How and why I transitioned to Linux, and how you can too
I'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'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't work.)<p>I'm currently restoring a Ubuntu system after a hard drive replacement. I'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'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't working properly. I used iDrive for backup, and now it's time to restore.  I'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 ("Restore From" means the name of the machine that was backed up), I get the restore running. It runs, but about 8,000 files don't restore out of a few hundred thousand. The message is just "FAILED". Files with "&" in the name don't restore. Files with "__" in the name sometimes don'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'd like back.