So close, yet still so far away... My thoughts on switching
Disclaimer: Very long read ahead. And I know I'll probably get flamed here by all the fanboys, but I need you to know up front: I want Linux to legitimately compete as a viable solution for everybody. That's why I won't keep my opinions to myself; maybe there's something in here that the Linux community can learn from?
Every year or two for the last 20+ years, I set aside a little time to dive head first into using Linux for my everything. I guess I'm bored. It's like a wild hair that I must address, and I've never been one to listen to the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra - I intentionally break things just to fix them. I've been through all the major distros, usually whichever happens to be hottest at the time, and I throw it onto a primary hard drive and force myself to figure things out. You know: immersion therapy. :)
I've never been overly impressed with Linux. RedHat, Ubuntu, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, FOSS in general... I've always been impressed that it was free and that you can do actual things with it, but that's usually where the fascination quickly turns to loathing, making me just appreciate Windows and MacOS all the more.
And here I was this year, CachyOS is all the rage. Wayland has replaced X. Lighter on system resources. Aesthetically amazing. FOSS has had more time to mature with more well-rounded offerings.
So I fire up the live distro from a thumb drive and... I'm honestly impressed! Wayland and KDE have made the UI actually look ... *polished*! I poke around a little bit and decide to install. But over the ensuing two weeks, here are the things that I find that I'm still frustrated by that I think are pretty normal things. Obviously everybody's setup is different, but I spent hours on each of these trying to get them to work well enough that I could just stay in Linux and never look back:
* Email: My work's email accounts are all Office365 accounts. We all have our own account/email, and we all share access to another shared calendar. I didn't think this would be the hangup that it is, but I tried getting by with web-based [outlook.com](http://outlook.com) and it wasn't enough. I tried until I was blue in the face to configure Thunderbird (got close) and Evolution, but Office365 account support is super spotty and complicated to configure. Then, once you get it to accept your credentials you need unsupported plugins to be able to also get calendar and contacts. I never was able to get all of this in one place. * PDF editing: I'm a project manager for a housing developer. We spend all day inside architectural and engineering plan sets on 36"x24" PDF pages. It's critical to be able to open these plans and work inside the files. I need to mark things up, measure distances, rearrange and cut and paste pages between files... I do all of this in BlueBeam Revu Extreme in Windows, and there doesn't seem to be a Linux alternative that comes even close in usability. Granted, there's not much else in Windows that matches BlueBeam's productivity, but I was willing to stumble through something that got close enough. LibreOffice's Draw program was the closest I got, but it doesn't deal in PDFs natively and there are no measurement tools to speak of. * Printing: I'm sure local printing works great. But in my office, we all print to a SHARP multifunction printer with inner finishers and duplexers and user account control... I discovered that the user control wasn't configurable in CUPS, so I tried for hours to edit the ppd to include the necessary lines for user control... to no avail. * Video conferencing: MS Teams (PWA) seemed to work great - until I tried to talk. My webcam (Logitech C920 Pro) was detected and video was great, but the mic on it requires all kinds of command-line changes, and I never was able to get the mic to work. * Video editing: I was pleased to find that DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux! ...But H.264/5 support isn't there? That's a deal-breaker.
That said, here are some things that I was pleasantly surprised about:
* The visual POLISH! FINALLY, KDE Plasma on Wayland looks so good. It's consistent, functional, professional... Configuring things to my liking was easy and I had plenty of options to tweak, and none of the tweaks ever rendered something else unusable. * Hardware detection: so much to say here. It knew right away that my mouse was low on battery. Keyboard shortcut control keys (like Volume) worked out-of-the-box. Speakers, sound card, hardware video acceleration, dual monitors... Super impressive. * MS Office alternatives: I felt right at home with Libre Office, as soon as I set the default formats to the monopolistic standards set by Microsoft's offering: .docx, .xlsx, etc. * Network server access: Was able to set up my user account access to our server with no issues at all. Pinned the location to the sidebar in Dolphin and it worked exactly how I had hoped it would. * Browser-based stuff: I ditched Firefox for Brave, and it worked exactly as I had hoped it would. I was able to install MS Teams (PWA) to the desktop with no issues, and I never encountered any rendering issues or other issues that would encroach on usability or productivity.
But in the end, I'm typing this up from Windows again. The things that I couldn't get to work were all deal-breakers in and of themselves. I must be able to do these things to be able to work, and I don't think that those things are asking too much... It looks like we've come a long way, but it still looks like we have a long ways to go. Browser-based stuff all worked great, but I need my work PC to be so much more than just a Chromebook. And I gave up (again) before I even got to the more niche things like 3d printing or serious gaming.
Thanks for taking the time to read! If you can provide meaningful conversation I'd love to hear about your thoughts or suggestions, but I'm not interested in engaging in any conversation that seems condescending, bigoted, or smug.