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you know, I’m begining to think this whole “readiness” idea is completely arbitrary. The same people who today complain about linux’s supposed difficulty, were just fine using their home micro-computer in the 80’s. If you ask me, the only people who are defining what “ready” means, is Microsoft’s marketing department.
Yesterday a guy was mad about that why everything has to go through his igpu and why not directlg through dgpu then I told bro that hdmi or anyother port on your laptop doesn’t use your dgpu then he understood.
I don’t think Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, whatever is “ready yet” either. operating systems are always in development. There are things I can do on my linux machine that I can’t do on my windows machine, and vice versa.
Nah…windows 2000 was ready…windows 7 was ready. The enshitification of everything since has had made everything “not ready”.
The end goal of every modern product is to shove ads down your throat. I’ll eat a little bit of pain from Linux to avoid that.
Linux is ready, but not the professional software devs. Literally only thing stopping me from fully switching
For me it’s the multiplayer games, godamm anticheat
That’s why WSL is still king. You can do all your work, play all your games and still use your flavor of Linux. I even do my dev work out of it when there’s no compliance requirements
Nope. Fucking spyware bullshit with a hint of Linux is absolutely not king. The fact that the OS allows kernel level anticheat is so stupid that it almost couldn’t be anything besides malicious.
Windows With WSL is just Mac but bad.
Desktop => Linux
Laptop => Mac
Then run games natively or with proton
It like the endless and useless fight between Android and iOS fan boys, it’s much simpler than that, you use what you like/comfortable with, you don’t need to convince anyone how right you are and how wrong they are, never really understood this weird behaviour from supposedly well educated people. You enjoy Linux, good for you , you like windows, kodus, you’re mac person have at it .
I would agree with you, if it wasn’t for the apple people trying to push everyone to join the cult because of the walled garden
Look here’s one in the wild!
People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks
Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/
By all standards, a completely understandable outcome
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 couldnt use linux on my laptop 15 years ago because suspend never seemed to work. Just tried it again last week on my generic desktop, suspend still not working. So ya linux has come a long way. Still cant use it.
Wifi on resume is the bane of my existence. If I close my lid I just have my laptop restart. Mint.
Suspend doesn’t really work for my Thinkpad either. Computers were never really meant to ‘suspend’, I’ve learned it’s just as fast to power down/up on Linux.
Suspend doesn’t really work for my Thinkpad either. Computers were never really meant to ‘suspend’
Well, whether computers were ‘meant’ to suspend is beside the point, windows made it work somehow but so far linux has not, and Id call it a required for most users. Without that feature working reliably, I can’t personally make the switch even though I want to.
The functionality is already there and sure, it could be made more user-friendly. But that requires a lot of invested time and money, which can be pretty lacking in the open source space. If the Linux developers had Microsoft resources then Windows would be long dead.
Maybe try a better distro if you can’t confuigure the one you use? I haven’t had problems on Arch after setting it up properly.
An HP by any chance? These don’t handle suspend well and you need to add a parameter or three at boot via grub (or systemd too). Otherwise the system gets tied up filling the log endlessly with rapidly cycling pcie errors and you end up crashing or frozen pretty quickly. If this might be your problem, see
And
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/yh3nkw/freezing_issue_finally_solved_here_is_how/
Where there’s a problem there’s usually a solution, you just might need to root around the web for answers.
Where there’s a problem there’s usually a solution, you just might need to root around the web for answers.
Thats a huge problem for linux, average users are never going to do that. But as a long time linux user myself I have been trying to find solution to the suspend problem for a long time and I still cant find one. So Id say its a big problem.
Linux programmers have been battling Microsoft and its shady deals with hardware vendors for decades. That’s the real problem. Just when something starts working too well, MS changes things up, dictates changes to hardware, and then that breaks it for Linux, so it’s back to the old IDE with new hardware to figure out how to get around it. Or the hardware folk just don’t consider Linux a viable alternative and just happily make sure only Winders runs well.
As another Linux user with over 2 decades of Linux as my primary, it sounds like that might be a your laptop problem.
it sounds like that might be a your laptop problem
All the laptops Ive ever tried and all the desktops including my current one which is a very generic Ryzen 7? None of them have ever suspended reliably, thats for sure a linux problem. Without that feature, I cannot switch to it as my daily. Its relegated to server only for me sadly.
