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99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
- Hardware compatibility issues.
- Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
- Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
- Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
- Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
- Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
fanzyzones
Thanks!! This is just what I need. Pop_os has an equivalent in their DE and because work I have windows and I really miss it.
If you don’t have admin rights on your work pc, you can install fancyzone by installing powertoys from the microsoft store.
Add binary compatibility issues to that list: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The moment you need software that is not packaged by your distro you either need to be lucky that whomever compiled it accounted for your setup, or compile it from scratch yourself (if open source and publicly available). Especially with closed source software (like most games) the latter isn’t even an option.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
They also want the developers to dedicate their entire lives, 20 hours a day, for no pay, just became they’re entitled to a FOSS Windows clone.
Honestly I think potentially a bigger factor is that there are very few manufacturers who sell machines with linux preinstalled. Very few people have ever installed an OS before or have any desire to do so.
Also there is plenty of software with no real linux alternative even today unfortunately.
That is exactly why Chromebooks were (are?) so popular. You got a cheap laptop with an easy-to-use OS without having to do any install. And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
You would think. Surprisingly, i only know of one non techy person in my life for whom this was the case, and even they ended up needing to use some statistics software for school after switching to linux. Luckily, they were able to get it through a school-provided VM.
People have all kinds of needs and those needs can change over time. For people who are deaf in one ear, there is no easy way to set the audio output to mono. That’s just one way that accessibility features are lacking. I know people who rely on apps like notability syncing their mac laptop to their ipad, which no app on linux can do. I know people who have specialized software for work such as VPN apps that simply do not exist on linux. I know people who do creative work for whom it would be a major learning curve at the very least to switch. It only takes one app or crucial feature to lock you out. Even I have to dual boot from time to time for firmware updates or to play games my friends want to play that aren’t on Linux.
But you better believe I’m tracking all of these issues so I can switch people over as soon as they’re implemented ;)
This is a big point that not many people acknowledge. The reason SteamOS works as well as it does has less to do with SteamOS itself (it’s ultimately as finicky as any Linux distro) and more with it being laser focused on making a specific piece of hardware do a specific thing.
Problem is, it’s a bit of a loop. It’s not particularly profitable to launch Linux-only devices, let alone to put the work to ensure they will work reliably for their entire lifetime without user intervention. That makes it harder to grow the ecosystem, given that the default implementation is way jankier than most people will allow, which in turn keeps the business less profitable.
You say it like it’s a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them… I don’t want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn’t work. I already spend all day doing that in my work’s linux servers and my home server.
This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn’t work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I’ve paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
That is a terrible analogy. In your weird alternate reality I just wouldn’t keep a garden. Also, I’d be pretty concerned with suing the patently illegal practices of this weirdly overbearing landscaping business, if I cared enough about gardening, which I don’t.
More to the point, that’s not how people present this to themselves and normies. At least not until they get some pushback. The pitch is always “it works now” or “it’s actually better and faster” or “everybody is going to switch any day now because of some random event or another, I’ve decided”.
It’s never “hey guys, maybe you can trade a whole bunch of convenience and a much higher minimum level of technical skill for the benefit of not being as impacted by enshittified services of the late online era”. Because in that scenario most people will take enshittified services. If not out of conviction, necessity or laziness, definitely out of not being able to clear that technical bar in the first place.
Bringing “no garden” back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.
The alternative is Apple. They don’t want to install a billboard just yet, and there’s no obvious fountain, but there’s a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don’t live their way you have to move.
No, that’s not the equivalent at all because I’m not a gardener but I do use a computer to work.
Look, analogies can be useful to explain things to people who don’t understand the paramenters in question, but we all know what an OS is. You don’t need to talk down to anybody here.
Turns out the question isn’t about gardening (or lube), it’s between a FOSS OS that remains finicky and not perfectly supported and a few commercial alternatives with different quirks and approaches to monetizing the crap out of you but that generally have decent usability for mainstream non-technical users with general applications.
You don’t need an analogy for that unless you’re talking to a time traveller from the 1800s.
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
Fair enough, sorry for the misunderstanding.
I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows audio though. It’s always been weird for me, randomly switching outputs for no reason, and I stopped even trying to connect wireless headphones because it would always seem to prioritize those, even when they’re turned off. Every 5 to 6 months I’d have to dig deep in the audio settings to fiddle with the gain on my mic so I’d stop blowing out my friends’ ears on discord.
I think we all need to start differentiating the usability quirks and general jank that all OS have in different areas from the blockers.
Yes, the way Windows handles sources and prioritization sucks, while different Linux DEs have dumb problems with UI scaling or their own audio quirks or MacOS has weird multimonitor support or whathaveyou. If that was it I’d be all for prioritizing the free alternative, no questions asked.
