Anony Moose

As I discovered, nvidia are infamous in the linux world for causing all sorts of weird issues. Things are getting a lot better now as they seem to be giving a lot more attention to the drivers in linux like they do for Windows. The open-source (Nouveau) drivers in linux seem to work well in many cases (maybe for 3000-series cards too?), but as you get to newer cards like the 4090, the proprietary linux drivers they provide are often needed. It’s still huge progress!

Yeah, I’ve heard really good things about Pop!_OS, especially for Windows migrants.

I think Linux still prioritizes the command-line for a lot of config/setup, which can be extremely daunting for new users. In addition, there are also a million options for everything, which is great for freedom, but really confusing for newbies.

I should note that both of these things are amazing pluses for me as a power user/developer.

That’s fair, I think Mac’s extremely opinionated design that be grating at times. Also, heaven help you if you want to do something non-standard on a Mac, the system fights you every step of the way.

Well, in my case stability refers to grub display loading at all :)

I installed Debian on my PC with an RTX 4090 and it just refuses to load the grub display on first boot (grub loads, but there’s no DisplayPort signal). I was able to get it working by switching to the latest stable backports kernel and proprietary Nvidia drivers, but then it stopped working again and now I have to figure out how to fix it.

I don’t mind this at all, and I’m even enjoying the troubleshooting process, but I think this would have been quite the headache for the average user!

Stability and UI/UX are still lightyears ahead in Mac, and to some extent Windows. Don’t get me wrong, they suck for lots of reasons, but I think Linux has a lot of catching up to do to be as usable as Mac/Windows for the ordinary user.

I think standardizing package formats, and more mature desktop managers and proprietary drivers will go a long way to fixing that though.

What’s your review of LMDE over Debian? I recently took the Linux desktop jump recently and started with Linux Mint.

I really didn’t like the Mint desktop as it seemed very dated, so I’ve switched to Debian/KDE. It was only much later that I realized how easy it would have been to just customize my window manager instead of getting a different distro. Having said that, I’m really digging Debian in spite of Nvidia issues being a headache, and Debian’s glacial update pace making me look longingly at Arch.