Implying suspend works on Windows either. I’ve got like a 50/50 chance my monitor connected with DisplayPort actually gets signal after waking on Windows. This shit has been a problem for a long time.
Ive been using windows 30 years and linux for 20, Ive never seen windows fail at suspending on any system in that time. Linux on the other hand Ive never seen it reliably suspend on any system. Dont get me wrong I want to use linux at home very badly, but none of the fixes I have looked into have solved the problem. Its a 100% required feature for me.
Lol, if I had a buck for every time a user came to me because Windows got stuck in Suspend and needed a hard reset, I’d retire.
If Suspend is your ‘‘must have feature’’, then I’ve got bad news for you.
30 years Ive never seen windows fail to suspend… coming back from suspend ya I have seen a few errors in 30 years, not many.
Right, that’s the reason alright, lol. Remember dconf on Gn*me? It’s like registry on windows, but worse.
No, Linux is still not ready for desktop, and it has nothing to do with this fallacy of yours.
Since when is Linux = Gnome?
How was the gnome registry some how worse? Microsoft didn’t even have a document that could describe how theirs worked, much less an organizational structure. At least Gnomes was basically simple words and categories. And they built a settings manager for it too.
Not that I use gnome much, but still this is silly.
I know this is linuxmemes, but if you want a serious answer, I can provide, lol. It’s worse because it is an amateurish attempt at recreating windows like registry (like most things Gn*me lol).
boring technical details
Let’s start from the top:
Microsoft didn’t even have a document that could describe how theirs worked
Oh, really, I remember reading enormous amounts of info on MSDN describing how the internal registry hives work in 1998 (yes, I am that old lol) Also, there were/are excellent books on the topic, i.e. “Windows Internals” by Mark Russinovich. Can you tell me where I can find more info on how dconf works, what about dconf internal structure and organization? I don’t want to read the source code.
At least Gnomes was basically simple words and categories
Right, can you tell me what this dconf dump is about:
[org/gnome/nm-applet/eap/fea8b3cc-21a2-4a3d-a3bb-72b7459247b7] check-time=uint32 1742505110And they built a settings manager for it too
You mean like simplified UI for poor man’s regedit?
Windows registry is horribly over-engineered very very high performance binary database (dconf is a Gvariant binary db also, lol) deeply integrated within the NT kernel and overall system, it supports access virtualization, transparent path override, robust ACLs, and more. IMO, M$’ biggest mistake was allowing 3rd party access to the hive in the early days. Then backwards compatibility kicked in and the rest is history.
Don’t get me wrong it sucks, massively, but this attempt of Gn*me/freedesktop INI db is a joke, like the OP’s argument
Last year with Ubuntu.
Installed it on an old laptop. Booted once then never again.
Installed windows. Worked like a charm.
This is Ubuntu, the OS that makes all the decisions for you like windows.
That’s crazy, I’ve never personally used Ubuntu so I can’t comment on it.
But I’ve used other great one’s like Mint and PopOS, I’d say they’re pretty easy to install and use, especially if you’re aiming for a primary clean install over a dual boot.
I’ve installed windows enough times as well to confidently say a clean install with maximum privacy settings and debloat takes atleast equal if not more efforts.
As someone who dual boots Linux Mint and Windows 11, can confirm, Mint is a much simpler install process…
Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.
I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.
When I’m not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can’t substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.
Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps
Fusion360 is literally the only reason I still have a windows install. I’ve had people try to recommend Linux alternatives before, and none of them can match my level of stupidity. If I can’t draw a circle in your CAD program without looking up a tutorial, then I really can’t design a webcam adapter for my telescope
A whole lot of people who just do web or email or whatever could live with a Chromebook actually. They don’t really need the latest CPU/GPU and gobs of ram and disk space for simple stuff
But it’s not ready because insert niche use case that only applies to me and no, I will not seek out open source alternatives to insert closed source software
I’ve been living with Fedora Silverblue for the past month or two and loving it, except for the fact there is no true good alternative to ShareX (FOSS but on Windows only) for taking screenshots, video clips, audio clips, and having easily configurable hot key galore. Is Wine + Share X a good/viable alternative? Cause Flameshot is very rudimentary compared to it.
