The Trouble With Linux: A Frustrated Tale

Why I have given up on Linu

This is going to be a little different piece from my usual tech history stuff. For one thing, it’s going to be comparatively brief, at least by my usual long winded standards, and it's not going to have a bunch of citations, as this is very much an opinion piece.

And why am I writing this when I should probably be head down working on the NeXT part 2 video…or Rise of Windows part 3? 

Well, while I am mostly focused on the second part of Steve Jobs and Next’s story, I have been mulling over making a video or at least writing an article on this subject for at least a year now, for reasons that will hopefully shortly become obvious. And everything kind of gelled together in my mind recently, when I saw a video of a YouTuber announcing that he had switched his editing entirely to a Pop!OS based system running DaVinci Resolve.

Seeing someone else starting their journey of using Linux for video editing and content creation needs, reminded me of my own experience with running Pop!OS to do all of the video and audio editing for Another Boring Topic. Which also reminded me of why I no longer use Linux in any part of my workflow, either for YouTube stuff or personal. So I sat down and started writing this, and it all came together extremely quickly.

I do not have Linux installed on any of my current systems, apart from a dual processor PowerMac G5 that no longer turns on, but has an install of PowerPC Ubuntu that I was playing around with last time I had it working. However, for the better part of two decades I have repeatedly attempted to use nothing but Linux, and every time, in spite of my best efforts, I wound up going back to either Windows or the Macintosh. The longest stretch I ever went was a bit over two years using Linux as a daily driver and to do all the video editing for Another Boring Topic, the shortest stretch was measured in a handful of frustrating days wrestling with Fedora. 

Anyhow. The YouTuber sounds like he is happy with his decision so far, and pleased with the overall initial experience with both hardware and software, which is honestly awesome and I hope it continues to work well for him. System76 seems to be a great company that is working hard to be the closest thing the Linux world has to Apple.

Their laptops may be rebadged Clevos, but they seem to review fairly well, and their desktops are all custom designed and manufactured in-house, and are by all accounts excellent machines. And their Clevos are apparently designed to their specifications, they aren’t just slapping the System76 logo on an OEM laptop and calling it a day. 

And it’s great that they take the Linux experience so seriously that they created their own distro and are constantly working to improve it and make it the best, most user friendly distro out there. In short, I like System76, I like Pop!OS, and I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to the System76 website over the years and specced out a Thelio.

But…the Linux world has serious issues that are preventing it from breaking into wider adoption and are preventing it from being a viable competitor to the Macintosh and Windows. And these issues are both hardware and software based, and I personally see little to no hope of them being resolved anytime in the next 10-20 years.

What I want to briefly discuss is my perspective on why I stopped using Linux for productivity work and why I don’t see myself ever going back to it unless some things really change. Some of this may not apply to you, and that’s fine. None of it may apply to you, and that’s fine too.

But I think there is room in the Linux discussion for the perspective of someone who just wants to get creative work done on their computer. I guarantee I am not the first to discuss Linux from this perspective, but I still feel it's a perspective that easily gets lost in the Linux discussion. So what is my Linux perspective and experience? Do I actually have some experience with it, or did I just play around with it once, get frustrated, and give up?

I was first exposed to Linux in the mid-2000s when I was in college taking some programming classes. We did our programming in Gedit, on Pentium 4 computers that ran some version of either Red Hat Linux or Fedora, I honestly cannot remember. I quickly fell in love with the idea of Free and Open Source Software and my sophomore year I started dual booting the Pentium 4 Windows XP tower that I had unwisely swapped my G4 PowerBook for…with Linux Mint. I loved how fancy and splashy it looked, and while I had Windows XP on the other partition, I rarely used it. In fact it was a point of pride to me to never boot into it.

About a year later I bought a Toshiba Satellite laptop, a remarkably annoying hunk of junk whose woes were only compounded by its being saddled with Vista Home Premium. I quickly started dual booting with Mint, which when compared to Vista was immeasurably better of an experience. I used Linux almost exclusively, going weeks without booting into the Windows partition. But crucially, I still needed to boot into it from time to time in order to get certain things done.

