4w ago

Windows VS Linux (part 2)

263 comments

Let’s not cherrypick scenarios to try and pretend Linux is easier than Windows. Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options, never mind putting them into a terminal window where they could seriously fuck up their machine. What about clicking the download link on a webpage, clicking next a few times and having them software on your machine, compared to having to build something from GitHub (how many people here have never had to do that?).
- This applies to pretty much all "Linux good, Win/MacOS bad" memes. I just assume that people either aren't really serious about them and it's just tongue in cheek, or they don't have any contact with regular people.
  I used to work as a(n assistant to the) sysadmin and the things I got called over never stopped to amaze. For instance, there was a case when software was updated on the work machines and I got called because some lady couldn't use Adobe Acrobat. "It is asking me something, I don't know what". I come over and it's just a TOS Accept/Decline window.
  Some people do not understand computers to an extent that they can lock up in a state of confusion when a button has been moved 100px in any direction from its usual position.
- Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options, never mind putting them into a terminal window where they could seriously fuck up their machine
  Maybe this is a problem that we should be addressing, rather than just making technology more of a black box, and raising generations of people who have no fucking concept of how any of it works.
  
  Lots of people don't care enough to learn
  
  and raising generations of people who have no fucking concept of how any of it works
  Only two generations were got to be technologically literate.
  
  If you have a driver's license, do you know a car works besides the basic maintenance that is checking your oil and keeping the tires inflated? Some people don't even do that last one, while it's a thing you should check regularly.
  I think it's a good thing the general public is able to use a computer without knowing the inner workings, but it also shouldn't be obscured from them if they want to know/learn.
  
  But this is the classic Linux user mentality; Linux shouldn’t get easier, users should get smarter.
  If computers can be easier to use then why should people instead sacrifice loads of time learning how to operate them? Most people have other things to be getting on with.
  
  There's also many people who can't afford technology, you know?
- Unless you have a system without a GUI, you don't need to open a terminal in order to update or install stuff. There is a GUI for that. And no, you don't need to build stuff from GitHub for normal user stuff..
  
  Not using the terminal is like buying a race car and not using the higher gears. I mean, you can, but what's the fucking point?
  
  I tried that on linux, it doesn't work if you want to do more than browse the web and other basic stuff.
  You can do some seriously advanced stuff on windows using only GUIs
- been using linux for a few years both on servers and my pc and I never had to build sth myself
- Let's also not conflate "ease" with historical behavior.
  Taking previous experience out of the equation, it is easier to type apt upgrade and reboot to update your entire system than to click through 300 times in the system and multiple apps with reboots.
  That is a fact.
  
  You don't even need the terminal. There is a interface to update if you are using a DE.
  
  Like 3 clicks lol
- Let’s not cherrypick scenarios to try and pretend Linux is easier than Windows. Most normal people are...
  Let's not cherry pick users then. I don't care about your normal users. My experience is better on Linux.
  
  Let’s not cherry pick users then. I don’t care about your normal users. My experience is better on Linux.
- Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options
  Sadly no. They should be nervous if it's about making changes to their system. In reality however Windows conditioned them to just click the button labeled "Yes" or "Okay" without even reading the pop-up in the first place.
- Compiling from GitHub is cherry picking the worst case especially for "most normal people" and frankly they should be using the software store GUI in their DE to install and update software with nice easy buttons to click.
  Frankly software management for a normal person generally is easier on Linux than it is on Windows for stuff made to run on Linux.
  But don't worry someone will respond with nvidia's shitty proprietary drivers.
- Most normal people only ever use the browser. Even image or video editing is niche for the average person

No restart require on Linux is a joke, right? Because I get updates that require restarts as often as I get them on Windows when updating Mint.
- Unless you're updating the kernel itself, there is little chance you actually need to reboot your machine. Just restarting whatever service or application you're using should do the trick.
  
  Just following the update manager instructions
  
  This is the same on Windows, you can just carry on and then complete an update when you go to shut down the machine. Can't remember the last time an app install or update required the whole OS to be restarted immediately.
  
