> How else can you stare at an empty screen and know that you have to blacklist your video card driver? Or sit in silence while tweaking alsamixer on the command line? Or write bash aliases to reload your network driver kernel module each time your laptop resumes from suspension?
The good old days! I've been a desktop Linux user for going on a decade. Yes, it used to be a mess. Something only someone with technical acumen, enormous amounts of free time, and an endless supply of patience would subject themselves to. It's amazing how much has changed. Maybe I was lucky. I transitioned from 'student with plenty of time to mess around with my computer' into 'adult who actually needs to get work done' at around the time that Linux desktops were becoming mature. I've been using Ubuntu for the last two years and rarely have problems. Granted, I'm not a typical computer user. I don't need everything dumbed down and made pretty. I need a stable and reliable system that I have complete control over. It doesn't hurt that any software I need is an 'apt-get install' away as well.
So thank you Linux, and thanks to all the developers that contribute to the ecosystem.
I'm afraid hardware support is still all over the place linux. I also had the same experience that everything just works nowadays, but a lot of that is because I buy laptops from well known hardware manufacturers and my current computer is 7 years old.
I was surprised to hear from a friend that he had a lot of trouble getting linux recognize his brand new nvidia video card.
At least half, or more, of that "crap" also gets done in Windows. Only diff is that is is masked by binary-distributed third party drivers.
The rest is because the udev/systemd devs are in a bikeshedding war with the kernel devs because the latter ruffled the formers feathers at some point.
16.04 or 14.04? I have to do the same after suspend on 16.04 gnome ubuntu, on my personal laptop. Network manager is such a shame on a system that otherwise gives me no trouble. I stay in the terminal and the web browser the vast majority of the time, so I don't need tons of fancy desktop stuff, but if it stays out of my way? Meh, sure whatever.
At work, I have a RNDIS USB network device I need to connect to (work laptop, not personal) and Network Manager is just insane, I don't even know what its trying to do. It only works if I delete the connection every time it boots, and re-add it. I just wish I could figure out where to add it in a config file and never touch it, but all the documentation seems out of date.
Ubuntu is trying to do so many changes in such a short period of time I guess they were bound to have some difficulties but it does seem like Network Manager is the worst of the bunch, otherwise everything else seems great.
The good old days! I've been a desktop Linux user for going on a decade. Yes, it used to be a mess. Something only someone with technical acumen, enormous amounts of free time, and an endless supply of patience would subject themselves to. It's amazing how much has changed. Maybe I was lucky. I transitioned from 'student with plenty of time to mess around with my computer' into 'adult who actually needs to get work done' at around the time that Linux desktops were becoming mature. I've been using Ubuntu for the last two years and rarely have problems. Granted, I'm not a typical computer user. I don't need everything dumbed down and made pretty. I need a stable and reliable system that I have complete control over. It doesn't hurt that any software I need is an 'apt-get install' away as well.
So thank you Linux, and thanks to all the developers that contribute to the ecosystem.