Eventually I bought a used Asus eeePC 900a netbook. I seem to recall hearing that I had the crummy Best Buy variant of the 900, and that was why I had no webcam and only a 4 GB, yes FOUR Gigabytes of SSD storage, plus a 16 GB SD card that I kept permanently inserted.

The 900a came with some form of Baby’s First Linux distro, which between the install and the recovery partition, left me with less than 200 megabytes, yes mega, not giga, bytes free on the tiny SSD. So I swapped it out for I think gOS or Good OS, painstakingly following instructions I found online on how to compile my own kernel and wireless drivers to make it all run.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

After testing that for a while, along with a couple other netbook oriented distros that I no longer remember the names of, I finally went with Ubuntu Netbook Remix and kept that on it for quite a while, until I decided to switch that out for Windows XP so I could run some more games.

And over the latter part of my college career, I was a fervent Linux evangelist, and tried to convince pretty much everybody I knew to let me put a linux partition on their computer so that they could be free of worrying about viruses and enjoy the wonderful world of Linux. I had definitely drunk the Linux kool-aid.

And yet…I never could fully get away from Windows. There was always something that would drag me back to it, some problem that I was experiencing with Linux that I would eventually get tired of wrestling with and reluctantly boot back into my Windows partition. Or in the case of my netbook, replace Linux entirely with Windows since I didn’t have the SSD space to dual boot.

When I built my first tower in 2013, I installed Windows 8 on it but I also experimented with running Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Fedora. I kept trying to find a linux distro that just got out of my way, but every one fell short in some ways and once again I’d wind up back on Windows. For example, one time I decided to just go full on Linux with no Windows partition, installed the latest build of Fedora, and determined to just power through any problems encountered, trusting that I would eventually figure them out.

 Well, YouTube was unable to play smoothly in any browser. Both the video and the audio were jerky and it rendered any YouTube video essentially unwatchable. I couldn’t figure it out, in spite of lots of googling and once again gave up in frustration and went back to Windows.   

However in 2020 I rebuilt my tower and decided to give Linux yet another chance. This time I went with Pop!OS, and from the start it was far and away the best Linux experience I have ever had. The installer was extremely intuitive, the look-and-feel of the operating system was cohesive and slick, and from the get-go everything just worked. Pop!OS came with all the drivers I needed to be running right out of the box, with my 1050 Ti just working without any tweaking needed and all the video codecs I needed just being there right out of the box.

I am not a gamer, so I will not be complaining about the state of Linux gaming, which from what I understand is pretty good now and rapidly improving every year thanks to Valve and Proton, and I really don’t know much about it anyhow. About the only experience I have with Linux gaming was unsuccessfully trying to get the Master Chief Collection’s multiplayer to work with Pop!OS a couple years ago, and I never was able to figure it out. Apart from that, pretty much every one of the handful of Steam games that I occasionally wanted to play…ran without issue on Pop!OS thanks to Proton. 

In November of 2020 I started using Pop!OS as my daily driver, and for all content creation. I did all my video and audio editing on it, and worked to use GiMP as much as possible for graphics, although occasionally I did have to boot up my Macbook in order to run Photoshop.

I did have to put some work into getting DaVinci Resolve to run under Pop!OS but it actually wasn’t too terribly difficult once I had done it a couple times. The latter because I did have to reinstall DaVinci Resolve almost every single time I did any sort of system upgrade of Pop!OS, but the upside of that was that I became fairly proficient in getting it re-installed and it ceased to be an intimidating process.

Now since the free version of Resolve doesn’t really support any codecs on Linux…I did have to run every single clip I wanted to use in an edit…through ffmpeg via the command line. Sure I could have fixed this issue by just buying the full version of Resolve, but at this point the YouTube channel still wasn’t monetized, was getting very few views, and given the fact that Resolve Studio didn’t have a single feature that I needed for the simple videos I make…I just couldn’t justify spending 300 dollars out of my own pocket. So I kept using the free version and running all clips through ffmpeg. 

