article: linux sucks

at the time of writing, i have been using linux on and off for about 4 years; and as a lifelong computer toucher, ive wondered why linux isnt more popular. in hindsight this is quite obvious: linux sucks.

this post is about my own inconveniences ive had with using linux. some of them are trivial. others are not. this is mostly just a big thought dump about why i hate the very thing that makes my computer tolerable.

linux is often hailed as "an operating system that runs on anything". this is not true. at best it is merely an operating system that boots on most things, which can describe macOS if youre deep enough in the hackintosh rabbithole. i have quite a few stories of linux either working very poorly or not working at all on computers i own.

first: macbooks. all of them. mostly the one i own, though.

whenever i try out a new linux distro on my 2012 macbook pro, its pretty much a coin flip whether or not i'll be able to get the wifi and bluetooth working in a reasonable amount of time. somehow like half the distros ive tried on it have little to no support for the macbook's wifi chipset so i have to go through some arcane bullshit to get it working. i dont know what the deal with this even is at this point. i thought it was some issue with the chipsets having proprietary firmware or something but no. broadcom has had an official, fully open source driver that they made themselves in the linux kernel since fuckin 2010. whats the deal here. do the dickheads working on the kernel just actively sabotage macbook users or something because they should have bought a thinkpad instead. what the fuck.

ok so according to linuxquestions.org "broadcom is slower than other manufacturers at porting drivers to linux" this is a laptop from over ten years ago. i understand them taking maybe 6-12 months at the most, but there is no way that, after 13 years, they havent released a driver and every up-to-date distro under the goddamn sun hasn't integrated that driver into their codebase. im even more confused now. what the fuck is broadcom paying those programmers to do.

on that same thread i saw a comment along the lines of "if you aren't willing to work a little bit, then maybe linux isnt for you" this is the mentality that is gonna keep everyone stuck on microsoft's dick for the next 3 decades. is it so difficult to stop fucking gatekeeping all the time and just make your os accessible for once. even if you have to ship a proprietary piece of firmware now and then. is it necesary to *fight* every new user you see because they committed the unthinkable, horrible sin of "wanting to do work with their computer". this is why i have respect for the "easy" distros like ubuntu and linux mint, because they at least offer the illusion of giving a fuck about the user experience while every other distro fucks you six ways from sunday for daring to utter the word "wifi" in their holy presence.

also worth noting that the shittiness only gets worse the newer the macbook is. by the time you get up to the touchbar and T2 models, they practically need to run custom-built kernels in order to function, which severely limits what distros you can (easily) install. don't even get me started on the apple silicon macbooks. those things are just fucked now that asahi (the primary distro aiming to support apple silicon) has lost so many major developers

second: my dell G5 5505 / dell G5 SE.

the 5505 is a budget-oriented gaming laptop from 2020. mine is equipped with a ryzen 4800H cpu, 32 gigs of ram, and a dedicated radeon RX 5600M gpu. i purchased it in july 2024 and consider it a pretty solid computer. for some reference of its speed, it runs helldivers 2 at like 35 fps on low-ish settings. quite good performance for a $350 device, and its only possible because of that dedicated gpu.

unfortunately, under linux, that gpu turns the laptop into a paperweight. after anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours, the laptop would completely, irreversibly, freeze. looking up this issue would lead to a bug report on the AMDGPU driver's gitlab repo. the issue was caused by a single line in the driver, intended as a workaround for another model of RX 5600. unfortunately, for reasons beyond my understanding, this specific line would cause the gpu on the 5505 to hang indefinitely.

given that the problem was caused by a single line of code, you would expect it to be patched pretty quickly. wrong. the gitlab issue was opened in mid 2021. an unofficial patch was available in the thread 5 days later. great! except that applying this patch means recompiling the entire linux kernel every time an update releases, which is something i really, really do not want to do because it is a pain in the ass. an alternative solution was offered; disabling the gpu's power management, which would cause the laptop's poor battery life to become even worse. this was also not an option for me.

so for a while i just had to use windows, which sucked. i will likely air my grievances with windows in some other post, just know i do not like it. i eventually got completely fed up with windows and wanted to switch to linux, so i spent an afternoon trying to figure out how to disable the dgpu entirely, as i didn't really need it. (being able to play helldivers is a neat bonus, but i have no need to do that in the middle of english class.) unfortunately the laptop has an incredibly limited bios which did not let me disable the dgpu (i am told this is a fairly common feature among competent laptops), so i had to learn the ancient art of udev rules in order to disable the gpu in software. after getting the rule set up, my laptop could now run all day without crashing, at the expense of the dgpu's functionality. yippee.

then about one month after i got my laptop into a usable state with the aforementioned udev rule, an official patch for the gpu freeze was released, and my effort was rendered pointless. sweet. at least it got done eventually though right haha

third: my gateway MT3705

the mt3705 is a low-end(?) laptop from about 2007, maybe late 2006. i have no idea honestly there is basically no documentation for this model online. i want to write a longer post about this specific device so i will keep this brief. but basically it is fucking IMPOSSIBLE to find a linux distro that works on this thing. just a simple 32-bit, x86 intel machine. not very special. unfortunately most distros that "have 32-bit support" wont boot on it or work incredibly poorly. arch linux 32 only boots about one third of the time, void linux works as well as it can but void linux sucks ass, and every other distro seems to only be a livecd. why are they all livecds??? why cant i just. install it to the thing's hard drive???? artix project i love you but what the FUCK are you doing??? why cant you be normal????? anyway uh turns out debian works great on it after installing LXQt and icewm so everybody say thank you to debian. ok i said this section would be brief.

fourth: ok this one isnt even hardware i just wanna whine about the pathetic state of "native" linux apps

steam and discord, two apps i consider to be pretty much essential, both barely work at all. ok thats a lie discord is actually doing pretty well now but steam needs to get their shit together. i just hate steam so much.

4.a: steam has so many weird issues on linux.

it eats considerably more ram than it does on windows, which is saying something, and it gets even worse the longer it runs. there is most definitely some sort of memory leak going on with steam and its been there as long as ive used linux. very cool thanks valve. also the dropdown menus steam opens have a nasty tendency to get stuck on my screen even if i alt-tab out of steam and it fucks up al ot of my apps until i alt-tab back to it. why are you so needy.

4.b: why is valve so goddamn important

ok this one is much more important but between proton, their financial support, and their driver contributions, valve is kinda singehandedly holding up the entire desktop linux community and that scares me. as grateful as i am for the work valve employees do, theyre a multibillion dollar corporation with morals seemingly held up only by the will of their 60-something year old ceo. the dude's gonna either die or retire at some point and those thin morals are gonna go down with him. valve's corporate structure seems to be somewhere between "nonexistant" and "weird as fuck" and would probably turn into a nightmarish power vacuum should gabe die. while valve collapsing would have a profound effect on the entire pc gaming market, i dont really give a fuck. all i care about is the fact that valve's numerous contributions to the linux community are practically charity work, and the moment electronic arts or whatever swoops up valve's disorganized carcass, all that open-source shit is going right out the window because to investors it is pointless. higher-ups would see to it that everyone working on open-source projects will be reassigned to adding chatgpt to dota 2 or whatever the fuck