How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too
I&#x27;ve used Linux on the desktop for over a decade.  Currently, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on x64.<p>It still sucks for the average user. The GUI is lipstick on a pig. As soon as anything goes wrong, it&#x27;s back to the command line. You look up the problem, and there will be a dozen articles about it, all contradicting each other. Look up what it takes to create a desktop icon for something. (Hint: the top result in Google won&#x27;t work.)<p>I&#x27;m currently restoring a Ubuntu system after a hard drive replacement. I&#x27;ve been at this for a day now.  Typical little stuff:<p>- OpenGL frame rate is terrible. The default install turns out to be running OpenGL in the Mesa emulator. Time to install a driver. There&#x27;s lots of advice on that.  Get it from the NVidia site? From Ubuntu? From a driver-aggregation site?  (Scary).  Want the open source version or the closed source binary? Need CUDA support?  Five choices of driver. Finally pick the latest open source version and it works.<p>- File restoration isn&#x27;t working properly. I used iDrive for backup, and now it&#x27;s time to restore.  I&#x27;ve restored one or two files from iDrive before, but now I have to restore a lot of them. The interface is a bunch of Perl scripts, with a command line menu system from the 1970s. After much struggling (&quot;Restore From&quot; means the name of the machine that was backed up), I get the restore running. It runs, but about 8,000 files don&#x27;t restore out of a few hundred thousand. The message is just &quot;FAILED&quot;. Files with &quot;&amp;&quot; in the name don&#x27;t restore. Files with &quot;__&quot; in the name sometimes don&#x27;t restore. Working on that. Looks like most of what I lost was part of old builds of a big program, but there are a few files I&#x27;d like back.