It's also still not true. My son has a Windows machine that he's responsible for, after a long time running ChromeOS. He's reported all kinds of weird driver things, and having had to watch YouTube tutorials to figure out how to fix issues.
It gave me pause in the sense that it doesn't feel true.
I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)
But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.
Some advanced uses from Windows that are very easy can be very difficult on Linux still. PipeWire, for example, while more stable overall, has made getting my audio routing all correct (e.g. for streaming) much more difficult than it is on Windows. Once it's set up it's just as stable but it took me longer to set up.
I could see that among other things totaling dozens of hours for a Linux beginner. Power management on laptops is still a common sticking point; i probably spent more than a dozen hours on that alone before giving up and going back to Windows on my laptop. And I've been using Linux for 20 years.
You know how much time I had to spend doing desktop support for developers who couldn't get their own Zoom/Teams meetings to work on Windows? Its not as intuitive as you think, you're probably just used to it.
What's funny is, the author is only having these questions because they chose a wacky Arch-based ultra-techie distro that I'd never even heard of.
If they'd just installed normal Ubuntu or Fedora, they wouldn't even know what a bootloader was, and they'd just use whatever desktop environment (probably GNOME, maybe KDE) came with it.
For real. I should write a blog post about my expierience but it would only be like 2 sentences. "Hey! I switched to Linux. I bought a desktop from System76 and it all just worked."
I suspect they sincerely picked CachyOS because they read people advocating for it, and were convinced by the advocacy. People advocate all kinds of distros, and all of them except the one I advocate are bad choices.
If you want a bit more automation on your spreadsheet, check out Tiller. They provide the integrations with your banks to automatically download your transactions into a spreadsheet (support Sheets or Excel), as well as some handy templates that you can use for budgeting/dashboarding/whatever. But fundamentally, just pulling data into a spreadsheet so that you can use it however you want.
I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.
In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
I have the HP Zbook Ultra G1a. AMD 395+, 129GB RAM, 4TB 2280 SSD. Works great with Ubuntu 24.04 and the OEM kernel. Plays Steam games, runs OpenCL AI models. Only nit is it is very picky on what USB PD chargers it will actually charge on at all. UGreen has a 140W that works.
I've had Linux running on a variety of laptops since the noughties. I've had no more issues than with Windows. ndiswrapper was a bit shit but did work back in the day.
I haven't, because I buy hardware that's designed to work with Linux. But if you buy hardware that doesn't have Linux drivers, it just won't work. That might mean Wifi not working, it might mean a fingerprint reader not working, etc.
I was going back and looking at timelines, and was shocked to realize that Claude Code and Cursor's default-to-agentic-mode changes both came out in late February. Essentially the entire history of "mainstream" agentic coding is ten months old.
(This helps me understand better the people who are confused/annoyed/dismissive about it, because I remember how dismissive people were about Node, about Docker, about Postgres, about Linux when those things were new too. So many arguments where people would passionately talk about all those things were irredeemably stupid and only suitable for toy/hobby projects.)
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