this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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The user perceiving it as such, doesnt make it so. It makes a difference because if you acknowledge and make visible that it is AMDs fault, then they will be more likely to fix their shitty driver. Over all linux does have much better hardware support than windows, but with newer hardware the vendors are just oddly slow sometimes.
It does make it so.
I get so tired of shouting this from the rooftops in the general direction of FOSS devs and advocates. UX is the only thing that matters. If the user can't use it, it doesn't exist.
No, Linux doesn't have "much better hardware support than Windows". It is harder to set up and maintain, so it's worse. It doesn't matter if you can make it work. It doesn't matter if you can make things work that don't work on Windows. If I plug it in and it doesn't go, then it's worse.
This doesn't make me mad because I want to defend Windows, this makes me mad because I really, REALLY want Linux to do well, along with other FOSS alternatives to enshittified commercial software, and this is an absolute brick wall blocker for that. I don't know how FOSS spaces take away control from whiny engineers who think the current situation is functional, but somebody needs a UX equivalent of a Linus Torvalds shouting abuse at coworkers about how garbage their UX is (that everybody finds hilarious for some reason. Maybe the next step is getting some HR).
Its really not tho. Have you installed Windows 11 to a PC? Shit takes forever to remove all the ads, garbage and AI features. You literally have to edit the registry to get a usable system. Installing a popular linux distro takes like 5 minutes and then you just install whatever software you need. Any normal consumer device you plug in just works out of the box, no need to install drivers that are then again filled with bloat, ads and often even malicious code or vulnerabilities. Like ffs sake Windows 11 doesnt even function at all on a good portion of desktop computers in use today because of the TPM requirement.
Just last weekend i helped someone that never used linux before to switch. The actual install took less than 5 minutes. GPU drivers come preinstalled with the distro and work out of the box. Then another 30 minutes or so of installing and setting up all the programs they need. Another 30 minutes to copy all their old files over and explaining some general differences and thats it. Literally zero tinkering required and they are happily playing their steam games at peak performance.
Ofcourse you can get unlucky with your hardware which then involves a very annoying amount of tinkering, but when the baseline on windows is already fuckloads of tinkering then having to do tinkering sometimes is not at all a bad trade off.
I dual boot on most of my devices and I have PCs around the house going back to Windows 95.
I am also proposing that "just this week I installed Linux for my mom" becomes the next "year of Linux desktop" and is treated with similar derision, because man.
In all seriousness, this is delusional. All Windows devices out there work out of the box and come with Windows preinstalled, so there isn't an installation in the first place, just a first time setup. Installing Windows the way I like it takes some tinkering, but MS's assumption is that most normies don't have a way they like at all and will happily take the default. They are right about this.
There is certainly more clicking on a Windows install in that you have to say no to a bunch of stuff, but it's ultimately fairly equivalent these days.
The problem with Linux isn't installing it (sweaty Arch users aside), the problem is what happens next. You can get lucky and have everything work, particularly with Bazzite and other distros that have a narrow focus and provide specific installers targeted to specific hardware, but if something in your PC doesn't work out of the box you're SoL.
In the example from this video the guy found out their AMD GPU was running about 25% slower than expected, so now what? And that's before he reaches an ungraceful boot failure and is stuck out of the OS instead of going into an automated recovery process.
You have to troubleshoot on Windows as well, as you do on any computer, but the likelihood of hitting an issue in the first place is lower due to it being the baseline platform, and the paths to a resolution are also more streamlined. That's the definition of harder to set up and maintain.
The sooner the Linux community gets over the delusional bubble they live in after getting their systems set up and fine tuned the faster a transition to Linux for more people will be. The delusional rah-rah isn't helping.
I should add that in my experience Linux developers and maintainers are WAY less unrealistic about the current state of Linux in these areas than vocal online advocates. This is more a community problem than a development or strategy problem, although there's some of both in there as well.