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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.
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.
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
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.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs greatAudio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
2 days ago, and about 4 different distros to get one that would even load on my laptop with discreet video cards…
Bad experiences from the past are valid reasons to be apprehensive.
So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.
(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)
I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.
But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.
After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.
I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.
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.
Linux is not ready for most people
The last time i used it was 30 minutes ago
That depends on your definition of “ready”, and of “most people”.
My mom, for instance, could pretty much do all her stuff on a Linux machine, and as soon as her current laptop with Win11 gets a tad too old and she starts complaining that everything is so slow, I’ll switch her over to Linux.
All she does is edit her photos, read emails and does online banking and some web-only games (like boardgamearena). She needs an image editor (she still uses Picasa, so Shotwell could be a valid alternative), an email program (she already uses Thunderbird), text processor (she already uses LibreOffice).
I have had problems with those tasks
The screen completely freezing, requiring me to restart the computer and lose everything i have not saved; putting the computer on sleep sometimes wouldnt let me open it unless i held the power button to shut it down and then restarted; connecting the certain wifi networks doesnt work
These arent enough to stop me from using linux, but other people probably wouldnt ignore them so easily
I’ve had similar experiences with Windows.
Recently the fingerprint reader on my work laptop (which is running Win11) just completely stopped working until after a reboot.
Putting my laptop to “sleep mode” didn’t work either, it would constantly wake up within seconds of me putting it to sleep. Wifi stopped functioning for no discernable reason. (I still haven’t found the reason)
It’s funny how little has changed since 15 years ago
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.
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.
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
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.
“Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?”
“WTF is a 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.
Everything’s computer!
I tried this year.
It’s not ready.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine for most things, but end-user, normie fire-and-forget stuff? Nah.
But by that standard, Windows isn’t ready either…
It is by far more “ready” than Linux. But even if it wasn’t, that’s where 80% of people already are. Whatever quirks Windows has, they are already aware of them.
But seriously, no, that’s not a valid argument. Forget software. Hardware compatibility alone makes those two things entirely different from each other. Tell me again what types of GPU I should buy for my Linux gaming PC using an HDR VRR display and what DE I should choose. Is the answer “any”? No? So it’s not ready.
Complaining about hardware compatibility on Linux while Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs is crazy.
I think you’ll find there’s mainly one group of people that fall into the “Linux isn’t ready” category - ‘Windows Power Users who cite specific use cases’.
But wait, I thought the meme was about normies that tried Linux once a long time ago and never bothered with it again. Which is it?
“Specific use cases” here seems to be “has a Nvidia GPU”, which seems to be specifically 90% of the PC market. Should a normie gamer with no tech skills who is not a power user try to migrate their mid-range PC with a 3060 to Linux? 3D modellers? Video editors? Twitch streamers?
This conversation always goes like this. Turns out that when you start scratching off all the exceptions then yes, Linux is ready to work first time out of the box. If you’re trying to salvage a specifically supported ten year old laptop with no dedicated GPU to do mostly web stuff and coding.
Literally me lol. I built a brand new Nvidia machine last year, tried a few distros and just had nonstop issues with games. Which became me googling reddit forums for fix actions and advice, which would just be try a new a distro or run these commands that breaks something else so another thing works. I love foss and what it represents, but I’m not a software guy nor do I have time to waste hours googling why kingdom come is playing at 5 fps on my 4080.
I’ve put Fedora on my mum’s pc after it became clear that Win10 will EoL soon, and that Win11 would refuse to run on it. Have had significantly fewer support requests since then.
Her work is mostly done via Citrix, which has an official Fedora Client. Everything else happens in the Browser, or sometimes in OnlyOffice, which so far has worked as a drop-in replacement for MS Office.
As always, it really depends on the use case.
There’s always one “I gave it to my mum” post on these. I don’t know if it’s always you, but man, it’s starting to get very funny.
Yes, my parents are on an Android tablet now as their sole computing device. Want to start arguing for the year of Android desktop? Sure, “for most applications” everything happens on a browser.
That’s not what people have desktop PCs for, though, is it? You may be surprised to know I also don’t run Windows 11 on my phone. For the same reasons it’s less comfortable to run Linux on your desktop PC, incidentally.
For the record, I actively tried to use my Manjaro install to work whenever possible. I only switched back and forth between it and Windows when one broke or something didn’t work, as a bit of a test. Turns out I ended up in Windows like 80% of the time.
It’s fine, but not ready for mainstream.
I’m sure it’s a common enough occurrence in a community with lots of computer nerds.
I do recognise that there are a lot of usecases in which Linux isn’t currently the sensible choice for most users, but I also feel the ready/not ready thing is quite as clear cut. While I’m obviously rather biased, I do genuinely think that there is a subset of casual users that would do better with Linux than with Windows.
I could talk about how Windows has been a lot more problematic for me than Linux, but that has been mainly down to driver issues with a specific network adapter, and we both know that isn’t the reason I prefer Linux anyway.
Android absolutely is ready for the desktop - its cousin is called ChromeOS which is running on zillions of Chromebooks. And ChromeOS is a version of Linux
If it’s good enough for mums, it’s good enough for a lot of people. Because mums are the mainstream.