  And on some distros you can also just reload the kernel without rebooting
  
  Even with kernel updates, you can use something like ksplice or kpatch to update it without rebooting. It's usually only used on servers though.
- Besides a kernel update... Which one?
  Honest question, as I usually just restart to be sure I haven't missed to restart a service or something, but theoretically I could restart every program and service, that got updated.
  Maybe Mint is very conservative here...
  
  Probably driver update, like nvidia?
  
  Fedora requiers them all the time. Sometimes there is a driver update in there.
- Yep. Every kernel update. Granted that's less often than Windows requires a reboot.
- Afaik mint just says you have to restart but don't forces you. Iirc it was there to avoud any glitches which could be caused by apps interacting with each other in different versions(say some system app got updated and desktop environment is still the old since its loaded before update then cause gui mismatch due to different versions of ui toolkit)
  
  I mean, in this case Windows doesn't force you to restart either, you can just keep chugging along with the restart icon at the bottom right... That icon can stay there for weeks on my girlfriend's laptop
- Yep. I'm on EndeavourOS which is about as far as you can get from Mint without going to like Slackware, LFS, or BSD. Basically every single run of pacman prompts for a reboot. I'm sure I could restart individual services or subsystems instead, but that's not what the OS popup says.
- This is a requirement for Immutable Distributions, not that Mint is... But others.
  
  It is often needed on OpenSuse TW.

I haven't had a DLL issue in Windows in like 20 years.
- I did
  
  I didn't
- I haven't had to restart to install / uninstall anything since WinME.
  
  Only thing I can think of is installations that include drivers. And even then, not all of them.
  
  Found the guy who never updated his windows since ME

This was made by someone who has never used either
- Eh, Windows complaints tend to get pretty hyperbolic much of the time. It’s slow and annoying but I’ve always worked with it
  But the description of the Linux update process matches my experience with mint, pretty much. I even use the GUI update utility because it will put a little icon in the bottom corner of the screen. It’s quick even if I’m using a program that’s going an update, and if the kernel gets updated it’s just like “hey remember to reboot buddy!”
- Besides missing dependencies or repositories for more nice software this kinda closely matches my experience though.
  (Ignoring winget, becaust it is not really the mainstream way to install windows software)
  What is your specific issue with this?
  
  Mostly that this hasn't been my experience with Windows for like 20 years.
  They might as well removed about dropping their punch cards.
- Literally
  My desktop/laptop experience for both is as follows:
  Windows update, at least since the inception of the concept has never required me to go to a browser (unless you count w98 "everything is a website" concept for the desktop or the far in between instances were a PC was offline/having issues and you need to download update packages)
  It also updated windows applications (ie office) but yeah it never intended to upgrade other stuff, all other software had their own auto update check
  I'll concede the restart because yeah it does all for that
  But yeah Linux install is not without issues, and I'll just remind everyone of how difficult it was/is to install a component driver when it's not automatically found (wifi cards, disk controllers, and Realtek drivers anyone?)
  Yeah it does update your apps, as long as you have the repos, and restart wise I distinctively remember that you do need to do restarts after updates, be it major distro or not.
  Simple commands? I'll concede that, as long as we remember the average Linux user is used to a less user friendly experience. Complain ask you want but for the average user, windows update experience works
  Thankfully I don't need to deal with all that stuff now
  
  Windows update, at least since the inception of the concept has never required me to go to a browser
  In xp it still was an website which required IE due to activex used to do the updates.
  
  I haven't had a driver issue except for Nvidia where the driver exists, but it sucks
  
  What's so hard about sudo pacman -Syu
  Is easy
  No sketchy website like having to go to Firefox.com to download Firefox. Ughhh
  
  I maintain a bunch of PC's and 2 of them won't update anymore with some vague error code that only has a microsoft community forum post as search result. I'll get it fixed, but Windows update is not quite flawless and a non tech person would be lost at this point.
  People seem to be having a hard time grasping that most of the time it works great on both Windows and Linux. Majority of people will have a solid experience. But on both platforms, when things go to shit, you need to get your hands dirty. And with that final thought, I like to add that because of it's openness, is usually easier to troubleshoot an issue on Linux because it doesn't obscure what it's doing unlike Windows ("Please wait...", "Setting things up", ... dafuq u doin, it says 100%, is it doing anything still or is it hanging?). Windows' vagueness has been a pet peeve of mine and it's only getting worse. I'm perfectly ok shielding it by default, but give me a verbose option.

