---
title: "The abysmal state of Linux in the year 2024"
url: the-abysmal-state-of-linux-in-the-year-2024.html
date: 2024-03-10T21:41:52+01:00
type: post
draft: false
---

This is in part difficult to write, but then I think it is necessary. How
come Linux is worse than it was 10 years ago. This may very well be
a subjective opinion, or maybe I am looking at the situation with
rose-tinted glasses.

Sure, we now have PipeWire and Wayland. We enjoy many modern advances
and yet, the practical use for me is worse than it was 10 years ago. Now
all of a sudden, I can't rely on the system to be stable like it was. I
don't remember the system bricking after an update, or the system becoming
laggy after 10 days uptime. This may be the issue with Fedora, though.

Over the years, I have daily driven many distributions. From Gentoo,
Arch, Fedora to Ubuntu. My best memories were always with Debian. Just
pure Debian always proved to be the most stable system. I never had
issue or system breaking after an update. I can't say the same for Fedora.

From the get-go, I had issues. I have an Nvidia card and even booting
presented issues sometime. This never happened on other distributions,
though they had their problems. Updating the system was basically an
exercise in gambling. How come an operating system that boasts with
the stability is so instable? And this was not isolated to my main
machine. This also happened on my X220 ThinkPad with Fedora on.

Shared dependencies were a mistake! I understand that disk space was
limited back then. But this has given me more grief than any other
thing. I am all in for AppImages or something like that. I don't care
if these images are 10x bigger. Disk space now is plenty, and they
solve the issue with "libFlac.8.so is missing" and I have version 12
installed. Which comes with unnecessary symlinking, downloading of older
versions and hoping that this will resolve the issue.

Now, the biggest apologist of Linux will never admit this and even saying
something is wrong with this is considered a mortal sin. I, however, am
not concerned with cultist behaviors. This is bullshit! Things should be
better than 10 years ago, not worse. And I don't care how much lipstick
you put on this pig. After more than 20 years of using Linux as my main
system, I think I have earned a badge that gives me the right to say
the truth.

Regardless of all this, I am still a massive fan. I still think Linux
is probably the most unobtrusive operating system, bar none. But the
complexity has gotten the best of it. It's bloated and too complicated
at this point. Understandably, you can't have a modern operating system
that competes with alternatives without sacrificing simplicity. But I
still think that there is another way.

One of the best aspects of Linux must be outstanding package manager
support. Nevertheless, they are essentially solving a problem that should
have been solved and done with years ago. The number of gymnastics
that happen in the background for you to install a software is just
mind-boggling. The dependency graphs are insane. And Snaps and Flatpaks
tried to solve some of these things, but until a distribution comes out
that is completely devoid of shared dependencies, we will still live in
this purgatory.

It would be an interesting exercise to make a prototype distribution
that does not rely on shared objects, but has everything packed in
AppImages. Probably a foolish endeavor, but maybe worth looking into. I
sense this kind of distribution would be highly unusable. Interesting
how far we have gotten.

The year of the Linux desktop? I have strong doubts. We are in a worse
state than we were. This is very similar to The Paradox of Choice. The
more options we have, the worse it gets. Wayland competing with X. So
many window managers, you just get lost. So many choices. I have no idea
if this is even salvageable, or something new must be invented.

Some interesting talks and videos

- [Jonathan Blow on how an operating system should work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0uE_chSnV8)
- [The Thirty Million Line Problem by Casey Muratori](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk)
- [Avoiding a Shared Library Nightmare by John Biron](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPAGVT4Ctt4)