The issue is the blocking issues. Entire features not working, or working at noticeably sub-par performance. Hardware with straight-up nonexistent support you need to replace to make the jump, or that is so finicky to set up that it may as well not work for all the average user is concerned. Those are showstoppers.
The problem is you could have a LOT fewer of the quirks, but a single dealbreaker is enough to block somebody making the jump, or reporting that they tried and failed. I’m as annoyed with how inconsistently videoconferencing picks up the right audio output as anybody. I complain about it every time I have a work call. But I still wouldn’t suggest to any of my friends to try to set up their high end Nvidia GPU on Linux as a main gaming daily driver. Those two things are on completely different tiers.
I was thinking not only about the finicky drivers, but also the different audio backends, like ALSA and OSS, Pulse would have just come out at the time, so it was definitely getting better, but it was fresh off the presses back then, so it wasn’t good enough yet either. Nowadays, Pulse works pretty well, pipewire works pretty well, things more or less just work, Bluetooth can be a little weird, but usually you just need to change the settings on pulse/pipewire to your preference.
I’ve genuinely had problems with multi-speaker configs this year on multiple distros and very little guidance on how to troubleshoot it. But you’re not wrong.
Especially if you had a soft-modem.
And printing. Oh dear, I might have a headache if I think too much about it.
Oh, man, I had entirely blocked the concept of “soft-modems” from my memory. I’m having flashbacks.
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs greatHaving recently spent the equivalent to five work days trying to get an Nvidia setup working on Linux I’m going to say the experience isn’t necessarily much better, depending on what you are trying to do and how.
Installing Windows machines 10+ years ago wasn’t much more fun either… (I’m not sure it’s any more fun these days, but I haven’t done it in ages, so I’ve no idea).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
Personally I believe that unless you’re able to do a slackware or gentoo installation, you’re not ready for Linux.
/s but only kinda
Linux users need to have a higher level of technical literacy than windows users. It just can’t be avoided unless you’re okay with potentially reinstalling your os at some point. The bar has been lowered a lot, but because other companies refuse to play nice with Linux, it’ll always be there.
If you’re okay with that tradeoff, then yeah Linux is great. But a lot of people aren’t even aware of it and it causes a lot of pain
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
The misery I have trying to get a newer(or sometimes older) version of a package I want is sometimes immeasurable. Yet somehow usually the right version is extremely accessible on choco.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn’t want, etc.
Rose tinted glasses.
I think you guys have hit the nail on the head. So much of the Linux argument has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with what people already know.
Everyone forgets the bugs and crashes they’ve always had to deal with even exist, because they become background noise. Then they change to a new OS and might run into completely new “roadblocks” and cry about how broken and useless the OS is even though their new problems are just as minor (or more so) than the problems they left behind.
In reality, any OS is a complicated piece of kit. The more you do with it, the more likely you are going to run into something that does something you don’t expect - and the more tech literate you believe yourself to be, the more likely you think the OS doing something you don’t expect means it is broken.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate “normal” person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that’s for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It’s based on arch btw
I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
The fact that there is a “correct” distro only adds to the unreadyness for mainstream.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it’s not really an app store, because it’s not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I’ll agree with you that Linux isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I’m tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn’t been fixed. I’m also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there’s another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven’t had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are “chicken and egg” things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn’t fixed quickly because there aren’t enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it’s hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don’t switch because it’s glitchy, it’s glitchy because there aren’t enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won’t switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn’t sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers… but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it’s not that things don’t break in Windows, it’s just that it’s a bigger emergency when they do break.
I’m not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I’m having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you’re trying to change doesn’t show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that’s not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the “DOS prompt” but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the “power” shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn’t quite there for the end-user, it’s getting closer and closer. Really, all that’s needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That’s an easy one.
Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
If Steam OS getting a wider release happens around the same time as Windows 10 hitting end-of-life, that could be a game-changer.
I know what you mean about it being frustrating when flatpak apps don’t work right though. I had an app that would just start to open and die, no error message, no feedback, just it started to open then closed. Because I was new to Flatpak I didn’t know how to poke at it. But, then I discovered how you can run flatpak apps from the commandline, and when you do that you get access to flags and you get error messages you can read. But, if you’re just some dude/dudette who wants to sit down and run an app and it doesn’t work, that kind of behaviour is ultra frustrating.
