Boy, the good ole days are gone when it comes to Windows. I am posting just to help anybody that doesn’t know. This is like a creepy wire tap. If you are actually using Windows 11, make sure to disable and or reduce telemetry in Windows 11 (Privacy). If that actually helps, I am sure there are more ways they send data back but the video link is a simple how to for the telemetry. Here is more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtg_s1GQiMU
This is easily said but I’ve personally had issues with Mint, Ubuntu and Bazzite as well. SteamOS has been pretty okay though, but not without its own issues either.
I feel like the issue right now with nearly all Linux distros is that it is too easy to break. Linux offers tons of freedom, sure, but the guardrails that are supposed to prevent you from making critical mistakes are few.
With Bazzite for example, I tried to mount my second drive. The config screen (I’m sure it has a name but I forgot) showed some kind of error, but did not make it clear what the problem was. It also gave no clear indication how to fix it. After I figured a reboot might help, I got completely stuck in an unbootable state, with none of the recovery options suggested online working. Had to reinstall the entire OS from USB. What should have been an easy thing to do ended up inexplicably bricking the system.
Microsoft has invested quite a bit in good automatic recovery recently. Just today, Dell pushed a faulty display driver update to my laptop, which meant no more display at all. After rebooting three times, Windows recovery kicked in, automatically uninstalled the faulty update and got the OS in a bootable state again. It displayed a nice message on reboot explaining what it did, and disabled that update from being reinstalled for at least 30 days. Find me a Linux distro that does that.
Like it’s easy to hate on Microsoft (I do it too) but unless we acknowledge why people get stuck on Linux and end up reverting to Windows people just aren’t going to switch. Windows contains a smelly heap of garbage, but there’s a lot going on as well to prevent the user from getting stuck in technical problems that don’t recover automatically.
These are a lot of issues! I have had basically no issues for years. Certainly not bricking or breaking anything.
Windows has been worse for me (on the windows machines I support). Nvidia driver broke (black screen on all accelerated windows) and had to be repaired using a bit of powershell and a roll back tool. No auto fix from windows.
Windows update didn’t complete correctly, hours trying to roll it back, the windows tools did nothing, including the repair tool.
Point is I see far more broken windows than linux at this point.
As for fixing linux? Keep your home and os seperate and its super easy. Try changing hardware on windows and watch the fun of breakage and licensing kick in!
Edit: I want to add: linux can break, sometimes in an update. But it seems like its the user actively doing something. Windows breaks, in bizarre ways usually due to an update. Particularly lately.
That could easily be because far more people use Windows though. It’s a hit and a miss with Windows, on my work laptop it hasn’t been very stable, yet my desktop has never had an issue with it and is running pretty flawlessly.
I’ve repeatedly changed hardware on Windows and never had anything break really. Even going from an Nvidia card to an AMD one went without a hitch.
I guess this is kind of my point: the user being able to break the OS is an OS failure, not a user one. The OS should have prevented the user from doing something fatal in the first place. Windows isn’t perfect in that regard but imo quite a bit stronger. That’s what makes Linux more attractive to tinkerers at the moment, but it scares casual users off. I really want Linux desktops to improve on this so it’s more attractive to casual users. Or a recovery tool, it’d be great if after making a change and ending up with boot failures Linux would automatically roll back the change. I know some systems have snapshots that you can roll back to but iirc you have to do that manually.