Which was a mild inconvenience, but one I was willing to deal with since I was really happy that finally was making Linux work for me as a daily driver. From video editing, to making graphics in GiMP, to watching Amazon Prime and Netflix-at least when Silverlight wasn’t being a pain- to streaming my media library via Plex to all my devices, I had finally made the full transition to Linux and I was never going back. I think the first video I did for the channel using my new Linux setup was the Rise and Fall of the IBM PC part 3, the one where I badly botched the audio levels and didn’t realize it until too late. One of many learning experiences.

Then I installed a major Pop!OS system update, I don’t remember which one but it would have been sometime in summer of 2021. And it destroyed my Pop!OS install and the recovery partition, I lost everything I hadn’t backed up. Which really wasn’t much since I did have good backups, apart from not backing up a crypto wallet that had a couple thousand dollars worth of crypto in it. Oh well, live and learn. And given how far that crypto has sunk, I lose less money by the day, I think I’m only down a couple hundred dollars now.

So I reinstalled Pop!OS, reinstalled DaVinci Resolve, and got back to work using it as my daily driver. I even reached out to System76 and let them know that I was running a full on Pop!OS setup for all our channel video creation needs. They quickly responded and honestly it meant a lot to me that the System76 crew was so fast to say hello to a tiny creator with only a few hundred subscribers, running Pop!OS on a self-built system. 

Like I said, I really like System76 and they seem like a great, friendly bunch of people. And again, I was running Pop!OS on a computer that I personally built, I was not running it on one of their custom systems. In other words, System76 had zero obligation whatsoever to me, I was not a customer of theirs in any way, shape or form. I just ran Pop!OS and felt that it was the best Linux distro that I had ever used, and I was willing to put up with the little rough edges and inconveniences that came along with it. After all, having to enter the Matrix to set a login background screen made me feel cool and hackery. Or would have, had I ever figured it out.

And then in late 2022, I did another system update, the final Pop!OS system update I would ever do. I had delayed it as long as I felt I could, but the version of Pop!OS I was on had reached the end of its support and I was constantly getting nag notifications to upgrade to 22.04. Foolishly I did it before finishing the video I was in the middle of editing, a video David had written that covered some interesting things about current-day Netflix.

The update didn’t brick my computer, but it did destroy my audio. Entirely. Computer couldn’t produce a single peep from any audio device. Eventually I learned that it was because Pop!OS had moved from pulseaudio to pipewire, two words that meant and still mean basically nothing to me. I sought help online from the greater Reddit hivemind and received a number of helpful suggestions and detailed instructions on what to try. And let me just say that while I have heard people complain that the Linux community can be unhelpful, I have never personally experienced or seen that. Every time I have had a Linux issue, no matter what community I asked for help in, I have always quickly received friendly, detailed assistance. 

Nothing I tried worked. Incomprehensible errors were returned with pretty much every command I tried typing in, based on instructions. The computer’s audio was well and truly destroyed. And I spent at least six weeks, possibly as many as eight working on it, trying to get it working again. That was weeks where I got zero video editing done, on a video that was only a couple weekends away from being completed. But since the computer couldn’t produce audio in any way, shape, or form, I couldn’t do any editing at all. And I really didn’t want to do a full system reload, not least because I try to avoid downloading large files over my metered internet connection.

Finally I realized that absolutely nothing was going to work, my only choice was going to be doing another full system reinstall from scratch. I couldn’t see any sort of recovery partition either, although it's possible that it was either there and I missed it or it got destroyed when I did the system upgrade. Again, it’s always possible that I missed it, while I have done countless Linux installs, I had never done a Linux reload from a recovery partition of any sort.

And I just couldn’t do it again, the thought of doing a full on Linux reload just felt depressingly tiring. I realized I was tired of dealing with the little annoyances that come with using every single Linux distro I have ever run. The little things that you put up with because even though there is always a way to tweak a Linux distro so it is exactly what you want…a lot of the time that requires spending a bunch of time researching, then tinkering with system files, editing config files in the terminal using vim, or copy/pasting terminal commands that you only vaguely understand in the hopes that it will improve things or fix the issue you are having. 