The problem is that there’s still a lot of flux when it comes to packaging and running Linux apps. There’s the old way – debs and rpms. There’s flatpaks, there’s the snap store, there’s homebrew, there’s mise and of course there are manual installs and/or building from source. Each one’s a bit different and has its own benefits and drawbacks. And, standard things like showing an error message that helps you sort out the problem when things break isn’t universally handled in a clean way.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
This is exactly what keeps me from switching. I don’t have the time or pull to do knuckle down on an important PC. Maybe when I have a backup one, I’ll do it. Who knows.
You’re not wrong. This is an argument for sticking with Windows. It will suck. But, you know exactly how much it will suck and in what ways. Switching to Linux will suck in new and expected ways.
This.
I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Yeah that’ll happen if you run Bazzite. It’s extremely hardware dependent. It “just works” if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it’s a shitshow
I would probably not recommend newcomers an esoteric linux distro tbh. People hate canonical but if people in academia can daily drive Ubuntu, anyone can
Linux will never be “ready”, in a large part because it’s made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and most of those people just don’t understand how an end user thinks.
I got annoyed when my new Windows machine immediately had to install a bunch of updates, which only required me to click next every fifteen minutes or so, and I had to uninstall Onedrive and disable the news feed on the lock screen.
I’d have taken it back if I had to spend that much time actually researching, I’ve got far better things to do with my time.
“Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?”
“WTF is a computer?”
Everything’s computer!
I don’t quite remember whether it’s the rectangle with all the buttons you press or the TV with all the funny pictures on it, but one of those.
Let’s be real. Most people can’t really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.
You don’t see how terrible Windows is until you’ve switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.
The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.
It really feels like your PC isn’t yours.
The average ‘advanced’ window user: CLI is scary!
Also the average ‘advanced’ windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it’ll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it
The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.
It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
File extensions, wanting a GUI for everything, running some random threat detection software, assuming that Linux is lightweight so therefore it will make old machines have modern performance… The list goes on
I find this list weird. I guess I’m the kind of person you’re complaining about!
I like having GUI available for standard stuff (eg.
dconf editoris great for various desktop settings). And I like file extensions in many cases - eg. I like to be able to tell the difference between a.pngand.jpegjust by reading the file name. … And Linux often really does give better performance on older machines compared to Windows.… So I suppose in your eyes I’m basically an old Windows admin brining bad habits to Linux. I’m just not seeing the downside of these ‘bad habits’.
So I suppose in your eyes I’m basically an old Windows admin brining bad habits to Linux. I’m just not seeing the downside of these ‘bad habits’.
Yeah. Now I get the best of both worlds. First time I need a setting, I do a nice search, instant result, and click toggle.
If I love that setting, as a power user, I can script the change to every future computer I use.
If not, I search settings, instant result, toggle back.
Gnome is amazing lately.
Wanting GUI for everything is a bad habit?
That is just regular consumer needs.
I wouldn’t have any issue if it was a consumer device.
The problem is when it is a server.
Well, at least for me…
Yeah, I do like me some file extensions.
I want a GUI for some things, but I’m perfectly comfortable with SSH into a machine as well. My general purpose server has a DE on it. My second server has a specific use and has no DE, nor do my IOT devices. All of them are headless.
I have an older laptop with Arch (btw) on it. It runs well for what I use it for. I understand I’m not watching YouTube in 4K though. The CPU and GPU have their limits.
I have a good inverse example. I started a new job as a government contractor. The machine I get is Windows. I need docker-desktop. I have a basic user account. They install docker-desktop. But it doesn’t work for me because I don’t have permissions. I tell them, hey docker says I don’t have the right permissions. They say, oh you have to apply for an elevated Developer account. Which I wont get because I’m a contractor. This is what you are asking about. The Windows way is just to increase the user’s permissions over the entire system. Which is utter bullshit coming from Linux. Anyways, I know the person helping me is just ignorant. And all they did was, next next next accept. But if you look at docker install instructions, for Linux and Windows, they create a docker user group and you just add your account to it. Super easy, and it’s one line in the terminal if you are on Windows or Linux. Windows admins just assume power user for everybody. No concept of localized security. Anyways, round and round with the back and forth, he finally adds me to the docker user group. And it worked, and I didn’t need to have elevated security or apply for a Developer account, wait two weeks doing nothing on the tax payer dime to only get denied.
Removed by mod
Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD
Classic.
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don’t ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
But muh games!
I’ve used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready
On Linux I’d have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn’t user ready
Yeah, Linux was ready long ago
I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.
Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.
For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
Gaming has improved significantly, although it’s rather frustrating that it’s by all these compatibility layers and such rather than native run.
For desktop, as a workstation and general purpose it’s ‘ok’ with rough edges. Things like (limited tests with a couple common distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Bazzite) the nextcloud app not supporting virtual files that have been available for a while in Windows and domain auth being twitchy where I’ve tried.
