This “just use linux” mentality is peak broke-brain logic.
You think spending an hour every day troubleshooting and googling how to fix it is some badge of honor? Congrats, you saved $0 and burned the only free hour you had after work. Hope the "Freedom" was worth it.
Linux isn’t free. It costs time, energy, and attention — the three things high-performers guard with their life. Compile time, Maintenance, debugging, dependancies, cleanup — you’re bleeding hours to save pennies. That’s not frugality, that’s time poverty.
You’re not a developer. You’re a tired guy distro hopping at 10pm convincing yourself it’s “self care.” Meanwhile someone else paid $100 for Windows, finished a deck, hit the gym, and got 8 hours of sleep. But hey, you configured your system by hand. King shit.
And don’t even start with the “but privacy!” cope. 90% of y’all using Linux aren’t toppling goverments or hacking banks. You’re watching Youtube, checking Gmail, Twitter, and scrolling the same niche subreddit every night. You’re not optimizing for privacy, you’re optimizing for feeling morally superior while wasting time.
Time is the only real flex. You get more of it by buying it back. If that costs $100 for Windows, that’s a steal. If you’re in any field where leverage matters — CAD, Excel, Adobe — and you’re still compiling Linux from scratch like it’s 1999, you’re not serious.
This isn’t about being rich. It’s about understanding what moves the needle. High-output people don’t micromanage their PCs — they outsource. You want to be productive? Stop pretending Linux is a virtue. It’s not. It’s a time sink.
Unpopular opinion, but I install Linux on my computers and they just work for like 5 years straight, with me spending exactly 0 hours each day fixing anything. Whereas I fix other peoples stupid printer issues and Windows becoming incompatible with the hardware or some nasty messages from some antivirus or strange software, multiple times a year...
I see however how some disgrunteled people would write something like this.
I installed Mint on my wife's computer last week, and we have had problems getting the printer to print, and then to scan. I've installed the manufacturer's driver a couple of times and it seems to do those functions okay, but some features still don't work.
For what it's worth I have a printer that won't work on windows no matter what I do. But it just works on Linux, copy and scan with no effort on my part.
It would seem weird it isn't supported, but also weird that you are trying to find manufacture drivers. Shouldn't be needed.
Without the manufacturer's drivers, I couldn't even print a page of text.
What brand printer? What functions? Just wanted to know what to expect.
It's a Brother B&W laser with integrated scanner. About 6 years old, so it should be fully supported. We can't view toner levels or scan from the printer (press a button on the printer to start a scan and have it automatically accepted by the computer. I have installed the separate driver for this functionality, but it isn't working).
We haven't yet tried some features like double-sided printing.
Weird.
I have a brother black and white 75 page thing that just works. Never had any issues with it until I installed a HP printer on my phone.
Seems printer drivers are amongst the worst. I had a brother inkjet printer/scanner combo a while back. Pretty much the same issues. Also what they call driver and offer on their website really sucks. Now I have one from Epson and that just pops up on Mint (and other distros) and I can print right away, no driver installation necessary. And it even started reporting toner levels after some update. Sadly I can't recommend the printer either, I had several other issues with the thing itself. But this kind of roulette with hardware is really annoying. And I believe it's really pronounced with those consumer printer/scanner combination devices. The expensive business printers regularly work way better, at least that's what I've seen.
I've been on Linux for a year and a half now with zero downtime.
I've been using it full time for 21 years, and dual boot for years before that. Early on it definitely took up a bit of time, but that's mostly because I was interested in breaking things and learning to fix them. Even 10-15 years ago I don't think I would have spent more than a few hours a month fixing things. These days it's a few hours a year, and that's only when I start messing around with something in a careless way.
Same. If I'm fixing something, it's because I did something I knew I shouldn't; which I rarely do. For instance, forced the upgrade of Ubuntu to 24.04 even though Canonical said that wasn't ready and had it disabled, but 24.04 was fine for new installs. I went out of my way to enabled the upgrade, let it break, and then I spent 5 minutes fixing the upgrade. Everything was fine after that. That was never my experience when I had to use Windows. It's like trying to start your carborated engine in the 80s. It's just a roll of the dice that things don't work with Windows.
Oh god, printer drivers are the fucking worst.