Open terminal
See whether the app is in my distro's repos, flathub, or snapcraft (It's not)
Go on the internet, search up the app's name
Download the AppImage (might be a virus)
LibFuse2 is not installed (fuck me)
Install LibFuse2
Install Gearlever to integrate AppImage into my desktop
I can finally launch the app
- Fuck, I hate AppImages so much. Never heard of gearlever, thanks i hope this helps a lot.
  Edit: Ok Gearlever is pretty great! Now I can finally open Heroic normally. That pissed me off for so long.
- doesn't use arch/nix
  "why cant i find my package in the repos?"
  
  Ah yes, downloading builds from unvetted third parties and running their installers as root. Truly the Linux way.
- Even if that’s needed, you can update apps w/o reboot usually (when sandboxed), and move opened files around (seriously wtf, Windows)…
  
  When the hell would I need to update my Windows because of an app update? I only restart when there is a system update, which you have to do on Linux too if you want your kernel to stay up to date.

somepackage requires otherpackage version >10.1.79
otherpackage is already at latest version
Have fun compiling it yourself and messing up what is managed by the package manager and what's not. And don't forget that the update might break some other package along the way
- If your distro maintainer's do a good job, that situation never happen's.
  Or just use gentoo where that problem doensn't exist at all.
  
  Don't use apostrophes wherever you see an "s" at the end of a word. If you're unsure about whether or not to use an apostrophe, just don't. Because statistically, there are far fewer cases where you need 'em than there are cases where you don't. Plus if you missed the apostrophe where it should be, people will just assume you didn't bother to type it or it was a typo. Whereas if you do type it where it shouldn't be, it's a clear case of "this person doesn't know how apostrophes work".
- Most of the time you can just download a release and place the binary in path (or a symlink).
  Compiling it yourself should not 'messing up' anything, it should build locally:
  undefined
  
  ./configure make -j$(nproc)
  Now it's just built, nothing on your system has changed. make install will place requisite files where they need to go, but this generally configurable via prefix or equivalent. You may need to install dependencies, but that's usually a simple exercise in reading the output from the configuration step.
  Compiling software is easy as fuck and is incredibly flexible.
- Huh, pacman always seemed to automatically work out those dependency loops, or whatever you want to call them, when I was on EndeavourOS. The only time I had an issue with updating was when I went like two weeks without updating, and then ran out of harddrive space halfway through installing the 600 updates.
  I've been running Bazzite for several months now, and updating is absurdly easy and unintrusive. It's basically impossible to fuckup (and if you do, it's extremely simple to rollback). I can really see immutable/atomic being the future of Linux.
  
  Well not if you're on Ubuntu and need the latest version of e.g. npm for some nvim plugin, because that version is not in the repository.
- I sometimes just give up and use Docker or a Flatpak (depending on if it's a CLI or GUI app)
- Manjaro, is that you?
- NixOS solved this. You can install both deps from two different channels.

Edge (Microsoft browser) thinks the Microsoft Teams exe installer FROM MICROSOFT SERVER is malware, no joke.
- It is.
- Broken clock and all that
- I like how you specified "Microsoft browser" 😏
  
  Not to be confused with Edge, the non-Microsoft browser! /s

I can't remember the last time I got a DLL error on my Windows laptop, honestly. I don't think that's ever happened on my current computer.
- The last time I got a DLL error was back in Windows 98 ffs.
- I got one on my work laptop this week. It's controlled by a shitty management software that is used by our IT, but still.
- I got this when I didn't have the correct .NET installed

When you make fun of something that really isn't an issue it just makes your side look worse. Windows has real problems, but installing shit ain't it.
My dad can install anything on windows with clicks, he can't do shit with a terminal.
I'm a power user and love GUIs. I'll use git desktop all day everyday, instead of typing shit in a command line. It's one button press vs typing paths and hoping you don't misspell shit.
I don't really get the whole command line fetish, there are no extra points in life for doing things the harder way.
- Ah, yes. I also love it when I search for firefox on my new PC with Edge (without adblocker) and get sponsored malware in the results.
  I still use windows but I think installing software on Linux is way more convenient. Especially with the AUR.
- The GUI app centers on most distros are quite usable without command line wizardry and reduces the risk of dodgey download sites
- Yay -S app is hard? Or apt install app? Or flatpak?
  Being used to a habit doesnt make the habit the default way. Humans adapt quickly.
  
