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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.
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.
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
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
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.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
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 can reinstall a driver without ever touching the command line on windows.
Can you do that with Linux? Idk maybe on some distros but the default would just be to uninstall the package from terminal.
Pretending these are equivalent is not cool and it just drives new users away for not understanding things the community takes for granted. It takes effort to learn the terminal if even tech-savvy windows users may not even use the command line
Not what I’m saying. I’m saying that a) copy pasting into the terminal isn’t the horrifying breakdown of usability Linux advocates seem to believe it is, and b) there are more pressing issues about how often you need to troubleshoot something in the first place.
On both Linux and Windows it’s relatively rare to have to reinstall a driver in the first place because both are able to pick up your hardware, set themselves up and keep themselves updated with minimal user intervention.
The real problem isn’t whether fixing the exceptions to that involves typing. The real problem is how often there are exceptions to that. In Linux it’s way more likely that the natural process of setting something up or customizing something will require some fiddling, while Windows is more likely to make you install some bloatware or not give you much choice, but most likely will get things working for you the way it wants them to work.
That is very much a user-friendly approach, despite its annoyances. The problem isn’t that there is a command line interface, the problem is that it’s littered in the middle of doing relatively frequent, trivial things. On purpose, even.
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.
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.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
Correct. I’ve been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
You’ve been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn’t under the impression that I’d have feature parity without doing that.
In the last twenty years, I’ve pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn’t in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
In my group of friends (all Linux gaming), I’m the only one with an NVIDIA card. I don’t have more problems than the other folks, I just have different ones.
The biggest gripe I have, HDR and color management, are getting fixed in Wayland soon. In the meantime I use gamescope to get HDR and apply color correction filters with reshade.
“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.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
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.
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.
On the other hand printers always work out of the box on Linux without even installing any drivers, whilst getting them go work on Windows can often be a nightmare
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
They want ReactOS.
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.
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.
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).
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The funny thing is, every laptop I have does suspend without issue. I think for a brief period in 2014 I had a problem with a Zen book, but it got fixed.
As of today, in this office right next to me now: A chromebook, an HP and a Dell. All 100% linux laptops, all suspend. I did not have to do anything to make that work, it just did.
I always avoid Ubuntu, for whatever that’s worth.
Actually there is one funny thing: I picked up a laptop with Windows on it for a user going to a conference. It will not suspend. When you close the lid the fan just goes full blast and it is a space heater. We re-imaged it and it still does it. We just power it off now. It is a dell.
You can’t install macOS on any PC you like either, is it not ready as well?
You can’t install macOS on any PC you like either
I dont understand your question…
Linux works incredibly well, if used on proper hardware
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.
Fair, I’ve never seen it fail to suspend.
Coming back from suspend though, seen countless times across countless computers during my time supporting both consumer devices and working in help desks. Probably in the top 5 issues I deal with.
But hey, that’s just anecdotal evidence at the end of the day.
Though a quick search will bring up no end of pages of people asking for help cuz windows keeps getting stuck when waking up or they think their computer is broken only for a hard restart to fix it. So while I don’t have hard data, it’s obviously not an isolated issue.
Wifi on resume is the bane of my existence. If I close my lid I just have my laptop restart. Mint.
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.
I had to implement a GPO to disable suspend on windows 10 AND 11 for everyone at my company equipped with HP zbook laptops because it was requiring a hard reset every… Single… Time.
No amount of bios upgrade ever fixed the issue.
With our HP laptops they would work perfectly so long as you only ever used them with one brand of dock. If you mixed dock brands without doing a full restart (like say having one brand at home, suspending, and then using another brand’s dock at the office) Wi-Fi, suspend, and several other features would no longer work or work intermittently. We had HP and Targus working on it, even their engineers were puzzled.
Problem was non-existent on Linux…
Just installed KDE neon on two HP laptops and I might be mistaken but I do think they’re both asleep right now. I’ll check back on that later but usually it’s a bad hardware issue that can be rectified with some kernel parameters.
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?
I used Linux desktop for 25 years now and I never used Gnome, what is your point?
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
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.
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.
