I can’t say I share this experience as I spend a lot more than half my time using Linux watching documentaries on youtube in a web browser. If you are obsessed with personalization I could see this happening, but I happen to prefer using default (as in “possible to consistently re-apply”) settings on most things.
Regardless, troubleshooting makes you better at resolving trouble that you didn’t bring about on your own, and life is defined by unexpected troubles. It is better to be antifragile than happy!
I guess you’re lucky (or much more tech-savvy than me). I tried to switch to linux once many years ago (pre-COVID, which is like ancient times now). It was horrible. Oh, I now need to learn about file systems and NTFS and ext3/4(?) - i guess i’ll try Linux on a separate, old hard drive. Ok, something didn’t work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn’t supported and what I need to download. Great, people on forums are helpful but they’re asking me a bunch of gibberish. Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don’t need to play with the command line, but then the GUI doesn’t work occasionally and now I have to figure out if it’s the GUI that broke or something else. And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.
Trying to use proprietary drivers and NTFS on Linux is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People work hard to make it work and maybe it does with a little effort but the proprietary model and Linux distros just don’t mesh well together. If you make it a point to purchase hardware that has open source drivers and use open source software (and as a consumer, you probably should anyway), everything does just work. Obviously this may not suit your use case and Linux may just not be for you.
NTFS is okay if you’re mounting a drive that you share with a Windows machine but don’t actually install Linux to an NTFS partition please. Most of the “beginner friendly” distros I don’t think even let you.
I can’t say I share this experience as I spend a lot more than half my time using Linux watching documentaries on youtube in a web browser. If you are obsessed with personalization I could see this happening, but I happen to prefer using default (as in “possible to consistently re-apply”) settings on most things.
Regardless, troubleshooting makes you better at resolving trouble that you didn’t bring about on your own, and life is defined by unexpected troubles. It is better to be antifragile than happy!
I guess you’re lucky (or much more tech-savvy than me). I tried to switch to linux once many years ago (pre-COVID, which is like ancient times now). It was horrible. Oh, I now need to learn about file systems and NTFS and ext3/4(?) - i guess i’ll try Linux on a separate, old hard drive. Ok, something didn’t work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn’t supported and what I need to download. Great, people on forums are helpful but they’re asking me a bunch of gibberish. Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don’t need to play with the command line, but then the GUI doesn’t work occasionally and now I have to figure out if it’s the GUI that broke or something else. And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.
Trying to use proprietary drivers and NTFS on Linux is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People work hard to make it work and maybe it does with a little effort but the proprietary model and Linux distros just don’t mesh well together. If you make it a point to purchase hardware that has open source drivers and use open source software (and as a consumer, you probably should anyway), everything does just work. Obviously this may not suit your use case and Linux may just not be for you.
NTFS is okay if you’re mounting a drive that you share with a Windows machine but don’t actually install Linux to an NTFS partition please. Most of the “beginner friendly” distros I don’t think even let you.