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  • By Betteridge's law of headlines: no. Also: this is an ad.

  • Linux is not quite normie stream ready but boy is it getting close.

    • Isn't it? I think it's quite there, unless you get unlucky with hardware.

      • There are some little things / low hanging fruit that I personally find very annoying, and don't know why they haven't addressed yet. Average users coming from Mac or Windows notice these things easily and will immediately write off Linux as being janky when they run into them. Most Linux users I see are fairly apologetic about the rough edges since 1. they know how to figure out how to fix them, and 2. believe in the principles of FOSS.

      • I still can't connect my 360hz monitor and 165hz monitor and get HDR at the same time in Linux. Only two of these things work at once. Hoping the eventual new Nvidia drivers fix that, but otherwise I'm out of ideas.

      • Not even close.

        Though it's really impressive how much it's improved over the years.

        I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.

        As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).

        I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

        There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.

        There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

        Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people.

        Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?

        Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.

        Someone else said it better than me:

        Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.

        So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

        And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

        I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

        I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

        Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's of a Windows server.

        Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.

        Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users.

        If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

        These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

        All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).

    • Ubuntu and it's spin-offs are really are as close as we're ever going to get to a full, user-friendly Linux OS. At least one that isn't going to scare off as many people.

      It's just when you tell people the part where you have to keep track of some of the software that they use through the terminal, that's when you start seeing them trickle off back to Windows.

      Because the average user doesn't have the patience, time or know-how to utilize commands in a terminal. If you plopped them down during the era where DOS was prominent, they'd be so lost and be begging for a UI to handle everything.

  • I find it really frustrating to not have a touchscreen on a laptop (e.g. scrolling and zooming Google maps).

    I don't understand what I'm getting for the price difference compared to a similar windows laptop.

    I don't like how the Ctrl/Fn/Alt/Cmd keys are used, but that's just because I'm used to Windows. (Remapping then doesn't help because commands are divided differently been those modifiers).

    I do like that it has a native bash shell instead of having WSL with its separate filesystem. But I doubt that that is a common reason people choose macs.

    • There is pinch to zoom and multitouch gestures on the trackpad, which I consider a lot more convenient than a touchscreen since my hand is already there.

      I haven't actually bought a Mac in a long time since I get them from my job, but the Windows laptops I've used and seen don't have the build quality, and having a big network of retail stores is a nice insurance policy. And if I was going to buy a Mac I'd buy refurbished anyway.

      I've been a Mac user since the late 80s so I have the opposite problem with keyboard commands on Windows and Linux that you do.

      Most of the people I've seen who use Macs - mainly developers working with Linux servers - do use it because it has a shell. (Though Apple switched to zsh not too long ago.)

  • I loved macs back when it was more maximalist design and its service was beyond reproach. anyone buying a pc might be installing linux on it. not that many vendors specific to linux.

    • What does maximalist design mean in the mac world ? Is this regarding UI and/or industrial design ? I was teaching design back when we were transitioning from OS9 to OSx early or mid 2000s I guess . We had to switch between them for a good couple years I think as various packages became available or affordable on osx. Never owned one in the early days but study and work from mid 90s onward was generally on them. I can’t relate to them ever being maximalist really but I guess they gradually did get more minimalist very gradually as far as UI. Throughout this time I was almost always using windows at home so my super basic summary of 90s, 2000s mac vs pc argument would be that the mac rarely interefered with workflow in the sense that win98,2000,xp etc were requiring a large percent of maintenance time. To me thats the minimalism mac were always about and for me still holds to a degree - though far more retail/consumer and far less industry/pro focussed despite FCP, Logic, and fast apple silicone etc.

      Dont necessarily disagree though, just curious what it means. Now also using kubuntu or similar around 9 years (I’m jumping between 3 OSs these days) it often feels like the os9 days as far as community vibe and support - smooth and low stress though the ui approach is sometimes an afterthought rather than the end goal perhaps. Completely capable though. Mac feels more consumer and indeed less concerned with service feeling direct or individualised . So agree with you there. Maximalist service, or is it minimalist :)

      • Im talking about the time when mac enthusiasts would brag about how many more ports a macbook had over a windows laptop. I use the term just because when they went minimalist design coincided when the apple store started acutally said they would not deal with something which was the cable losing their casing which did end up being a design issue so they handled it later but previous to that they would never not do something unless it was obvious you took a hammer to it or something. my last mac was the macbook pro erra with the dvd-i port.

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