And of course I am dealing with a metered connection these days, and not a very fast one at that, meaning that installing Pop!OS or any Linux distro was going to involve a lot of lengthy downloads and burn a lot of data as I struggled to get everything set up again the way I wanted it. And I just was tired of dealing with it all.

Was the fact that I, for example, couldn’t outsmart setting a custom background image on my login screen really a big issue? Of course not, but it was a little, tiny annoyance, a good example of the many little ones that tend to come with trying to use Linux. A similar annoyance was the fact that my Super key quit working after what I think was my sole successful Pop!OS system upgrade. So I always had to click in the top left to bring up the menu of applications. Just another minor annoyance, and I quickly got used to doing it and my muscle memory from the previous year of Pop!OS faded away.

Was it a huge insurmountable problem that the USB wireless card I had wasn’t supported by Pop!OS at all, and the one I purchased to replace it, one that boasted Ubuntu compatibility, only worked at about 5 Mbps and sometimes even slower? No, I worked around the problem by lugging my tower from one end of the house to the other end where my network closet was so I could run a six foot Ethernet cable to it from my router, and do any big downloads needed.

Eventually I was able to run fifty feet of CAT5E to a network jack I wired into one of my office walls, finally enabling me to enjoy decent Internet speeds on the tower. Silver lining, I successfully wired both ends of the network jack on the first try, my very first time trying to wire network jacks. The next two cable runs I did were not so successful sadly…but failure is a part of learning. 

However, these types of issues are the type of things that keep the vast majority of people from being interested in a Linux machine, and they contribute to Linux’s intimidating reputation of being unfriendly to newcomers. 

And note, this is not a community problem, as I said above I have always found the Linux community to be a welcoming one. This is a systemic issue with Linux itself, and every distro. And please don’t misunderstand me, these comparatively little issues are a huge hindrance to Linux adoption. Any bit of friction with going away from the default Windows experience most people are used to…is going to be a major problem.  

And look, while I am definitely not an advanced computer wizard whose hands never leave the keys, disdains the use of a mouse, and thinks that GUI’s are for the weak and waste precious computer cycles, I think it's reasonable to say that I am far from a basic user. I’m probably advanced intermediate or something similar. I spent years doing retail tech support, I’ve built my own computers, heck I’ve even taken two G3 Lombard PowerBooks completely apart and rebuilt one of them with the best parts from the two.

I like to fiddle with various old or odd computers and I even played around with Alpha 3 of Haiku in 2011, when I actually bought an install disk from Haiku themselves to help support the project. I casually follow Andreas Kling and his work on SerenityOS and look forward to someday trying SerenityOS out for myself when it's a bit further along in development.

But I no longer enjoy doing this sort of thing on my daily driver computers, the computers that I need to just stay out of my way and let me be as efficient as possible. The computers that I just want to work without fuss, so I can get stuff done. And I know there are lots of Linux experts out there who could have easily solved any of my problems, large or small, had it happened to their computer. But I spent at least six weeks vainly attempting to get my Pop!OS system working again, to absolutely no avail. You shouldn’t have to be an expert to be productive on your computer and you certainly shouldn’t have to be an expert Linux ninja to keep your audio working.

And Linux…just doesn’t seem to be making much progress towards the noble goal of breaking through to the mainstream. If even Pop!OS cannot reliably smooth the rough edges out enough for someone like me to run it on my own hardware for productivity, how in the world can Linux ever, in any distro, break out of its current comparatively small user base? People have been predicting the year of Linux on the desktop for decades now, and it’s never happened or even come close. I remember hearing that gOS was going to be the Linux distro that finally broke through to the mainstream, since Walmart was going to start carrying computers preloaded with it. And that was 15 years ago.