  All of that is harder than a double click, yes.
  
  apt install funbox funbox not found apt install fun-box fun-box not found apt install openfunbox openfunbox not found Google openfunbox "use apt install open-funboxxx"
- Check the name of this community again.
- Power users are just regular users with an ego.
  GUI is like fast food, sure you can eat it and enjoy it, and you will live to see another day, but it's inferior in every way to everything else. The real problem is that people start acting like fast food is the default food and start looking at people who eat raw or cook their own food or pay for food at a restaurant as being full of themselves.
  There are countless real advantages to CLI over GUI, but allowing people to use their computer effectively by fumbling around isn't one of them.
- A simple analogy is, would you rather have keyboard with a-z and symbols you can use to build words/sentences, or would you want a wordlist you can scroll and click, while expanding words in groups, and having to find non-frequent words with a lot of difficulty to make up sentences.
  Command line use is harder if you come from gui. But the main use case of command line are:
  automation: anything you can do in a command line, can be copied in a script,
  uniformity: every software now has almost the same format of use,
  flexibility: gui almost always has less options than command line, and many times options are hidden within a lot of tabs and options.
  Auto complete: whenever someone complains about terminal being hard to use and spelling mistakes I think about this. I think many people that come from GUI don't know about auto-completion on terminal. It's easy to see which options are available, easy to choose files, wildcards for multiple files, and all that
  piping: command line allows you to chain one command with another. You have a command to list all your music files, chain that with a search command to search files within them. Now if you need to search in a python code, you use the same search command, just different command to read the file. You basically have lego blocks (old ones) that can be used to make anything.
  I can understand people being afraid of command line when they start, but I think many people come with biases and don't use good terminal and other tools to make things easier.

You're forgetting winget. It's actually really good.
- Winget sucks ass. Fails half of the time, lists way too much I did not install through Winget m, even had apps broken because of bad updates through Winget.
  Never had these problems with scoop or chocolatey though.
  
  That sucks. I use it to handle all software on my work dev machine and haven't had any issues so far. We basically use it to set up clean machines and it's worked perfectly so far.
  
  lists way too much I did not install through Winget
  That's one of the features though. You can update apps via Winget even if you didn't originally install them via Winget.
- It’s alright, but (in my experience) incredibly slow.

What the actual fuck are you smoking?
At least update this meme to the 2010s if you won't go to the 2020s

Been using Linux off and on since 2003-ish. I remember the days of having to compile applications and having to download various dependencies. Linux now is so streamlined and easy. Minus gentoo.
- What? Once you set up gentoo properly, its as if not more streamlined than other distros

IDK, but I more often had issues with installing apps to Linux than to Windows, usually dependency-hell related ones, but once I had trouble enabling snap on Linux Mint.
- If you're enabling Snap on Mint, you might as well install Ubuntu.
- but once I had trouble enabling snap on Linux Mint.
  Seems like a win
- Mint activity tries to protect you from using snap.

I don't know about all the arguing and snark, but... I've been using Ubuntu (laugh it up) on my work laptop for the last 3ish years, and the vast majority of the time it really is "click install updates. wait 2 minutes. ok every program on your computer is up to date, just don't forget to restart Firefox". Can't think of a time where updating sucked. Sometimes I even go through the terminal just because it makes me feel cool to be a hackerman.
I dread updating my windows pc at home. Cuts into my WoW time too much.
- I've switched over a year ago and that's the thing that, looking back, sticks out to me the most as well. It's just insane that practically every application I used had its own update routine. Lesser used apps I had to update every single time before using them. Just constant interruptions everywhere.
  Winget is a step in the right directions, but it still has to build upon and work around that same shaky foundation, and it shows.
  
  Still pretty ez
- I can't laugh it up as I use Ubuntu with a K.
- Coincidentally my windows PC needed to update when I got back to it. It took like 15 minutes and 2 restarts. I legit pulled out my Ubuntu laptop and Sudo apt-get upgraded that removed just to flex on Bill Gates.

