Linux

As everyone is saying, Linux can be perfectly stable, depending on your distribution.

The only thing I’d think about is that you could have to tweak a few things to get everything working at the beginning.

For instance, I had nothing to change to make everything work in Fedora on my Surface Go, but I gad to enable rom fusion in the terminal to get the wifi working on my wife’s MacBook Pro.

Otherwise, you can just enjoy your Linux distribution as long as you don’t want to do crazy stuff out of the beaten paths.

I’ve never really had issues with Fedora (has more up to date software vs Debian stable) or Debian, they generally just work. Back when I used arch there were a couple of times in about a year and a half where it stopped booting (mobile nvidia graphics forced me to do weird things that lead to issues), but that’s a less stable OS on top of a bad hardware setup for Linux (obligatory fuck Nvidia).

Most problems I run into with Linux are caused by me doing weird things. Linux doesn’t prevent you from messing with things you don’t understand but if you just want to use it as a standard desktop then you shouldn’t have many issues aside from finding replacement applications for things you are used to using.

If you decide to start tinkering, just keep a backup of your home directory since it contains all your settings and files.

My experince :

Tbh motherboard matters. Updating my msi motherboard actually fixed a major issue for me preventing grub from letting me select what OS to load on boot.

I installed linux mint and did have to do a bit of tinkering to get my audio to work from the front panel too. Found answers in the mint forums.

Other than that my discord streams have no audio and discords screen capture daemon or whatever keeps the computer from shutting down for like a minute after i try to.

Those are the only issues Ive had though.

As for lack of features, no HDR sucks, but other than that I'm good.

Warpinator is nice for syncing files with my phone.

Also enjoying the simpler feel compared to windows, and no ads.

Depends on the distro, some are rolllig. /s

And some are intended to fiddle with (Arch and Gentoo for example). Others are made to explore new ways to do things (like immutable root, state managing package manager, each app in their folder Mac-style, such things). Of course there's a lot of stable general-use distros too. But you may ask someone else for examples.

Until one of the RAM sticks went bad, my parents, who are in their 60s ran Ubuntu Linux for years without an issue. I set it up in 2016, as a dual boot with Windows. They almost never booted into Windows, and told me they preferred Linux.

Depends on your use case. Most of the people running Linux I think are the kind that want to experiment and try different stuff, opposite to the regular user of Windows. And you know when you do changes chances are something to break much higher.

If you install some user friendly and stable distro, VSCode, browser, word editor and you never touch the terminal or do any changes it will be solid and stable.

it's been awhile since i dove into Linux, but last time i dabbled i was liking Kubuntu.

As already stated why would there be a bunch of posts of people bragging about their uptime and stability? Would be pretty boring no? Why are you wanting to make the switch and what are your needs?

Yes you can.
I spend a lot od time fixing things that I broke because I like it and it's a hobby for me.

I installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on my SO's laptop last year (old thinkpad t470) and I haven't had to do anything about it since then. The installation process was easy, I didn't bother changing the defaults and just clicked "Next" on most of the steps.

Can you share with us the hardware you'll be using ? In most cases it'll be easy peasy, but some stuff is known to cause issues that we might be able to identify before you start your journey.

My current issue is i see you guys constantly having issues, editing files etc.

These guy cannot self-develop

They never learn thing themselves. Never read books. Never read manual pages.

Just ignore them.

Is it not stable?

Commits to softwares around Linux (userland, system maintenance tools, etc) usually just works (even if alpha). There are few bugs.

Alpine Linux edge+testing is much stable (my only issue come from testing mesa packages, just don't upgrade this package to any version without -r0 or -r1 or like that :) )

Can you not set it up and then not have ongoing issues?

Yes.

A system that never have to su root (except for shutdown, reboot).

I use Ubuntu for everything I do (except building and testing windows binaries) beside upgrading when it asks me to I never really have to worry about anything, everything I use just works and the ui is fine.

I'm not a big gamer and I only really use open source software so I don't know if you'll want to do things I don't but I do pretty much everything else: image editing, video editing, CAD, coding, all sorts of weird internet stuff.

I have linux distros that i like and work for me, i almost never have issues. I think it depends on hardware, and i think a lot of the issues are just people trying to do things as they used to on windows and things just work a bit different

Even running Arch for the last decade or so, I largely don't have issues that wind up being any more complicated than downgrading a package every so often. Most of my config editing occur in one of three situations. First and most common, initial setup of a program to telling it where to find any files it needs and change any default settings I have a different preference on. Second, it's a program I use constantly and want to tweak it to work just so, adding to it as I discover new features that catch my interest, like tweaking my ncmpcpp and tmux setups. The last case is procrastination, where I get obsessively focused on something because, clearly, the reason I haven't written my 5 page paper due tomorrow has nothing to do with the fact I've been screwing around and not keeping up with my coursework for the last week, and can instead be squarely attributed to the fact that I have discovered some aspect of my emacs setep that needs to be refined, like realizing I dislike how biber formats my references in Auctex and needing to spend hours finetuning my reference style to m' exact preferences.

For most general use cases, like browsing the web, listening to music, watching movies and maybe firing up a word processor, this is entirely unnecessary. To give an example, I got tired of having to periodically spend a night purging my elderly mother's laptop of myriad viruses and uninstalling the dozen or so IE toolbar she kept infecting her system with. Clearly not a techy person. I put Linux mint on it, changed the desktop shortcut for Firefox to the Internet Explorer icon, ditto for Open Office's word processor with Ms Word, and she was happy as could be without really noticing a difference. I would just remote in and periodically update it. Worked fine for her until she got a new new computer, by which point she'd realized she could, in fact, live without all that malware taking up half her screen in IE.

I don't know who these people having issues are but I run Linux Mint Debian Edition and have no issues editing my stuff.

The only issue I can imagine is if they had formatted an external HDD with ext4 and and copied docs from a previous Linux install, and now when they copy it to their new install, they don't have permission to edit the doc.

For example, you try out Ubuntu for a few weeks/months. You format your ext HDD in ext4 and create docs in Ubuntu. You then copy those into the HDD. Or maybe you had another drive formatted with NTFS and copied docs from there onto the ext4 drive.

After a few weeks you erase Ubuntu from your machine and install Arch. Now when you try to edit a doc on the HDD or copy it to your machine, you find you don't have permission because those permissions were set on your previous Ubuntu install.

I've had permission issues with that hence I format my ex HDD with exFAT and it works perfectly. Also works perfectly with Windows and macOS as they can all read/write to exFAT without permission issues.