This really isn’t trua anymore with immutable kde distros, everything really does just work. You have to relearn some things but that’s a fundamental issue with switching to anything, the recent ltt experiment confirms pretty much the only thing that’s missing at this point is anticheat and it’s the year of the linux desktop. I feel like your stance was valid a few years ago.
Let’s talk about my recent exercise in mapping persistent network drives:
Windows: Right click in file explorer, select map drive, enter server path, user name password. Check the Reconnect at login checkbox. Click OK.
Linux: Add user to soduers file, sudo make a directory in /mnt, chown of directory to user, sudo install smbclient, create a cedentials file with server user and password, modify fstab file and add mount command to that and refererwnce credential file, well network stack doesent load until after it tries to map the drives on boot so then I added a 60 second wait to wait for the network to come online.
Yes, things are better now when it comes to installing and hardware compatibility, but for the average person the steps I took to map a network drive is not feasible to pull off. Most people just want things to work without going through multiple steps of trial and error
It goes back to what I said earlier, that yes you can do what you need to if you’re willing to put in the effort. But I don’t want to have to build a hammer every time I need to drive in a nail, even if I know how to build that hammer. I want to grab an already working hammer from my toolbox.
I think its no accident that the majority of desktop Linux users are software devs. Using Linux at home in a way serves as job credentials, because you have to be intimately familiar with the OS in a way that Windows and (especially) Mac users don’t have to be just to get by.
My latest (and so far longest) streak of daily driving Linux was with Mint. The bluetooth worked perfectly out of the box for the first time… and then never again. My headphones would simply never pair, and my Wacom tablet and xbox controller would constantly connect and disconnect, causing popups every time it did, and no amount of terminal magic seemed to solve the problem. Of course that’s not what pushed me back to Windows, as always that honor goes to the lack of a usable screen reader and magnifier.
Linux works great as a server precisely because you’re supposed to know what you’re doing, but a consumer-facing OS is supposed to be fool proof.
Yes, things are better now when it comes to installing and hardware compatibility, but for the average person the steps I took to map a network drive is not feasible to pull off. Most people just want things to work without going through multiple steps of trial and error
Here’s you’re problem: the average person has never used a network drive. You aren’t an average user.
I’m using Garuda, and have been for several years. 99.9% of the time, things just work. Then few times it doesn’t are when I’m trying to do something more advanced, and that’s fine. The experience for the average user is pretty much solved, and that’s what matters. If you are doing something more advanced, you also know how to figure out how to solve it.
Is it perfect? Of course not. However, I (and I assume you too) am the type of user who modified registries in Windows to get things working how I want. That is far worse of an experience than anything I’ve had to do in Linux (for the simplicity of what it was doing at least). Sure, MS makes it pretty easy to do some things, but they also make it almost, if not actually, impossible to do others. I was tired of dealing with that and have enjoyed Linux much more.
I didn’t like using Linux when I tried it the first few times 10+ years ago. Now, it’s pretty good, but you do have to commit to it. You have to learn how it works, just as you had to do for Windows at one point. Just because you forgot about all the shit you dealt with on Windows doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. You have to come to Linux knowing it’s not Windows, and you are not going to know how to do everything. If you come in with the mindset that it should work like Windows then you’ll inevitably have a bad time.
Network drives are a legitimate painpoint, luckily kde just got over a mil to work on network drives in particular, this will be a solved problem soon.
This really isn’t trua anymore with immutable kde distros, everything really does just work. You have to relearn some things but that’s a fundamental issue with switching to anything, the recent ltt experiment confirms pretty much the only thing that’s missing at this point is anticheat and it’s the year of the linux desktop. I feel like your stance was valid a few years ago.
Let’s talk about my recent exercise in mapping persistent network drives: Windows: Right click in file explorer, select map drive, enter server path, user name password. Check the Reconnect at login checkbox. Click OK.
Linux: Add user to soduers file, sudo make a directory in /mnt, chown of directory to user, sudo install smbclient, create a cedentials file with server user and password, modify fstab file and add mount command to that and refererwnce credential file, well network stack doesent load until after it tries to map the drives on boot so then I added a 60 second wait to wait for the network to come online.
Yes, things are better now when it comes to installing and hardware compatibility, but for the average person the steps I took to map a network drive is not feasible to pull off. Most people just want things to work without going through multiple steps of trial and error
👆 This
It goes back to what I said earlier, that yes you can do what you need to if you’re willing to put in the effort. But I don’t want to have to build a hammer every time I need to drive in a nail, even if I know how to build that hammer. I want to grab an already working hammer from my toolbox.
I think its no accident that the majority of desktop Linux users are software devs. Using Linux at home in a way serves as job credentials, because you have to be intimately familiar with the OS in a way that Windows and (especially) Mac users don’t have to be just to get by.
My latest (and so far longest) streak of daily driving Linux was with Mint. The bluetooth worked perfectly out of the box for the first time… and then never again. My headphones would simply never pair, and my Wacom tablet and xbox controller would constantly connect and disconnect, causing popups every time it did, and no amount of terminal magic seemed to solve the problem. Of course that’s not what pushed me back to Windows, as always that honor goes to the lack of a usable screen reader and magnifier.
Linux works great as a server precisely because you’re supposed to know what you’re doing, but a consumer-facing OS is supposed to be fool proof.
Here’s you’re problem: the average person has never used a network drive. You aren’t an average user.
I’m using Garuda, and have been for several years. 99.9% of the time, things just work. Then few times it doesn’t are when I’m trying to do something more advanced, and that’s fine. The experience for the average user is pretty much solved, and that’s what matters. If you are doing something more advanced, you also know how to figure out how to solve it.
Is it perfect? Of course not. However, I (and I assume you too) am the type of user who modified registries in Windows to get things working how I want. That is far worse of an experience than anything I’ve had to do in Linux (for the simplicity of what it was doing at least). Sure, MS makes it pretty easy to do some things, but they also make it almost, if not actually, impossible to do others. I was tired of dealing with that and have enjoyed Linux much more.
I didn’t like using Linux when I tried it the first few times 10+ years ago. Now, it’s pretty good, but you do have to commit to it. You have to learn how it works, just as you had to do for Windows at one point. Just because you forgot about all the shit you dealt with on Windows doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. You have to come to Linux knowing it’s not Windows, and you are not going to know how to do everything. If you come in with the mindset that it should work like Windows then you’ll inevitably have a bad time.
Network drives are a legitimate painpoint, luckily kde just got over a mil to work on network drives in particular, this will be a solved problem soon.
https://news.tuxmachines.org/n/2026/05/13/KDE_Receives_Over_1M_from_Sovereign_Tech_Fund_for_Software_Deve.shtml
i will say using a network drive makes you not an average user though.
Click the script the IT guy gave you. Most end users don’t know what a network drive is.
GNOME: Browse to the location in the files app. Drag the folder to the shortcuts list. Done.
This sounds very similar to things that were being said five and ten and fifteen years ago.