This will be quite similar to a lot of stories I’ve read on Reddit, Stack, etc lately. But last week there was a straw which broke the camel’s back.
I’m currently installing my tool set on a macbook, after spending nearly half my life on Linux. As an analogy; it feels like finally trading in that old-timer car, which you know every nook and cranny of the engine bay but it just isn’t up to it’s task in this world.
In the past 20 years I loved how the merry heap of Open Source devvers tackled every (really every) hurdle and created this OS shaped out of hope and dreams. A project started so small and turned to influential by those same characters 🙂 I laughed about the naming of less (less is more), used cowsay on most of my terminal messages and could use this free and open solution to earn money as a self employed engineer.
I installed Warty Warthog and was wondering what I would do with the rest of my day, since it only took 30 minutes instead of a full day compiling in Gentoo.
I found out about so many beautiful solutions built, maintained and cared for by communities which were revolving around the community itself, instead of self-glorifying CEO personalities.
The straw was an email from the customer I’m currently working at, they stated that you need to be MS Intune compliant to be able to login to corporate resources. Which means that I can reach everything (yay openvpn) but not use it (nay intune)
In all those years it has always been corporate policies which broke stuff for me. A customer or client would ask me to join their network and it’s tough to explain that you need to recompile gnome-network-manager to add VPN support. For me myself I can explain why this time is an investment, but when a client/customer is waiting for me to deliver value it’s a different story.
I spent a full day on getting audio to work in MS Teams via Citrix Workspace (both Citrix and MS are very corporate), and that shows where the issue lies; The corporates (not meant as a negative!) don’t care that much about the minority share that Linux users are. They don’t lose (much) money when I can’t use their products, so why bother.
Next to that the companies which develop solutions for Linux are in trouble with testing, the group is abysmally small and the techniques they used are splintered (gnome/kde, ubuntu/fedora/mint/pop_os, cpu architecture, sound subsystems, etc etc) so it’s neigh impossible to test a new release properly to prevent previous bugs to re-appear.
I switched to a Macbook three days ago, ported my whole workspace and most of the tools are working fine. Next to that, I am now compliant, thus can use the corporate facilities without restrictions.
And. It. Just. Works.
Honestly it feels like losing a good friend, who’s been there for most of my life.
Goodbye Linux, it’s been a blast. I’ll see you on all of my servers, so I guess we’ll be neighbours, no longer roommates.