For the end user a big part is being able to just find an app and use it, no compiling or tweaking of settings needed for it to do what’s expected. Package managers help greatly, but with the huge number of distros out there it makes it really hit and miss to say just go for it. The relatively few times you can just download a Linux version of an app from a site (as people are prone to doing if they go read about something on the web) you often would have to go chmod +x it and quite possibly have to run it from a CLI rather than just click the downloaded app.
So usable yes, but in a place where I could just drop it on someone and say go to town less so…
I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.
But to be honest, I’m just not the target demographic for that.
I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.
And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.
Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
They actually are ! I have seen a few posts talking about it. Not sure about SuSe/Mandrake, but they are talking to implement Linux or try to somehow get away from Microsoft.
Agreed. Just put Debian on a 17" i7 Asus laptop tonight as win11 didn’t like the track pad or the display adapter.
To get Chrome on, had to download a deb file, then manually open it with a right click and choose software installer since it wanted to open an archive instead.
Just little things like that are tedious for the n00b.
had you installed mint or pop, you could just install multiple chrome variants from the software manager
This is part of the annoyance of Nix as a desktop though. With windows you have 64bit and (for whatever reason) x86 versions of apps and it’s generally just assumed to work with what your running, unless you have an antique with win98 or something.
With Nix there are a a whole pile of possible variables and ways to install things. Particularly with people getting so used to phone/tablet app stores the need for easy install, use, removal is needed for mass adoption. Nobody wants to create folder structures and set environment variables to use some app.
Good point.
Mint wouldn’t run on my other Asus laptop which is why I ended up on Debian. I think it was a discrete GPU issue booting to a black screen.
I know most Linux users probably wouldn’t want Chrome anyway, but since it’s the most popular browser and this post is discussing the greater populace, I think it was a valid point - same as how a n00b booting to a black screen is an issue.
Having to fetch gnome tweaks to get a right click on a trackpad is another - that might just be a Debian thing.
Is it Linux’s fault that Google doesn’t provide an apt repository? Chromium is available in DebianStable
Absolutely 100% agreed.
I’m frustrated by app managers because on principle they all work so much better than the Windows alternative, but the moment you have to explain to people how and why they need to manually add repositories or what a flatpak is you’ve lost the battle.
For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
How I wish
It’s like someone’s never used GroupPolicy.
As much of a shit show as it is, group policy is really the killer feature of Windows.
And Active Directory
Kinda but … they go together, and Active Directory is more or less LDAP+Kerberos with a sprinkling of standardization on top.
The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn’t usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they’d consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.
Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn’t work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.
Based Linux wont run riot games
Is that a bad thing?
Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
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They’re just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
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With the most braindead reason,
There are barely any Linux users…
Riot… I quit the game because I didn’t want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends… That guy gets counted as a windows User…
Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don’t attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn’t bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
whoa gpu pss through is wild, how well does it work ?
If I remember correctly and I never did it myself, so please be careful.
He used KVM with qemu and there you can configure a pci through put and he would run the Linux over integrated graphics of the CPU.
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The fact that it won’t run on Linux anymore is, what finally got me out of it.
I’ve never spent a dime on it, but I’ve wasted so much time on League for over 10 years.
Being on Linux exclusively saved me.I am in a similar boat but I disagree with saved me. I just cared more about my friends than the game and my friends were bad at it, and so I had to adapt my attitude, leading into a more casual experience and the resulting distance to the game.
Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
Because it is.
Same goes for Valorant, I hear.
Playing Valorant is like opening port 22 and having “password” as your root password.
Not to mention the backdoor it opens into your soul, for the toxic commumity to pour their verbal detritus into.
It was Valorant first, because of the kernel anticheat, which they eventually brought to league too
The joke is that the games are bad, and the communities too toxic, to be a healthy hobby.
Thereby, a person being prevented from playing is being blessed, not because there is no longer a backdoor into their system. But because they will no longer have to endure the verbal abuse of temmates and opponents.
I stopped using Linux on my desktop PC in 2007. Last year I switched back, and wow everything is so much smoother now. Video, sound, webcam, networking, all worked perfectly out-of-the-box. No more messing with fglrx for hours to get ATI/AMD graphics working. No more figuring out ALSA vs OSS vs PulseAudio vs whatever else. I don’t know what the sound subsystem is even called now, because I don’t need to know. It just works.
KDE is beautiful now, too. I tried a few desktop environments and liked KDE the best.
Great time to switch. I’ve been using Linux on servers since 1999, but it’s totally viable for desktops these days too.
Had a friend of mine rib me for “not just paying for a license (for windows)”. Tried to explain that wasn’t the point to their befuddlement. Smh
I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.
