- Your experience and expertise with Linux is not universal.
- Many major Linux distros are at a transition point between Xorg and Wayland, and that will be hell for nvidia users (who should not be fucking shamed for just happening to have/need an nvidia gpu) (and yes, I'm aware a new driver drop is coming in the summer. No, I don't think that will magically solve all the problems plaguing nvidia + wayland)
- There exists no creative package in the FOSS ecosystem that is a drop-in replacement for the proprietary software it is supposed to replace.
- Relearning entirely new software is not easy, it takes time, and people are not shitty for not having the room in their lives to dedicate to a transition.
- About the only creative package I would remotely consider to be "professional grade" and has at least some market penetration in its industry is Blender. Its interface and workflow is still weird as fuck even post-2.7. The world still uses Maya.
- Most digital artists have invested years and a lot of money in the form of software, brush packs, etc., and dumping all that will cause a lot of workflows to collapse.
- Big Tech has invested decades and billions into locking people into SaaS ecosystems like Google Docs and Microsoft 365 that have provided value and ease of use for end users. People are not weak for benefiting from that ease of use.
- Big Tech is light-years ahead of most FOSS in terms of accessible computing, translations, etc. Your favourite go-to tool that needs to be compiled from a git repo might be absolutely useless to someone who only knows Farsi.
- Regardless of how you feel about it, some of the biggest games on the planet are Windows-only, and won't even run under Proton/WINE. People have built up social relationships and microcultures in those games that are just as valid as your local LUG full of weirdo IBM XT clone enthusiasts, and they are not fools or shitty for being human and forming social relationships and microcultures.
- "Tech support" on Linux is fucking abysmal, and always has been.
- "Just switch to Linux" is, and will always be, a temporary and personal-sphere mitigation against the inexorable march of cryptofascist surveillance capitalist tech. You will never make a meaningful enough dent in numbers to affect any kind of change simply by telling your friends to switch, and it will not stop the nightmare world being built up around you. Everyone would be better served by comprehensive privacy legislation, which means you have to get politically active, and message or call your reps.
- There are other things you can do beyond "just vote" but I ain't gonna write about 'em. Suffice it to say that the fate of our planet's ecosystems are at stake from people who think it's great that we can't tell what search results are real anymore.
just for funsies, i decided to see what Linux driver support was like for my main desktop machine, which is also my streaming machine (and thus my primary source of "income"). the very first part i looked up, my HDMI capture card, does not have an official driver. there is a similar driver that sort of works, but might not depending on your particular hardware configuration and/or flavor of Linux, and has the following caveats:
- driver needs to be recompiled/installed manually every time there's a kernel update
- RGB LEDs are not supported and will keep flashing red
- scaler doesn't seem to work so selected resolution has to match input resolution
- RGB24 doesn't work and there are audio issues in OBS
- only tested in Ubuntu and Fedora, other distros require further patches
- last update was four years ago, so it's effectively dead in the water, and further issues have almost certainly cropped up since
and that is just one piece of my setup. i would likely have to spend a not-insignificant amount of money i don't have on Linux-compatible hardware if i were to switch, and i haven't even thought about all the software i'd have to replace (if it can be replaced) and all the scripting i'd have to redo to get my setup functional again. there are pages and pages of discussion about getting veadotube mini--a core part of my pngtuber setup, and a wonderful program made by a wonderful person--working in Linux on the official Discord, and once you sort through all the talk of packages and dependencies and lack of good documentation, you find out that it Just Doesn't Work for some people, and nobody really knows why. i do not have the spoons for this.
so, yeah, if Linux works for you, great! i'm legitimately glad to hear it. but please keep in mind that some of us cannot make the switch for some reason or another before you hit that reply button. thank's.