I don't like windows either, but updating with Winget in terminal works pretty good. Not as good as with Linux, but better than downloading every app via browser.

Chocolatey is the best option I've found for this on Windows:
Chocolatey was created by Rob Reynolds in 2011 with the simple goal of offering a universal package manager for Windows. Chocolatey is an open source project that provides developers and admins alike a better way to manage Windows software.
You can install & uninstall software from the command line and update everything installed through it with one command.
It's not a real package manager of course. It can't update the operating system, and Windows applications aren't built for modularity and shared libraries the way Linux applications are. But it does automate application management like nothing else. I highly recommend this if you use Windows.
- There's winget now too, which is the official Windows package manager. I've used it a couple of times now and worked as expected, not sure how it compares to chocolatey outside of simple app installs though.
  
  I love winget, at least for the initial installation. No more having to search the the download and click through a gui. Just one or two commands (two if searching for the id) and done.
- I always prefered scoop with which I had fewer issues and which installs everything without needing admin rights.
  
  installs everything without needing admin rights.
  I hate installers that do this because they don't install the apps in the right place. Apps should be in Program Files.

Remember DLL hell in windows 2000? Damn that was rough.
- I think the last time I saw a dll issue was windows 8.

Tbh, with stuff like Winget and the respective GUI apps the process for installing or upgrading software is pretty much the same nowadays.
- Genuinely the only people who use Winget or choco are Linux users who have to use Windows.
  
  Or anyone that does automation. Pretty much any Windows sysadmin.

WinGet: Am I a joke to you?
- WinGet, choco, scoop, &c, they all have strengths and weaknesses, which is why I had to write this: https://github.com/brianary/scripts/blob/main/Update-Everything.ps1
  It's also why I use Linux at home.
  
  You need to update a bunch of separate things on Linux too, though. For example, apt or dnf, rpms and debs that aren't in a repo (although Deb-get handles some of those), Flatpak, Snap, fwupd for firmware, plus language-specific things (npm, dotnet, cargo, Python, etc). At least the UIs handle a lot of it now.
- Winget-ui is great, except Microsoft hasn't figured out to conceptually make two installs of the same product get treated the same -- absolutely pathetic that if you install VLC from their website you can never ever ever use Winget VLC without uninstalling the other.
  
  Android has that issue too. Can't install the same app via fdroid and play store. Sounds logical though. Even Arch pacman won't continue of it detects existing files it doesn't know about.
  
  That does work for me in general, might be a problem with the specific app where the 2 builds are somehow incompatible
- Yes

Missing dependency? Don't you like living away from your parents?

Windows side of things is getting better though, thanks to winget. Not perfect and it f's up with certain packages but already a lot better than updating by hand.
- Windows is not getting better,
  CoPilot, Recall, all more unwanted spyware..
  UniGetUI is a good way to maintain software on Windows in a Linux fashion through package managers,
  however that does not change that the underlying OS is pure spyware.
  
  Sure, but since the meme was talking updates my response is about updates only as well.

The Windows updating experience, both the system and apps via the Microsoft Store is so fucking bad it's unbelievable. Shit just stops working all the time, updates fail, grinds the whole system to a halt etc.
For several years now I've been unable to update apps in the Microsoft store in one go, I have to open it, click "get updates" and the circular progression bar goes to about 1/5 and then just stops. So I have to close the app, wait a few minutes, open it again and then press the "play" button for every single app that has updates for the download to actually start, nothing else works. It's been the same for Windows 10 and 11 across four different computers.
There was a Windows 10 update several months ago, might even have been last year that just failed for a ton of people and it took months before it was fixed.
- That's actually a major reason I switched to linux. Windows security update kept failing with no solution for like 6mos. Afaik there is still no solution.

