I remember it being like that already in 2014. The only thing especially annoying I remember was having to use optimus to manually switch between the "internal" Intel GPU and the dedicated Nvidia GPU to not run out of battery within an hour. But the whole set up thing was never an issue for me on Mint and Ubuntu even 10 years ago.
ture
joined 4 months ago
A lot of people did this at that company as well. But mainly my point was that it might be better to first get productive, or verify you can be productive with the OS you installed before you waste tons of hours configuring it in some obscure ways.
Especially since it was usually the ones straight outta university who did the fancy configuration, tons of alias, custom theming and so on stuff while most senior Devs using Linux just used default Ubuntu, Fedora or whatever installations. Something that just worked.
Dunno if this is an american thing but a lot of these things or similar stuff can still be found at German/ European playgrounds and honestly with most of this things a kid will have way more fun as with those super save, the city is afraid of being sued playgrounds.
E.g. this one here in Cologne, Germany Link to Google maps with pictures
Once worked for a software company where we could run Linux on our machines if we maintained them ourselves and wouldn't ask admins for support since they were only supporting the default windows installations. Right before Christmas new coworker joined, early twenties, got into a project that was apparently hard to get it set up locally, we told him get the project running and then spend time to configure your laptop the way you like it to be. Low and behold, he spends Christmas setting up and configuring some fancy desktop environment on Kubuntu, returns to work, shows off the fancy looks and within a week fails to get the project set up and everyone else in the project was using windows. So one week later he was back using windows and super pissed that he wasted like 5 days configuring his desktop. My heart is still bleeding for that poor guy :(
Same thing with why do I need to pay someone to do maintenance my car, kitchen, AC, whatever works perfectly well.
Also why should we pay developers to do stuff like dependency upgrades and other maintenance or software just runs™