I use ShareX for sentence mining when I consume Japanese media for easy Anki flashcard creation.
Yes, that’s exactly me. I need to use creative cloud for the company where I work. If I deviate it fucks everyone and the entire workflow. But I don’t really think CC is niche. The moment they support linux, I’m switching
Tbf (and you seem to already be aware of this) that’s not really an issue with Linux. Lots of software devs don’t care about supporting Linux sadly.
Like he said its not lacking on anything is just that you cant use your needed program. And its fine to stay on windows.
It is in mixed states of ready. Each distro has something it’s ready for and something it isn’t. It’d be nice if all the ready parts were in a single distro, but that’s an XKCD 927 issue. I am hopeful that Valve puts thought and effort into making SteamOS a solid desktop on top of a solid gaming platform.
The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.
I’ve been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.
the average user does not want
The average user wants their problem gone. And will use whatever helps. Windows users were editing register and editing ini files since Windows was an addon to DOS, and continue doing it. For a literate person there is absolutely nothing more inheritly more intuitive or easy in clicking a checkbox in a fifth submenu than entering a command in a console. Stop perpetuating this weird myth.
This is correct. I work with the “average user” of technology daily as IT support, and honestly, they don’t give any shits at all about why it’s messed up, or what needs to be done to correct the problem. Box broken, make fix.
The argument that I think the poster is trying to make is that, if a user needs to do any self troubleshooting, which is basically inevitable with technology at the moment, having to use a CLI to get things done is undesirable for the average person. They barely want to bother opening control panel in Windows (or the new “settings” app… Ugh.) nevermind understand any of it.
Box broken. Make fix.
It’s not a myth though. How do you know what to type in a CLI? You either google it or you read the man pages and god help you if you have to do that because they are not noob accessible documents. What do you do in a GUi? You either google it or you read plain words that are low in technical information on the screen in the menu labeled after what you want to change. GUIs exist for a reason. They brought in the masses for a reason. Pretending that they aren’t easier is a demonstrably wrong position.
How do you know what to type in a CLI
The same way you know where the setting you’re after located. As my little experiment showed it’s not obvious if your problem isn’t trivial. And if it’s trivial, you can be sure it’s trivial on every modern OS.
If you spend a fraction of time you spent learning your GUI on learning the set of commands you have, it will be very easy for you. There is autocomplete and there are various helps, and there are conventions a lot of the software follows. If you’re literate, it’s fine.It’s funny you listing out that experiment, because that’s more akin to the bullshit I run into with Linux when I need to fix some weird ass quirk. Tons if incorrect or outdated information, and forum assholes calling people idiots for not knowing and refusing to help or being autistically pedantic because you misspelled something. Support on either platform is a garbage experience. I haven’t denied that at all.
It’s a curse of the tech world. There are always some bullshit problems, there is always the need for tuning, tinkering, and generally fucking around with your system. No matter the OS, you will encounter some non-trivial problem at some point, that’s just the price of complexity. At least Linux is made for that and is opensource.
GUIs exist for a reason.
What is that reason? To obfuscate what is really happening? To make it difficult to support a computer because it takes 20 pages of pictures and a flow chart to explain something when a person could just copy paste a single line? I don’t buy that gui’s are easier or intuitive, or all that useful every time.
I don’t see any difference
googlingusing a decent search engine for one over the other.And lets not forget that windows is a confusing mess of self help support pages and command line entries for almost everything that goes wrong.
Windows: “PROGRAM_NAME experienced an error: DEEZ_NUTZ”
Yep that’s what we’re calling a useful error prompt these days. So much better than Linux lol
“I’m sowwy, something went wrong :(”. No logs, no error message, no nothing.
God I hate it so much.
You can definitely have your opinion. But seeing how so many people have a hard time switching to Linux because of this particular issue, I’d say your position on the subject is quesionable. There are hordes more people on Windows and Mac because they made things easier through accessible software. A large part of that was the GUI.