I think mixing app and system dependencies is not the best idea, and Linux desktop is still fighting its impact.
When all the apps on a consumer laptop is expected to depend on the same dependencies, the system likely run into dependency hell, which means many apps needs to be downgraded in order to keep older apps working.
This mixture of system dependency and app dependency also prevents users to use the the latest version of an app on a hyper stable base system.
Flatpak basically aim to solve this problem, where each app chooses their own dependencies, so you don't need to downgrade all your app just because one app depends on python 2.7.

i love when i need to search for dll files

no restart required
Not true for immutable
- Nixos doesn’t need a restart

I'm preparing for a new computer build and I have some questions. I'm feeling really scorned by Windows 11 and its incompatibility with my current hardware as well as the overall sense of that my privacy is being invaded. I'm not super familiar with linux, but I have messed around with various distros.
The build I'm planning to put together will likely use an AMD processor, but I'm uncertain about the GPU (definitely AMD or Nvidia). With my current build, RX 480 and i5-6500 I have found that in recent years I get massive artifacts in relatively old games such as Planetside 2 and Path of Exile (I also play Magic Arena quite a bit, but haven't experienced any issues there). I even get screen tearing when watching youtube or amazon prime. It's possible that my card is just dying, but considering that I don't consistently see these issues across multiple applications I feel like it might be a driver issue.
I'd really like feedback and to know more about Linux gaming (especially with the games mentioned) as well as experience with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel hardware.
Thanks to anyone who responds.
- In my experience, gaming worked great on Linux Mint. Overall, you may encounter issues with online gaming but only because the servers will see you're using Linux and decide you must be cheating. Not really an issue with Linux, more an issue with the devs not doing a proper job.
  ProtonDB is a good resource to understand what games run well on Linux and what issues you may encounter.
  
  Oh wow, that cheating bit is interesting and something I would not have thought of. The games I play are prominently online, do you know if this is an issue with them?
- For me, nvidia with proprietary drivers works great, just make sure to have correct dependency packages installed for vulcan etc. (should just work in most distros if their recommended way of installing nvidia drivers is used)

One thing that no one can argue is better on windows is app updates.
On Linux, my apps update through the app store or a terminal command.
On Windows, the app has to create its own auto-updater that usually means it bugs you for permission (sometimes if it's something like Adobe or Office it'll keep an update-checker service running!). Otherwise your app is just stagnant forever.
It's not impossible for Windows to fix, there's chocolatey and winget but they're always going to be a niche alternative to the shitty systems Windows gives by default.

Wait till you accidentally overwrite the system python.

I've been a Linux user on and off since 1996, and there are still times when I give up trying to install software because of cryptic error messages.
Yes, I had my parents using Linux Mint for about 5 years, but eventually my brother who lived near them switched them to Windows because if there was a problem with Linux he couldn't help.
Don't worry, this is definitely the year of the Linux desktop.
- Perhaps its just gotten better, but I've been on it for a year or two now, and I haven't come across an error message that didn't bring up solutions when copy/pasted into google. Definitely varies by distro though, I was on EndeavourOS for most of that time, and being Arch, it has like infinite documentation.
  
  I haven't come across an error message that didn't bring up solutions when copy/pasted into google.
  Yeah that's more effort than like 95% of people out there can exert.
  Thinking about googling a computer problem is what separates the sheep from the goats.

If I had seen this type of content when I was discovering Linux, I'd have probably stayed with Windows...
- Yeah at least back in the old days the ones frothing at the mouth about Linux...you had to seek them out on irc or weird forums. Now the doge memes come to me.
  
  I've been using Linux for only about 6 years. I was just lucky to never get exposed to the unofficial Linux sales group.

You people always come off as old people on infomercials.
Anyways Linus desktop is a mess. You are delusional if you think it's easier. Maybe more efficient workflows for certain things but easier is a lol.
- Anyways Linus desktop is a mess. You are delusional if you think it's easie
  Use it before saying shit that's so blatantly stupid
  
  Have a nix box upstairs. It's much more of a pain in the ass than any windows install. Year of the Linux desktop in year 20xx 🤣
- I appreciate Linux for how well it can handle single-purpose tasks, like if I wanted a media centre or such, but after daily driving it for 3 years on my Desktop I've had enough. Anyone who thinks it's easy has a lot of spare time they wish to invest into a thing that's supposed to just work.
  
  I love it for long running services eg *ardar + Plex but the desktop is nearly unusable.
  Ubuntu out of the box requires you to install pulse audio, grab your device id via cli, and then run a script at bottom to set that device as the default speaker.
  Ubuntu out of the box needs scripting just to deal with an audio source that gets turned off and on. And zealots will scream it's ready for everyone on steam to use.

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