Posted by todsacerdoti 1/3/2026
After decades of macOS, and a bit of Windows, I tried Linux again recently and it was... good? For the first time in 20+ years, I ran into no big issues and no need to switch back.
The new UI stuff happening in Gnome-land, while controversial, has started to make the desktop feel modern and cohesive.
After years of Windows Explorer, clicking around in ~~Nautilus~~Files felt so snappy. The built-in Gnome document viewer is fantastic.
Gnome is starting to show glimmers of being the natural evolution of the Mac desktop, not a poor imitation -- which is very exciting.
The things I personally had problems with is BTRFS and printers. BTRFS was completely irrecoverable after a system crash, full story see here [1]. Since I've read a lot of these horror stories while doing some research after the crash, I would encourage everyone using it to be careful and backup your system on a daily basis. I switched to ZFS with ZFSBootMenu[2] and never looked back.
Printer-wise, I have a Canon network printer / scanner which seems to use a strange proprietary protocol. On Fedora everything worked fine while on Arch I did not find a way to get this thing working (I tried hard with different options like driverless, gutenprint, cupsd etc.) - printing also seems to be a bit of a security nightmare when changing firewall settings is mandatory.
Everything else is working absolutely stunning.
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=13013
In short, I'm not sure there are any real issues with having it on disk but unreadable by anybody but root.
Since I reboot my notebook only about once in a month it is no real hassle to enter the key twice 12 times a year :-)
I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.
I play loads of games; its mainly AAA multiplayers that aren't able to run on linux due to kernel anti-cheat - nearly everything else runs well with minimal effort using proton via steam (either installed via steam or imported as a non-steam game).
Thank god I've been using Linux long enough to not experience any of that.
At my job in a large non-tech company, almost everyone uses Windows (except for the dev team) purely because of Microsoft Office. As long as that thing exists, they can do all the dumb things they want and still dominate.
Web-based really ought to work. Maybe your admins are being weird, and checking the user agent? Try using a plug-in to change your user-agent to Windows