And maybe the solution is to do what System76 seems to be trying to do, and are having at least some success with. Make your own machines as much as possible in-house, and make sure every computer you sell ships preconfigured with a Linux distro that is tuned to that machine, so all the user has to do is turn it on. Provide excellent tech support to your customers, and have full time software engineers working to continually improve your own distro for end users.

But that only works for people who buy your machines, and until that distro reaches a point where it works almost as well on custom installs as it does on System76’s own machines…that goal will probably remain elusive. And that is assuming System76’s own systems run Pop!OS without any of the rough edges and issues that I experienced. I would be surprised if they didn’t, but not having any personal experience with one, I am still assuming. And you know what assuming makes you.

And that disappoints me. I was proud of doing all of the video creation on a Linux system, and even though I kept my Photoshop subscription active on my old MacBook Pro, I did my best not to use it because I was usually able to make GiMP work well enough for whatever graphic or thumbnail I needed to make. I tried to do everything for every video, all on Linux and I pretty much made it work for two years and edited multiple Another Boring Topic videos before once again, Linux let me down.

 While I am not really a huge Windows fan, I do find Windows 10 to be a solid system that mostly does a good job of staying out of my way when I am trying to work. Don’t get me started on Windows 11 though. So that’s what I went back to. A year ago I purchased a Windows license, wiped and formatted my NVME boot drive, loaded Windows 10 onto my editing tower and installed a fresh copy of DaVinci Resolve. The Fall of OS/2 was the first video I edited on it, and it was a perfectly smooth experience without any annoyances. 

When I upgraded to a 15” MacBook Air this past November, I was considering a System76 laptop, a 16” Framework laptop, and a 15” Macbook Air. However I didn’t want an OEM laptop and while I admire System76’s Thelio’s, I already have a powerful desktop, I needed a powerful laptop. Plus I didn’t want to be running an operating system that I don’t fully trust, so no Pop!OS or Linux distro.

The 16” Framework wasn’t even available at this point and I needed a laptop sooner rather than later…or else Rise of Windows part 2 was going to be delayed even longer. So in the end it was a pretty easy choice, made even easier by the fact that I knew the 15” MacBook Air runs a polished operating system that I’m very familiar with, stays out of my way and doesn’t require tweaking to be productive on. 

Please do not misunderstand me, I am not an Apple fanboy, but neither am I an Apple hater at all. When my new laptop came in, I basically turned it on, logged into my Apple account, installed Brave and Davinci Resolve, logged into Creative Cloud and downloaded Photoshop, and then I was done and ready to start editing Rise of Windows 2. Aside from download times, I doubt I spent even an hour actually setting things up before I was ready to start editing. For DaVinci Resolve, I just downloaded the installer and ran it. 

I didn’t have to do any configuring, mess with the Terminal at all, or follow a multiple step process involving using the terminal to install dependencies, then download and run a separate script that tries to simplify the otherwise even more complex process of getting Resolve to run under Linux. I just downloaded it, ran the installer, and I was ready to go. Zero time wasted. I could have cut the time down even further by installing Resolve from the App Store, but I didn’t even think to check and see if it was there.

The whole out of box Macintosh experience is incredibly user friendly, honed by Mac OS 10’s 25 years of history and development. And I’m not just saying that, I started using Mac OS 10 way back in the early days of version 10.0, “Cheetah”, running alongside MacOS 9.1 on the family iMac. The Mac out of box flow is easily the best one available, although  honestly Windows 10’s out of box experience is fairly straightforward as well. 

And while at least the Ubuntu variants of Linux that I have experience installing are mostly self explanatory and pretty accessible, it’s still not as polished as either of its two major competitors. And post-install, Linux is just too widely inconsistent in the amount of work required prior to you actually being able to, you know, actually DO work on it. And while I think a lot of this complexity is greatly mitigated by System76’s own machines, all I can go off of is my personal experience with Pop!OS on my own system. And that experience is that things work fairly well…right up until they catastrophically fail.

