Rant: I think I'm done with Linux

The Water Cooler
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With no signs of seeing this fixed directly, I’ve had to drop GNOME as a primary DE after years of using it. The general process of dumps and bisecting are too-timely for me for to do a “proper” bug report, and my only interaction with GNOME bugzilla about the Weather app being shipped broken since 2022 didn’t encourage me to go back there; I posted the log-in issue here and several other places so a GNOME dev had to have seen it by now, assuming this is GNOME-specific (F38-F39, into F40, but GNOME higher-version on oS TW didn’t affect me until later after F40’s release). I never had a problem with Xfce, so I went to that.

I don’t have confidence in Fedora’s Xfce spin and generally don’t like Fedora’s specific Wayland push (Plasma 6, GNOME proposal), which also had me drop Fedora as a primary OS at the same time.

Wayland has been disappointing for me for years Intel/6600XT/RTX3060, and as of F40 I still had a floaty mouse and lower FPS in Dota 2. That’s all that mainstream Linux is pushing nowadays, for years, while also mis-advertising a good desktop experience, for years (personal experience). I tolerated systemd even after questioning years ago how it could leak past the OS’s VPN because it had it’s own hard-coded DNS rules; systemd may as well be its own OS at a slightly higher-level than Intel ME :stuck_out_tongue:

Basically, I’ve used Linux primarily since 2015, but ran into issues starting around 2023 that had me question how anyone is allowing this to pass QA. I’ve tried going back to Windows for a bit and can definitely deal with it, but I like command-line tricks too much :stuck_out_tongue: and do prefer how services run in the background attached to an init on Linux.

Always wanted to try FreeBSD out, and figured now was the best time to try something new. I haven’t done a ground-up OS set-up probably in 5-6 years since Arch. There was a lot I took for-granted working on mainstream Linux! Imagine having to manually get the pin ID for your laptop’s speaker and 3.5mm jack in order to have to create your own rule to have it auto-switch; I’ve only heard stories of that, but had to actually do it, and I like that I actually understand what it does too! No PA or PW; OSS. I actually got confused about how PA got configured when I accidentally pulled it in somewhere and had to remove it, and now I’m convinced PA only came about for conveniently connecting to Bluetooth headphones with bizarre names.

With years of Linux, I learned default apps to use, and generally what to include at a minimal. All my apps (and more) are on FreeBSD, and Xorg and Xfce were packaged enough to get to a DE. After several days and late hours, I have a reproducible set-up down that’s comparable to what I was getting mostly out-the-box from Linux; only a couple broken-to-full-reinstalls were needed :stuck_out_tongue: but it was an incredibly fun learning experience! I’ve learned more about how a game controller connects to an OS than I thought I ever needed to :stuck_out_tongue: but hammered at figuring out how to do it proper and I like it!

I have eyes on Gentoo (compiler opts) and Void (musl) if I check out Linux again, and Fedora is still interesting because of SELinux (maybe until I have to learn to set it up from-scratch).

One thing I’m finding interesting is how FreeBSD seems to prefer config to global files (like /etc/rc.conf) instead of separate micro-managed ones in conf.ds. I only learned that conf.d habit from Linux, and it looks like global-confs are a BSD or Unix thing, which makes me think it has a more-simple approach to things.

Generally-speaking, I feel systemd and Wayland (PA and PW too) are a large toolbox that’s only being mainstream-used to ease dev maintenance, at the expense of better options for the best desktop experience. Mainstream Linux on desktop works, but could be so much better (I get why distro maintainers do it but why are end-users settling, pushing, and encouraging mediocrity?)

I guess this post could serve as:

  • My experience with Linux QA in-general and how it might be able to be changed
  • Any questions about FreeBSD (with limited-experience)
  • Any general discussion related to any of that :stuck_out_tongue:
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Hardware compatibility is a known weakness of Linux. I think there is just too much (particularly bad and buggy) hardware for the kernel devs to keep up with it all. I mostly use Dell or Lenovo systems that generally work OK with Linux. If you have something that doesn’t work, however, it can be quite frustrating.

I’m not crazy about the design choices GNOME has made in recent years either. But I do like Sway for my sysadmin workflow. I’ll never go back to Windows. There are things I do with systemd-nspawn containers and ZFS filesystems that just aren’t possible on systems that are as restrictive as Windows or macOS. There are still a lot of freedoms in Linux that I find make it far superior to other OSs (despite the hardware shortcoming).

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If I could rule it down to hardware, I’d be fine with replacing it! But the log-in issue seems like an introduced software-related issue somewhere (oS was fine until it got updated later and wasn’t)

The frustrating part is that I’ve found no way to debug what’s going on (nothing in dmesg or journalctl), and I’ve tried a lot of stuff to try to narrow it down. Xfce, memtest, and Windows are fine.

I’m fine with GNOME’s design choices, or I would be if I could use it consistently :stuck_out_tongue: I was fine with no extensions on Fedora and liked it.

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