2w ago

I see these MFs on a daily basis

775 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- They want ReactOS.
  
  But they don't want to pay it to develop it fully
- Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
  Hardware compatibility issues.
  Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
  Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
  Personally for me the list is:
  Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
  Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
  Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
  
  fanzyzones
  Thanks!! This is just what I need. Pop_os has an equivalent in their DE and because work I have windows and I really miss it.
  
  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.
- 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.)
- 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.
  
  This is a big point that not many people acknowledge. The reason SteamOS works as well as it does has less to do with SteamOS itself (it's ultimately as finicky as any Linux distro) and more with it being laser focused on making a specific piece of hardware do a specific thing.
  Problem is, it's a bit of a loop. It's not particularly profitable to launch Linux-only devices, let alone to put the work to ensure they will work reliably for their entire lifetime without user intervention. That makes it harder to grow the ecosystem, given that the default implementation is way jankier than most people will allow, which in turn keeps the business less profitable.
- 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
- This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
  It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
  Not Linux's fault, necessarily, but hardware got... weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn't do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I'd have been on Linux full time.
  These days it's a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
  
  Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I'd call user friendly...
  
  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 great
  
  It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
  This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
- I've been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don't know why.
  On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
  
  In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
  
  On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
  The misery I have trying to get a newer(or sometimes older) version of a package I want is sometimes immeasurable. Yet somehow usually the right version is extremely accessible on choco.
- Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There's a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn't break everything.
  
  Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn't want, etc.
  Rose tinted glasses.
- I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate "normal" person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
  That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that's for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
  It's based on arch btw
  
  I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
  I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
  
  The fact that there is a "correct" distro only adds to the unreadyness for mainstream.
- I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it's not really an app store, because it's not really a store), just worked for me.
  But, I'll agree with you that Linux isn't quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I'm tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn't been fixed. I'm also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there's another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven't had the time to track down.
  Mostly, these are "chicken and egg" things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn't fixed quickly because there aren't enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it's hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don't switch because it's glitchy, it's glitchy because there aren't enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won't switch.
  Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn't sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers... but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it's not that things don't break in Windows, it's just that it's a bigger emergency when they do break.
  I'm not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I'm having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
  Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you're trying to change doesn't show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that's not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
  Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the "DOS prompt" but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the "power" shell is a janky mess.
  Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
  But, while Linux isn't quite there for the end-user, it's getting closer and closer. Really, all that's needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That's an easy one.
  
  Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
  Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
- I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
  Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.
  Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
  This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
  The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
- Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could've gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
  
  I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
  I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
- Yeah that'll happen if you run Bazzite. It's extremely hardware dependent. It "just works" if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it's a shitshow
- I would probably not recommend newcomers an esoteric linux distro tbh. People hate canonical but if people in academia can daily drive Ubuntu, anyone can
- Linux will never be "ready", in a large part because it's made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and most of those people just don't understand how an end user thinks.
  I got annoyed when my new Windows machine immediately had to install a bunch of updates, which only required me to click next every fifteen minutes or so, and I had to uninstall Onedrive and disable the news feed on the lock screen.
  I'd have taken it back if I had to spend that much time actually researching, I've got far better things to do with my time.

"Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?"
"WTF is a computer?"
- Everything's computer!
- https://youtu.be/KQwOwuC9hLM
- 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.
- I have to use Windows at work. Once, apropos of nothing at all, a system pop-up asked me if I wanted to buy an XBox controller. When I lock the screen and come back, sometimes Edge will have opened all by itself, presenting me with the Bing homepage. Nice try, Microsoft!
- Honestly, not being able to run Dolphin as root made me feel like my PC wasn't mine more than anything windows did up until recently.
  Your computer is yours... As long as you're comfortable doing it via terminal... Yay...
  
  That's been fixed for nearly 2 years now.
  Install
  
  kio-admin
  Then in the location bar type:
  
  admin:
  It'll prompt you for your password and then:
  
  On mine I just right click in the window and choose open as administrator. It asks for a password and that's it. No terminal ever comes up.
  
  I much prefer using the terminal than the GUI if I can.
  But I understand that not everyone likes the terminal.
  To be fair, I couldn't tell you how to run my file manager as root from the GUI because I don't use it that much.

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

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