Most people I know that are on Windows are there for two reasons: they either have no idea what they’re doing, they bought a laptop that had Windows on it already, they have a flowchart of buttons to press to achieve results, and when interface changes, they are in panic and I need to come to them to make a new flowchart. Or they’re using Windows for the last two decades, never tried anything else, and know about Linux from random comments on the internet that scare them into believing that evil Linux is completely incomprehensible.
My wife is an English teacher. When we got her a new laptop, instead of buying Windows, I installed Arch (I use Arch btw), which is wildly considered the most evil of the evil Linuxes, and believe it or not, she is completely happy with it (well, as happy as one can be using a computer). The amount of times she needs my help with some random bullshit OS throws at her decreased since she learned a bit about how stuff works. Even using terminal to input some commands turned out not to require wast amount of knowledge like some people imply.There are hordes more people on Windows and Mac
Because it came with their computer. I have not used a command line at all on two laptops over the past year. It is the exception not the rule these days.
However I have had to use the command line many, many times with Windows. Which is fine, it is MUCH easier to do this “Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted” instead of trying to find the gui to deal with it.
That example just proves my point further. No average joe is going to alter the execution policy because they aren’t running unsigned powershell scripts. They just want their applications to install and work. They don’t want to debug shit. You being fine doing all that is great but other people don’t want to mess with it and won’t.
Half the time instead of downloading and running an executable that works with nearly all versions of their OS, they have to figure out which os flavor they have since it’s not just “Linux” it’s Debian, Red Hat, Arch, Kali, Suse, CentOS, Mint, Pop, Ubuntu, etc. and then does it need to be compatible with gnome or kde or something else, then is the configuration even a supported option, oh wait it only supports versions newer than 5 years where anything older will fail, or only till 5 years ago and anything newer will fail. Or the one project that solved the issue stopped developing it 10 years prior and no longer works. Or there just plain isn’t a native app so now you have to try and find an alternative way to connect to a service you pay for that has an equivalent feature set and price.
Linux is a fractured mess overall. It is not user friendly. It is not out of the box ready. It’s a great option for someone technical that wants to type shit in a terminal. And it’s a bad option for anyone that doesn’t want to figure out what the magic words are that took the place of their double click.
My example wasn’t literal, I have had to do similar things for drivers, sound, USB, search etc. And windows support is just randos telling you what they think might work.
As to your second point, the sane applies as windows is a collection of who knows that the hell software and random hardware. Which hardware? What driver? What vendor?
I don’t know if I agree with entirely. A good UI lets you configure your system without knowing much about it. E.g. if you want to change Ubuntu’s Wi-Fi power save setting you edit a hidden text file (I don’t remember where it is off of the top of my head.) I didn’t even know that this file existed without a helpful AskUbuntu thread and that editing it would greatly speed up my connection. If a UI option existed, I would probably have found it while poking around the network settings screen.
That’s what a good UI does: it lets you mess with your system without need for a help forum or leafing through documentation. You can look at where settings are supposed to be, find what you’re looking for, and even explore new settings that you don’t know about.
Oh hey, let’s run an experiment then. I’m not a Windows poweruser, but I have an access to it. Let’s see, in almost real time, how long it will take me to find how to change Wi-Fi power save setting (I don’t know what it is, so very fair this way).
Well, it’s a setting, so let’s go where settings are. I go to a big menu, find settings in it, assume wifi is in network settings, go there, find wifi setting. Read through all the menus. Nothing. I’m 5 menus deep, and there is “more adapter options button”. It asks an admin password, so let’s give it to it. Completely different window opens, one that I saw all those years ago in Windows XP. It’s called wifi 3 properties. It doesn’t render properly on my monitor, the text is blurry, but we’re not in “googling shit” territory yet so I power through. (later I found out that it’s normal, this menu was constructed when 640x480 was considered high def resolution, and it struggles with modern screens). In this menu there is 12 rows of something, I don’t know what QoS Packet Scheduler means or what Client For Windows does. Let’s press configure on this one. That menu closes, it asks ominous question, and new one opens. It assures me that the device is working properly, and in advanced tab there is 24 different settings I can change. Settings like “Fat Channel Intollerant” (It is disabled. I don’t know if it’s good or bad), or Human Presence Detection (it’s auto. I assume it’s something related to the upcoming robot uprising). There is no help, there is no explanation, I lost count how deep I am, it’s more than 10. I’m like half an hour in, probably. I checked all the available settings. I forgot what I’m looking for and had to re-read your comment to remind myself. But at least I don’t have to edit a text file, amirite?
