I have quarter of century experience working on Linux including running it on all my laptops and desktops for 23 years.
Over the years keeping it working started becoming what seems like a full time job and I jumped the ship for M1 MacBook Pro. It still has a lot of problems but at least I have more time to do my actual work.
I understand I might just becoming less tolerant of wasting time on things that should just work (my actual work being more and more distant from tinkering with OS internals).
But, if I with all my experience am spending time keeping it alive, what has to do a person that has no idea about systemd or pulse audio or dealing with failed upgrades or anything else? Essentially -- you are using it until first problem happens and then you can either reinstall it from scratch or switch to Windows or Mac.
I still keep a Linux laptop dedicated for critical security tasks (I don't trust Apple this much) and a number of Linux VMs (I am running small datacenter at home).
In my experience, the people who spend so much time maintaining their Linux are the people hacking on their OS. Which is something I encourage; the customizability of Linux is part of what makes it so great.
But if you load up the newest Ubuntu lts on a laptop and never fiddle with configs, switch display managers/ desktops, etc, then there will be zero maintenance required.
I agree, if you install and never do anything with it it will usually work. But that isn't very high bar for usability. What about people who actually use their machines for anything else than just browsing Internets? I had people break it even in this relatively simple case.
I'll give you an example. I am using an external DAC (connected over Toslink). It starts up automatically when it detects digital audio signal and shuts down when the signal stops. Unfortunately, the startup sequence takes couple of seconds (it has a delay of 2s and then slowly increases the volume over 4s, can't be configured).
So in the default configuration, PipeWire insists to turn off the audio whenever there is no client to play anything for more than X seconds.
This is super annoying, every time you try to play youtube video after going to kitchen for coffee you are loosing first couple of seconds of audio.
This can be changed (remove a module that causes automatic suspend), but over last couple of years I had to redo this configuration at least 5-6 times after various PipeWire upgrades because PipeWire developers don't give a shit about user configuration and are happy to override it or in fact do some stupid things like move it from /etc to /usr/share so you are left guessing why your config files no longer do what they were supposed to do.
ArchWiki is a well-known recommendation to every newbie who has technical needs.
Quote:
"PulseAudio will first look for configuration files in the home directory ~/.config/pulse/, and if they are not found, the system-wide configuration from /etc/pulse/ will be applied.
Tip:
It is strongly suggested not to edit system-wide configuration files, but rather edit user ones. Create the ~/.config/pulse directory, then copy the system configuration files into it and edit according to your need.
Make sure you keep user configuration in sync with changes to the packaged files in /etc/pulse/. Otherwise, PulseAudio may refuse to start due to configuration errors."
"[...]or by creating a new file that includes it with the syntax .include /etc/pulse/name. For simple changes the latter is preferred because the user will not be required to update the file when system-wide defaults change."
So this particular example is moot unless PA somehow disregards the /home config and loads its system-wide config anyway or does some weird overrides. Any details or other examples?
I normally don't edit the text substantially after somebody responds but this time I corrected Pulse to PipeWire not to slander Pulse developers for no reason.
Eh, maybe this behavior was changed, but PipeWire works in the same way ATM:
"The PipeWire configuration template file is located in /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf. You can copy and edit the file to /etc/pipewire/ or ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.
Since 0.3.45 you can also copy fragments of the config file to a file in the directories /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/, /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/ or ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/."
TBH, while this is a common pattern across Linux applications, the thought to look for override location in the /home folder comes solely from experience and I am not aware of any place suggesting it. I tend to treat all of root as if it was an immutable file system that is a hassle to edit manually. Saves a lot of headache.
I've been running Linux for most of the last 25 years, too. But I've mostly
learned how to keep things simple.
I buy high-DPI Dell Precision laptops. They're pricey, and the build-quality is meh, but they come preloaded with Linux. Everything works. I leave all but a few settings on factory defaults, and I never run anything but a "Long Term Support" release of the OS. In case of hardware issues, I buy an on-site service plan.
I won't claim that it's perfect. But I spend less than 20 hours a year "keeping it working." Which is less than some of my MacOS coworkers spend fighting with Docker and other Unix tools on the Mac, so it's a wash. It's not like getting the Python development ecosystem to work on an M1 Mac is all sweetness and joy.
One secret to my success is that I try very hard not to customize anything. To paraphrase Yoda, once you start down that path, forever will it dominate your destiny.
I do not recommend Linux for casual users. But for developers who deploy on Linux, it can be a very reasonable choice.
I have quarter of century experience working on Linux including running it on all my laptops and desktops for 23 years.
Over the years keeping it working started becoming what seems like a full time job and I jumped the ship for M1 MacBook Pro. It still has a lot of problems but at least I have more time to do my actual work.
I understand I might just becoming less tolerant of wasting time on things that should just work (my actual work being more and more distant from tinkering with OS internals).
But, if I with all my experience am spending time keeping it alive, what has to do a person that has no idea about systemd or pulse audio or dealing with failed upgrades or anything else? Essentially -- you are using it until first problem happens and then you can either reinstall it from scratch or switch to Windows or Mac.
I still keep a Linux laptop dedicated for critical security tasks (I don't trust Apple this much) and a number of Linux VMs (I am running small datacenter at home).