And what about David’s Netflix video I mentioned I was in the middle of editing when Pop!OS failed me? Well, I carefully backed the project and all assets up to two external hard drives prior to wiping Pop!OS and installing Windows. And then both hard drives failed and were, and have remained, unreadable when I tried to recover the project. So that video was never completed, and is in fact lost apart from the raw voiceover track.

While this wouldn’t have happened if the Pop!OS upgrade hadn’t nuked my computer, it’s obviously not Pop!OS’s fault that two external hard drives failed at once. It was just one more stroke of bad luck on top of the whole annoying situation.

I also think that Linux also has a serious problem with perception, specifically what is blamed when problems happen. And I freely admit that I tend to reflexively do the same thing myself. When I have trouble with an application on either my Windows or my Macintosh systems, I tend to blame the application itself, i.e. doggone it why is Teams such a buggy mess, why does Outlook randomly decide to take itself offline, why is Adobe Premiere such an unstable program that constantly crashes, etc. 

However when I have trouble with an application on a Linux install, I tend to blame the operating system itself, i.e doggone it why is Linux making it so Proton doesn’t want to run Serious Sam correctly, why has Linux locked up and Pop Shop won’t accept any input, etc. And I think that people trying out Linux for the first time, or trying to use it as their daily driver, tend to do the same thing and blame Linux anytime they have an application problem. That’s not fair, and maybe I am an outlier in it, but I’m willing to bet it happens a lot.

I want to see Linux make huge strides towards being a viable choice for the average consumer. And no, Chromebooks running ChromeOS don’t count. People just assume they are somehow running the Chrome browser as an operating system and don’t really give it any more thought until or unless they get frustrated with some limitation ChromeOS has.

 I want to see computers preinstalled with Pop!OS, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or whatever Debian distro you like, at my local Costco. I don’t want it to be a remarkable thing for someone to run Linux as their daily driver, something that makes people think you are some sort of hacker. I want it to be unremarkable to run Linux.

But here’s the problem. Or rather, here is the series of interlocking problems that are preventing that from happening. First of all, the greatest enemy Linux faces is the fact that it is not the default. Go to any Best Buy, Walmart, or Micro Center and what you are going to see are Windows machines plus Chromebooks. And an Apple section of course. In order to run Linux, you pretty much need to buy a computer with Windows, and then replace Windows with your preferred Linux distro. That is a massive barrier to adoption, and one that every attempt to solve has failed.

The most recent one I remember was when Walmart briefly started carrying PC’s preloaded with gOS…back in 2007. There may have been some attempts since then, but they came and went without a trace. 

Fighting the default option is an uphill battle, hence why Microsoft fought so hard to make Windows the default for PCs and Google pays Apple billions to make Google search the Safari default. The history of computing is littered with the corpses of operating systems that unsuccessfully fought the overwhelming pressure of not being the default preinstalled choice, ranging from CP/M, DR-DOS, BeOS, and even OS/2. 

So long as Linux is not available as a default in an easily available mass market consumer venue, whether online or brick-and-mortar, it will struggle to gain traction. Add any friction to making a change, and you immediately and easily lock most people into the default. And being forced to install an entire operating system, is some serious friction that is absolutely killing Linux’s chances at breaking through to the broader consumer market.

The second problem Linux faces is hardware. The vast majority of Linux systems that can be purchased, are simply rebranded PC laptops, sometimes with just a glorified sticker to cover up the Windows key and make it the Super key. Distinctive looking hardware is a key way for a manufacturer to differentiate a computer from its competitors. And this can occur within a system, such as with Microsoft’s distinctive Surface line of computers, or to separate one ecosystem from another, such as Apple’s very distinctive computers. System76 is the only company I’ve ever heard of that makes distinctive hardware for their Linux systems…but they only do desktops right now, not laptops. 

Thelios…I have wishfully specced one of these out many times in the past few years

But it is at least a start, and those Thelio systems are really distinctive looking in a good way. Linux desperately needs more of this, but the problem is that Linux really badly needs sleek looking custom hardware in the systems that people are buying, which are predominantly laptops, not desktops. These systems need to be in mass market locations, preferably physical ones where people can touch and interact with the systems. Again, huge props to System76 for making distinctive Linux hardware, but what the Linux ecosystem is crying out for is distinctive and stylish looking laptops, available where potential customers can easily see them. 

