This “just use linux” mentality is peak broke-brain logic.
You think spending an hour every day troubleshooting and googling how to fix it is some badge of honor? Congrats, you saved $0 and burned the only free hour you had after work. Hope the “Freedom” was worth it.
Linux isn’t free. It costs time, energy, and attention — the three things high-performers guard with their life. Compile time, Maintenance, debugging, dependancies, cleanup — you’re bleeding hours to save pennies. That’s not frugality, that’s time poverty.
You’re not a developer. You’re a tired guy distro hopping at 10pm convincing yourself it’s “self care.” Meanwhile someone else paid $100 for Windows, finished a deck, hit the gym, and got 8 hours of sleep. But hey, you configured your system by hand. King shit.
And don’t even start with the “but privacy!” cope. 90% of y’all using Linux aren’t toppling goverments or hacking banks. You’re watching Youtube, checking Gmail, Twitter, and scrolling the same niche subreddit every night. You’re not optimizing for privacy, you’re optimizing for feeling morally superior while wasting time.
Time is the only real flex. You get more of it by buying it back. If that costs $100 for Windows, that’s a steal. If you’re in any field where leverage matters — CAD, Excel, Adobe — and you’re still compiling Linux from scratch like it’s 1999, you’re not serious.
This isn’t about being rich. It’s about understanding what moves the needle. High-output people don’t micromanage their PCs — they outsource. You want to be productive? Stop pretending Linux is a virtue. It’s not. It’s a time sink.
Unpopular opinion, but I install Linux on my computers and they just work for like 5 years straight, with me spending exactly 0 hours each day fixing anything. Whereas I fix other peoples stupid printer issues and Windows becoming incompatible with the hardware or some nasty messages from some antivirus or strange software, multiple times a year…
I see however how some disgrunteled people would write something like this.
I’ve been on Linux for a year and a half now with zero downtime.
Been on this Windows install for 5 years or so, no hassle.
Hmm, interesting. But we all have different experiences anyway. I believe my mom’s computer “broke” twice in the last two years during some major Windows updates. One time some service pack broke a lot of printers for quite a while and she was affected as well. I don’t remember what the second incident was, since I didn’t fix it, but it also required manual intervention. And she doesn’t even do a lot with the thing except office stuff, documents and mails, so I doubt she was at fault.
I certainly also had stuff break on Linux, but it’s been kind of quiet the last years. But I’m kind of the wrong person to judge since I currently don’t take part in everyday Windows use. At least not when I get to decide and maintain the computer. But I feel it has improved as well. There has been a time where I had to install my gaming windows several times because the order in which I installed all the drivers mattered for some reason. It got cluttered and slower over time so I had to reinstall it during the lifetime of a computer. And I had friends infected with trojans and cryptojacking malware every other month or so. Back then I had a very comfortable life full of hubris with my Linux on the desktop. Granted, it needed more fiddling at that time, but that was acceptable. But times have changed and everything got better and it’s nothing like that anymore. And for a long time now.
I’ve been using it full time for 21 years, and dual boot for years before that. Early on it definitely took up a bit of time, but that’s mostly because I was interested in breaking things and learning to fix them. Even 10-15 years ago I don’t think I would have spent more than a few hours a month fixing things. These days it’s a few hours a year, and that’s only when I start messing around with something in a careless way.
Oh god, printer drivers are the fucking worst.
I only use Linux for servers, Win11 desktop. I don’t do any of this fooling around lemmy tells me I need to be doing constantly. Been a Windows admin for 15-years, same, rarely have to fiddle with anything. Same goes for the occasional Linux desktop.