Why use Linux at home, and how hard it is?

TL;DR: due to security, and much easier than you thought

On a dark night in January of 2006, my classmate installed Debian to my PC. Almost all time since then, I use Linux as my home desktop. Can you use it, too? Let’s see what problems you might have with Linux, and then what advantages it has.

Negatives

Hardware. Though things continue to improve, to this day, Linux does not support some hardware out of the box, specifically you’d most probably need to manually install Radeon graphics card drivers. Nvidia drivers can be installed automatically in some cases. I don’t recall running into anything else as a problem, but I don’t buy a new laptop every month, so there might be other hardware problems I’m not aware of. Solution to all of those is to use user friendly ditro (roughly meaning a “Linux flavour”, more on this later), and if you buy new hardware for Linux read how compatible it is for Linux.

Consumer software. You won’t find some applications you are used to on Win or Mac; you might try running them via emulation, but final solution is to move to an equivalent software for Linux.

PRO software. You won’t find most professional non-developer applications in Linux: no official Photoshop or other PRO-level video and image editing. Possibly, they can be ran via virtualization, but that is not a simple task for a beginner, and you’d probably want to use platform that is officially supported for your PRO software anyway.

Gaming. Though it is possible to play Steam games on Linux, it is probably not as “out of box” experience as in Windows. Steam games are emulated on Linux due to Valve’s programming layer called Proton.

Raw and sometimes clunky user experience. Due to most of Linux software being developed by community, general experience with it is often not the same as with proprietary software, here and there you’ll see things that were not done perfectly, run into some missing or outdated parts because there is no maintainer etc.

Positives

Owning your computer. You might’ve heard that Linux is different from Win or Mac, but most probably you don’t understand how fundamental the difference actually is. Windows and MacOS are operating systems; Linux is actually not an operating system itself, it is a technology to build operating systems. That’s why you cannot just install “Linux OS” on a computer, you rather install a “Linux distribution” like Ubuntu, or Fedora, or Debian, or OpenSUSE, or Elementary OS, or Raspberry Pi OS, or Alpine Linux, or any other of thousands there are in the wild. You can create your own Linux based OS on your machine, that is called LFS, “Linux from scratch”; of course that requires being very skillful.

With that said, you get an unprecedented control of your machine, if you run Linux. Really, there is no real default software there, you can replace any component of the system, as long as you are competent enough for that. Of course with that control you can break something completely, that’s the price for having access to any part of OS. But also, you can replace any component that you consider insecure, and you can turn off and delete completely or block any software that might perform surveillance. This is not possible with proprietary solutions even if they state they are secure, as became evident with the Big Sur scandal; not even mentioning not so scandalous Win10 issues.

It actually works, for free. You’d be surprised how much can be done on a modern Linux distribution. There are YouTubers who edit their videos on Linux; you can do any work that is web based, as Linux has fully functional Chrome and Firefox browsers; you can watch videos, listen to music, use online banking, use fancy note taking software etc. There is software library big enough for a home user.

You can install it almost anywhere. If you have an old laptop you need to revive; if you have a machine on an old or weird processor architecture - be sure that with some effort you will run some kind of Linux on it. I am writing this on Raspberry Pi — an ARM credit card footprint machine inspired by British home computers of 1980s, and I’d say it is an incredible value per price.