And System76 is also a small company, it is not realistic to expect them to create an entire ecosystem of custom Linux systems on their own. However, other options in the Linux space are slim to none, the only other one I had even heard of was called ZaReason and they went out of business in 2020. I think they only did rebranded PC laptops as well, no custom system designs. I’m sure there have been any number of other Linux only consumer hardware vendors in the past, however their failure rate is clearly pretty high. And Dell creating a few Linux options that you can dig through its site to find…if you are motivated enough…is hardly even worth counting. No Dell Linux laptop is ever going to be in Best Buy, and Dell is never going to design a sleek and stylish laptop that is only sold with Linux, aimed at the mass market. It’s just not going to happen.

And I know a lot of the reason why there are so few Linux only retailers is because Linux users tend to be very into building their own systems, customizing the hardware on an individual component level, and then installing a customized version of their favorite distro, spending hours or days, or heck even weeks tinkering with it all to get it just right.

And obviously there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it means that the main group of people who are willing to spend money on Linux systems…are probably just going to build them if they want a desktop, or just buy a PC laptop and replace Windows with Linux. That means that any company that seeks to build a business by creating custom systems that come preloaded with Linux…is going to have a tough time breaking out of the boutique system builder and reaching the computing mainstream. 

The last big problem that Linux has is in its applications. And yes I know, all sorts of powerful applications are available for it but a lot of those applications are either rough around the edges, or are more aimed at developers. If you want to reach the average consumer, they need to be able to just run their own familiar applications completely frictionlessly. It's all well and good that LibreOffice can replace Microsoft Office for pretty much any task, but for the average user, it doesn’t look like any version of Office from the past 15-20 years and that’s a pain point for the average user. 

And as someone who for two years did his very best to use GiMP for all video graphics and thumbnails…GiMP is a great example of the problems that so many Linux applications have. It marries powerful features and capability with a clunky user experience, and a poorly designed interface that feels actively hostile to the user. Plus its learning curve is a royal pain in the neck. Time and time again I had to reluctantly boot up my Macbook Pro in order to use Photoshop. 

Valve’s first attempt to create a Linux gaming ecosystem with Steam Machines was a failure, because there was still too much friction for the average user. Its second attempt with Steam Deck was a rousing success, and a huge part of that was the fact that it turned into a pretty seamless experience. You aren’t necessarily running Linux games, you just have access to your Steam library and most of the games you are likely to play, generally just run seamlessly through Proton. 

Solving Linux’s applications problem means making it so it's absolutely pain free to just install and run the top 100 most used Windows applications. Make it so it's frictionless to the user, they don’t have to Google anything, open the command prompt, or go through the absolutely maddening process of getting Wine to work correctly. Linux distros need to incorporate Wine/Proton (yes I’m aware that Proton is based off of Wine) directly into the base install, and make it work seamlessly out of the box.

About ten years ago I remember getting really excited when I saw “Wine For Dummies” on the shelf in an Ollies. I immediately grabbed it off the shelf and was deeply disappointed to find out that it had nothing to do with what I had been struggling with for the past week or two. That may have been a sign that I was focusing too heavily on running Windows applications on my Linux Mint install at the time, but I digress.

I’d love to see a System76 table on my local Best Buy, one section over from the Apple table, and right by the Surface display, all of them enticing customers to pick the experience they like the best and giving a massive amount more choice to customers who will never have the confidence to create a live Pop!OS USB drive or partition their hard drive as part of a dual boot Ubuntu install. I’d love it even more if the System76 table was simply one of multiple Linux hardware vendors' offerings, jostling for space and attention alongside the normal Windows systems. And customers can buy one of these systems and take it home, without any worries that their favorite applications won’t just run on it.

But the way things are going…that just doesn't seem like it's ever going to happen. And that’s unfortunate.