Edit: here is some context because people are getting mad
the reason i asked because my friend asked me to install linux on his laptop because he wanted to look like a cringey hacker so i installed it but after i installed linux few days after he reinstalled windows(i am not sure why but he said he can’t run bluestack, i suggested other VMs but he wouldn’t have any other way but that’s not reason i think he switched he was being dismissive) and now his mic and web cam is not working and some other stuff, so he’s asking me again to reinstall linux constantly and i don’t want to do that again (why? My school is far from my home around 9km/5.5 and i go there by my bicycle so after school I don’t wanna waste my time installing linux)so i was just ranting didn’t expect to make people mad
If only. I’m running old stuff, not by choice either.
Ubuntu 18.04 and up literally fails to install on one of my work computers. I’ve been forced to run Ubuntu 16.04. BIOS-incompatibility / hardware issues happen man. It forces me to an older version. On some Dell workstations I’ve bought for my org, Ubuntu 22 fails to install and we’re forced to run Ubuntu 20.04 on those.
Software compiled on Ubuntu 16.04 has issues running on Ubuntu 20.04, meaning these two separate computers have different sets of bugs as our developers run and test.
I’m running old LTS Ubuntu instances, not because I want to mind you. But because I’ve been forced with hardware incompatibility bugs to do so. At least we have Docker, so the guy running Ubuntu 20.04 can install docker and create an Ubuntu 16.04 docker to run the 16.04 binaries. But its not as seemless as any Linux guy thinks.
CentOS is too stable and a lot of proprietary code is designed for Ubuntu instead. So while CentOS is stable, you get subtle bugs when you try to force Ubuntu binaries onto it. If your group uses CentOS / RedHat, that’s great. Except its not the most popular system, so you end up having to find Ubuntu boxes somewhere to run things effectively.
There’s plenty of Linux software these days that forces me (and users around me) to use Linux in an office environment. But if you’re running multiple Linux boxes (This box is Ubuntu, that one is Ubuntu 16 and can’t upgrade, that other box is Red Hat for the .yum packages…), running an additional Windows box ain’t a bad idea anyway. You already were like 4 or 5 computers to have this user get their job done.
Once you start dealing with these issues, you really begin to appreciate Windows’s like 30+ years of binary compatibility.
You know there are distros other than Ubuntu and CentOS right?
You know that doesn’t matter when commercial software often only releases and tests their software on Ubuntu and RedHat, right?
I run Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. because I’m forced to. Do you think I’m creating a lab with a billion different versions of Linux for fun?
Linux kinda-sorta works if you’ve got the freedom to “./configure && make && make install”, recreating binaries and recompiling often. Many pieces of software are designed to work across library changes (but have the compiler/linker fix up minor issues).
But once you start having proprietary binaries moving around (and you’ll be facing proprietary binaries cause no office will give you their source code), you start having version-specific issues. The Linux-community just doesn’t care very much about binary-compatibility, and they’ll never care about it because they’re anti-corporate and don’t want to offer good support to binary code like this. (And prefers to force GPL down your throats).
There’s certainly some advantages and disadvantages to Linux’s choice here (or really, Ubuntu / Red Hat / etc. etc. since each different distro really is its own OS). But in the corporate office world, Linux is a very poor performer in practice.
Fair point. I think I’m just too used to dealing with the bullshit of building the packages myself cause I find it fun. Definitely not viable for commercial use.
And here I just installed Debian 11 on a poweredge 860. No trouble at all, it just works. I’ve installed newer versions of debian of older laptops as well, I have a thinkpad T42p sitting here that runs it although it hasn’t seen much use lately. I dunno, it doesn’t sound like you have a linux problem, more like an ubuntu problem.
Maybe I’m just sour with ubuntu because they literally ignored a network driver bug for a decade before closing it despite the kernel driver working fine, rebuilding the kernel with their own instructions worked fine, and yet the problem persisted through all of their releases during that period. I completely ditched ubuntu a few months later but I kept getting the emails from the bug tracker over the years as other people continued to experience the same problem. Using ubuntu in a business environment is just insanity.