You will always see crashing and freezing some parts of gnome shell
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Been using bazzite which is based on atomic flavors of fedora. I've been using the KDE flavor cause even though the KDE desktop environment annoys me quite a bit at times it's the only one that has had a good look and feel for me and is usually the one I had to configure the least out of the bunch to get a decent experience.
It's been fine. I mean i'm still having issues that are annoying but are usually fixed with a simple restart.
KDE's Discover app store has surprisingly not been so bad on bazzite. I'm used to it being absolutely terrible but it's actually tolerable on bazzite for me. Of course the downsides of things like not looking the best and stuff like that still apply.
But of course like always the terminal seems to do a better job than it at updating in sadly common Linux fashion. Although all update commands have worked fine for me from bazzite's preferred update command to rpm-ostree upgrade.
And overall everything else has worked... Reasonably well enough. Enough to do my daily routine without wanting to pull my hair out anyways.
That's all I really gotta say to be honest. Not amazing. Can get pretty annoying. But compared to every past distro and DE combination I used it has so far been the best for me. Which I would say is a pretty decent start lmao.
a month later
Yes, one of the many reasons why I love Linux only as an idea at the moment, but when the rubber hits the road it is MacOS.
I appreciate your input, but I respectfully disagree with your premise. The Linux experience is highly subjective and depends on many factors, the most important being hardware. With the right combination of hardware, distribution, and desktop environment, you can have a very smooth experience.
In my view, Debian and Arch are excellent recommendations, with Debian being especially known for its stability. Additionally, when choosing hardware for Linux, I suggest opting for AMD or Intel components since their open-source drivers are usually well-supported. Although Nvidia drivers are available, they can sometimes lead to issues.
I say this with the utmost respect, but if you are experiencing problems with Linux, the issue is most likely due to your hardware and setup rather than the operating system itself.
SudoMason Debian has much worse security than the baseline of an OS that's receiving proper updates and not applying very misguided patches and configuration changes including enabling a bunch of services by default upon installation. Recommend using Fedora or Arch if you want to at least have the baseline security provided by the upstream projects, which is quite poor for a lot of that desktop software stack but you can at least avoid having ancient software with a subset of security patches backported and many new problems introduced.
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From a security standpoint, I agree with you. To clarify, my recommendations were specifically tailored to the OP, as they don’t seem to have much experience with Linux.
Personally, I use NixOS on the unstable branch, but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone like the OP, who appears to have a negative perception of Linux. That said, I believe NixOS offers superior security compared to Arch due to its rigorous GitHub-based vetting process for both the OS and Nixpkgs software before reaching the end user. Additionally, NixOS's declarative, immutable, and reproducible nature, along with its non-FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) design, further enhances its security and reliability.
In short, my goal was simply to convey to the OP that Linux is fundamentally more secure and flexible than Windows or macOS.
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After my MacBook broke I was using Windows 10 LTSC with no bloatware and a bunch of Blackbird tweaks, but the install eventualy corrupted itself and I got terminaly fed up with M$.
Now running OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Rolling release with snapshots already configured. Some normal hickups natural in any operating system imo, mostly during setup partly because of user tinkering probably, but it runs really great now. I have to install a bunch of extensions and customize gnome quite a bit, but that's why I use linux.
I really don't understand OP's feelings about the overall Linux desktop experience and I certainly have different feelings about it. As to the @GrapheneOS comments regarding Debian, I do believe that they do a lot of backporting in order to mitigate eventual issues that arise during the lifetime of their distribution, although I understand that they're being applied to an ancient, probably insecure, base. I don't have the expertise to have an opinion but would like to know more about it.
Debian is massively used on servers. Google has their own patched flavor of Debian. I suspect the observations might be related to the desktop itself, rather than the base OS, but I might be wrong.
I've been using Gentoo Linux since 1.4 circa 2003 (I was 13 yo) and KDE desktop that started to mature around v4 in 2008. So, I have been using Linux longer than five minutes it takes many to form a negative opinion and it is the alternatives that feel clunky.
aurocha As to the @GrapheneOS comments regarding Debian, I do believe that they do a lot of backporting in order to mitigate eventual issues that arise during the lifetime of their distribution, although I understand that they're being applied to an ancient, probably insecure, base. I don't have the expertise to have an opinion but would like to know more about it.
Debian has traditionally been seen as one of the most secure Linux distributions, because they have taken security issues very seriously. Back in the days, many Linux distributions did not bother much about security issues, and even in more modern days, some popular distributions such as Ubuntu (and derivatives) only issue security fixes for a small subset of their packages, leaving all the other unpatched even if security issues are known. Debian took it far more seriously, and backported security fixes to a much larger scope of their packages, and did all this in a reliable and timely manner. Debian has also always been entirely transparent about what security fixes they release, and for what packages, which has contributed to them being a preferred distribution. Debian was also first with reproducible builds, to further raise confidence in the security of the system, and most other Linux distributions, apparently including Fedora, do not have reproducible builds even today.
However, the security landscape does change. And by today's standards, merely backporting security fixes is no longer considered to be secure enough. The set of security issue that gets fixed will not be complete. Debian has also not applied almost any of the more modern hardening features that have been developed. The attention has started to shift towards Fedora and especially the Silverblue and Secureblue versions of Fedora.
And for people with specific security needs, such as activists, Tails and QubesOS have instead been favorites, for a long time now, since they enable compartmentalizing ones life into security domains.
aurocha Debian is massively used on servers. Google has their own patched flavor of Debian. I suspect the observations might be related to the desktop itself, rather than the base OS, but I might be wrong.
No, I certainly would feel very uncomfortable running Debian or even Ubuntu on a server. Most modern servers today relies heavily on virtualization, and thin containers that doesn't really have any OS at all, just a single application bundled with the essential libraries it needs. It makes QubesOS look legacy in comparison. They can keep security much tighter that way, and also enable load balancing, redundancy and 100% uptime guarantees and many other things a regular OS cannot.
With that said, although security vulnerabilities are common, as long as you are not a specific target, ie are not running a server or other service exposed on the internet, and are not an activist or other attractive target, getting your system actually exploited isn't that common. It is far less common than one might get the impression from at forums like this one, where we take security extremely seriously. Most desktop computers running Windows or Linux never gets hacked, as long as security updates are installed, and the user has basic security hygiene, that is, do not follow untrusted links, do not install random untrusted application, do not open random email attachments and so on.
UnOrdinary
I want to add my two cents in here. Chrome OS Flex is really great. But I would personally wait until Google decides if they're merging the two projects ( Chrome OS and Android) because that's where it seems like it's going in my opinion.
I do concur that updating Linux through a GUI is not at all intuitive or reliable. I don't know how hard it is to build a GUI application that just pulls data from the command line. But look at Windows They just got winget and winget's unofficial gui is outstanding, So hopefully that will inspire some future designers
With Android now having a terminal, would there be a future of Android specific package managers?
UnOrdinary Yeah, the DE situation on Linux is a bit of a mess, but you can get a pretty good experience using Gnome with a few good quality "extensions".
Apps Menu
Desktop Icons NG
Frippery Panel Favorites
Hide Activities Button
Places Status Indicator
Window List
No overview at start-up