Ok, fuck it, let’s google. First link.- Right-click the. …
- Select Power Options.
- Select Additional power settings.
I cry for a minute, click the link, the list isn’t there. I still don’t know what to click, and the link is about Intel. Is my wifi adapter made by intel? Do I need to know it? Let’s google further.
Stack overflow.Start > Search > Device Manager > Networks Adapters > Double Click yours > Power Management Tab > uncheck: Turn this device off to save power
Click yours. So I do need to know it. OK, let’s do that. I should’ve guessed that you don’t find setting in settings, it’s intuitive after all.
It looks like one of the menus that I saw already, but it’s not, it’s different one. It once again assures me that the device is working properly. There is no settings. There is no Power Management Tab. Let’s google that then.
Mycrosoft forums.Why is the power management tab missing?
Good day! I’m John Dev a Windows user like you and I’ll be happy to assist you today. I know this has been difficult for you, Rest assured, I’m going to do my best to help you. When was the last time it worked properly?
Please check and try Rbotero’s solution in the older thread in the link below if it helps. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for…
Kindly let me know if this helps or if you have any further concerns.
Hi, I’m Robinson, an Independent Advisor and a Windows user like you. Install the latest driver 22.20.0 released yesterday. https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/130293
Note: This is a non-Microsoft website. The page appears to be providing accurate, safe information. Watch out for ads on the site that may advertise products frequently classified as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products).
Well, the answer is 4 years old. My drivers are up to date, so that doesn’t help. Let’s dig further. Another post on the Microsoft forums.
Another post said to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power in regedit, where I had to create a new DWORD called CsEnabled and set the value to 0, and restart, but that did not work. How do I fix this?
Damn, I am sure glad I don’t have to edit any text files, that would be unintuitive as fuck. Anyway, let’s open regedit and create some new DWORDs, shall we? That would not be a problem, regedit is easy and intuitive program that allows very easy way to intuitively do anything.
Anyway, it didn’t help. Turns out it stopped helping at some point. Further in the Microsoft forums people offering helping powershell scripts that I need to run in Elevated Powershell to do…something, I assume? It changes some register keys, it’s not obvious what.At this point, I give up. I am easily hour in, I don’t know how to change wifi power safe setting in Windows, and I am afraid I will never know. Sure glad I didn’t have to edit one symbol in a text file the name of which is easily googlable.
You have so thoroughly captured the Windows experience. Bravo!
Well the comparison I’d draw is not even needing to worry about that kind of thing on Windows. I went from getting about 200 to 300 Mbps on Windows without doing anything besides connecting to a network to getting 10 to 30 Mbps on Pop!_OS and Linux Mint (Before fixing this issue.)
The strength of Windows is not easy access to more settings (especially after they split the setting between the new settings app and the old control panel), it’s not needing to access most of them in the first place. That will vary between users and use cases of course. Some people moved to Linux well before the enshittificafion of Windows got really bad because it suits their needs better.
Well, that’s moving the goalpost, isn’t it? We started with “Linux bad because reading hard” and “Windows good because mouse click boxes easy” and now we’re in “windows is just works, no need to change anything”.
Well guess what, this is also not true, you do constantly need to fiddle with Windows, it’s just sometimes you can’t edit what you need, and you’re out of luck.
It’s not a weird myth, have you ever worked with average users? Some of them have trouble opening a PDF or don’t know how to import a CVS file in Excel. Power users have always been tinkering in their OS that’s nothing new, but I’m talking about the average Joe.
People you described don’t have better or worse time with different types of user interfaces, it’s all incomprehensible to them. Average Joe with zero skills can’t check boxes in some weird menus, just as they can’t write text in a weird black box. We’re talking about people who are at least a little curious about their OS.
