You should give Linux a chance
With the release of the new macbooks and the rise of web and electron apps, I truly believe Linux has a chance to finally be significant on the desktop. The one, real problem it still has is the perception among a great number of people that you need to recompile the kernel to be able to use your mouse, and that you can't even run Skype.
Well, guess what, that's not true. At least, not anymore.
To put things in context, this post is for the average developer which, like me, is not tied with a specific OS. So if you need to run Xcode well, I'm really, really sorry for you, and you can just go back to browse Twitter.
The Hardware Problem
I run Ubuntu on a Thinkpad and Fedora on a Dell XPS 13. Everything works out of the box. Why? Because they don't have some crazy hardware released yesterday and Linux is getting better and better with hw support. But most importantly, they work because I knew before buying that they worked.
You don't blame Apple because macOS doesn't boot on your chromebook, do you?
Fun fact, I bought the developer edition of the XPS, so it came with Ubuntu preinstalled, and I tried Windows 10 on it when it was released (you know, for science). Some weird problem with the touchpad driver made it crash with a BSOD every ~30 minutes.
So, everything should work, but if you do a little research before buying, you can be (almost) sure you won't have problems.
The distro problem
So many choices. Which one should you choose? Ubuntu? Fedora? ElementaryOS? Gentoo? Arch? LinuxMint? And which DE? GNOME? KDE? Mate?
Take a look and decide yourself, but here's my advice:
- If you want a well supported, super stable and simple distro, choose Ubuntu with Unity (the default), and choose the last LTS. I use it for work and it's really rock solid.
- If you want something more “cutting-edge”, with more features, a more polished desktop environment (IMHO), choose Fedora with GNOME (the default). I run Fedora 25 at home and I'm thinking to move my work machine to it in a near future. It requires a bit more work to install, say, Spotify because they provide officially just a .deb, but you'll find out that someone has already done the job for you and you just need to add an external repo to make it work.
Fedora 25
The software problem
If you need Photoshop etc., stick with macOS and Windows. That's it. But if you don't do design work, you may not have a software problem.
For a long time, 95% of desktop programs didn't offer a Linux version, but nowadays every shiny new app is built with electron, so Slack can build its desktop client and there's very little cost to add Linux support.
If it's not built with Electron, it's a Java app, like Intellij and other Jetbrains software, or Mongobooster, or it's built with QT, like Telegram.
Here's a list of software (with a GUI) that I use everyday:
- Google Chrome
- Visual Studio Code
- Android Studio
- Slack
- Telegram
- Skype
- Spotify
- Mongobooster
- GNOME terminal (on Ubuntu) / Tilix (on Fedora)
But why
But why should you switch?
I'm not here to tell you that if you use closed source OSs like macOS and Windows you're a bad person. I use the best tool for the job and as you can see from the list of software above, sometimes the best tool isn't open source.
There's tons of stuff online which explains why Linux is (or isn't) better than macOS and Windows, so I'll just add my 2 cents.
I prefer Linux because:
- I find it simpler.
- I feel in control when I use it.
- It doesn't try to sell me stuff.
- It gives me the freedom to change whatever I want.
- When I SSH into a remote machine I still feel at home.
- Docker containers are much faster.
- The community is amazing.
- CLI is the best interface so why should I care about fancy animations and blurs (and GNOME looks gorgeous anyway).
Conclusions
Give Linux a chance. You may like it.
Gilfoyle likes it.
Special thanks to the people still using Windows such as @f_gaddini who inspired this post.