Most people’s measure of whether it’s ready is “How soon until I have to type into a console to get something done”.
If it’s within the first three months - then it’s not ready.
Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won’t kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.
It’s like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that’s becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.
Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS
People for the most part haven’t had to deal with the command line since Windows 95 was released, and that was 30 years ago. Which means anyone old enough to had regularly used DOS is at least in their 40’s now.
By that definition Windows 11 isn’t ready for people too. You’ll need the command line at installation to circumvent the mandatory MS account requirement.
No, you need the command line for that. Most people will just create an MS account and continue.
You need a command line to install it on unsupported hardware.
The main push back i get is in order to maintain soc2 compliance the IT department needs to run auditing software on the laptop. Microsoft intune barely support linux and is years behind on the os versions it will work with. IT does not want to run multiple audit software packages.
it still surprises me that something like linux exists.
Lots of high quality FOSS projects exist. Interrogate that feeling of surprise!
Not talking about quality or utility. But how gigantic the project is and how diverse its users and developers are. All that for nothing being asked in return, just some evolved monkeys satisfying their curiosity of tinkering.
Linux is the backbone of large portions of the internet so tonnes of money is poured into it. Althought Linux has a niche userbase for home PCs it is often the default choice for servers & development.
To be fair lots of companies contribute time/labor/money to Linux. It’s a pretty commercial FOSS project as far as they go.
It is surprising that it has prevailed against all the billion dollar companies and their hatred for it. The many people making, maintaining and testing the kernel and all the applications should be applauded.
Which billion dollar companies hate Linux? The likes of Microsoft and Google actively contribute to it and make money from it!
They still hate it. They are just not completely braindead. They know that its much cheaper to use Linux than keep maintaining their own kernels.
This doesnt change the fact that they still actively hinder widespread adoption of Linux systems for consumers. They could just publish their kernel and allow linux, wine and proton devs to support all windows applications flawlessly but they dont.
They were calling it a cancer just a decade ago. Now they can’t ignore it.
Looked it up and apparently that quote was from 2001, and it was specifically about GPL code infecting their precious intellectual properly. Does sound like classic Ballmer though!
Hello Tim Sweeney
Didn’t get that reference?
Epic CEO (makers of Fortnite, the Epic Games Store and Unreal Engine) who has regular rants on social media hating Linux.
And it’s all because Richard Stallman got pissed off at Xerox.
I mean, who wouldn’t? Two sounds for X in one name? Surely it’s eckserocks or its zeroz. Make up your darn mind!
Imagine if it was called Pacific Ocean, which has 3 different sounds for C!!
Do not test me. My rage knows no bounds.
I always loved the “it’s not polished” excuse withoutb a single example
Let me check dmesg:
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: amdgpu: failed to write reg 291c wait reg 292e
or
[46531.357889] amdgpu 0000:c5:00.0: [drm] ERROR lttpr_caps phy_repeater_cnt is 0xff, forcing it to 0x80.
Let me know if more examples are needed ;)
It’s not because you can’t check on Windows, that it doesn’t exist ! I’m sure there are a lot of different boot issue logs in Windows, they are just hidden behind a “beautiful” Welcome page.
You’re making a huge assumption based only on the fact that Windows hides these logs from the end user.
I’ve had line of sight to those logs through a system that automatically highlights those errors and warnings for something like eight years now, for a fleet of over 1000 Windows machines at the start which is now roughly 5000 total.
In that time I’ve seen less than 200 graphics driver issues logged, and they all were on machines with failing hardware.
Yes, they are not anywhere as visible to the end user as they are on Linux, but they are also significantly less common (graphics issues in particular).
Also, if the warnings are meaningless, why display them to the end user? It’s just more noise that actual problems can sneak by in.
How is support for HDR colors nowadays?
Support for HDR is fully implemented in Wayland last I checked
Looks like it’s still rough around the edges.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
KDE Plasma 6.0 introduced experimental HDR support for Wayland session.
DRM clients can directly pass HDR metadata, but this is not available from regular userspace clients, only specialized software can use it.
Web browsers: No web browsers support HDR on Linux at this time.
Valve’s Steam compositor gamescope offers experimental HDR support.
It’s ready if you use a Linux device, you get dedicated laptops for as low as 600€ by now.
Unfortunately people keep comparing diy machines with Windows and Mac. That’s simply not a fair comparison, there are reasons a Linux vendor often charges a few hundred bucks more for a Clevo or Tongfang design laptop (not just because they have to finance their support). Thousands of work hours are needed for every detail of a device-software combo to be prepared for the average user. And most of that hard work eventually get upstreamed or is about fixing FOSS bugs in the first place, so buying from Linux computer vendors is a win for everyone.
That’s also the reason why Channels (or “Influencers”) like The Linux Experiment are talking so positively about everything while still aiming at a relatively “average” audience (meaning no Linux nerds). They use Slimbooks, Tuxedos, System76’s, Star Labs…
If you got the money, get one of those. If you absolutely hate it Windows will, in 99% of all cases, still work on them.
I bought a cheap arm based Linux laptop a couple of years ago. The official distribution with full hardware support never received any updates. ARMbian didn’t fully support the hardware more than a year later. E.g. no sound output.