I dont know wtf you are using, KDE and Gnome dont use the terminal and Bluetooth has never crashed for me. Your shit is all fucked up
IMO, this is a demonstration of the problem. You’re blaming the poster/their equipment. Rather than any real solution to the problem the defacto answer is “well, it works for me so what’s wrong with you?”
I’ve never heard this kind of toxicity from other communities (like the apple/Windows crowds). Often you’ll get useful answers indicating what to check or pointing to another resource. There’s always the chance that the hardware is busted, but let’s face it, in the modern era, that’s far less likely to happen now than it was even 10 years ago.
Immediately blaming the user for their issue isn’t going to solve the problem, nor does it endear any average user to the Linux community or the Linux OS. This attitude is not going to help adoption even if the posters concerns are invalidated by newer/better drivers/software, and all they need to do is update, and/or try again.
This kind of statement actively harms Linux adoption.
Sorry I meant to say I dont even remember how many years ago I saw anyone with Bluetooth problems. Look how you conveniently ignore the fact Kde and Gome dont use the terminal contrary to what you had stated. Your shit is all fucked up.
Bitch please.
Just try to install a program that isn’t in the repo without dropping to the CLI.
I dare you, I double dare you.
There are also just a lot of personalization options that just aren’t there, particularly for power-lite users, because Linix power users use the terminal for everything.
Like, heaven forbid you want a full featured, advanced file manager or something, but aren’t interested in learning bash scripting…
you want a full featured, advanced file manager or something
Which means you are shit out of luck in windows, but comes by default in Plasma. Go figure.
Windows File Manager is superior to any linux file manager I’ve tried. I have tried switching to Linux many times and it’s really great, except the damn file managers, which always ends with me switching back to Windows. I just ended my last run with Linux Mint as my daily driver for 3 months. I really enjoyed it and had it configured just the way I wanted. But the file manager(s) just isn’t mature enough, so I caved in, again, and moved back to Windows. Oh well, maybe next time will be the one.
You can’t be serious? People buy other file managers because the Windows one sucks so bad. I would know, I purchase our software.
I’m not saying windows file manager is perfect and there isn’t better alternatives. But for my work flow, I haven’t found any linux file manager that fits the bill.
What file manager are you using, and what features does it have that makes it the right fit for you?
Are you truly saying personalization is not there on linux but Windows has it? LoL
I’m pretty sure they’re saying that customization, while present in Linux, is not accessible to most because of a lack of GUI options to configure a nontrivial number of the customization settings.
KDE can configure more things than there are atoms in this world. And All other DE are way more advanced than windows all through the GUI. So their point remains garbage
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.
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
As a normie (at least in these circles), I think I agree with your last point. Windows being heavily restricted in its customizability is a feature. A bad feature, but a feature nonetheless.
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
This is a common meme but essentially is never needed
The deliberate misrepresentation here is that the Windows registry supports importing keys from a text file, so most of the time you have to mess with it you just download a file and double click on it.
Is that super secure? Nope. But hey, anytime you need to do something on a Linux terminal you’re also copy/pasting random crap you found online, don’t pretend you’re not.
The ultimate point still stands. None of these matter to normies, it’s how often you need to tinker or troubleshoot to begin with. For most users the acceptable number is zero.
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
Sure AMD’s drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
Frankly you are comically biased.
Yeah, I run Linux as my main OS and am able to say that it’s not ready to go mainstream, biased as fuck
It’s telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn’t, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It’s because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won’t face those problems in the first place on Windows while they’ll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn’t a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can’t tell what OS they’re using in the first place) and the solution doesn’t come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with “don’t just trust random people”.
The “What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!” argument falls apart when you realize that it’s not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you’re trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don’t even need to know that it has a terminal.
There, happy?
You can’t bullshit me man. I ‘ve been using solving peoples’ issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won’t see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends’ pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Sounds like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair because I’ve never had issues installing AMD drivers on Windows 10, never had Windows update issues and so on.
Maybe you would be better off getting a iPad.
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn’t support first gen Ryzen either!
Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
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 ;)
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
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.
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.
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).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
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 greatAudio 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.
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.
