Obviously, a bit of clickbait. Sorry.
I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?
I find myself far more patient using Linux and De-googled Android than I do with windows or anything else. After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
And that’s a good thing; I get less frustrated with my tech, and I have something that is important to me outside its technical utility. Unlike windows, which I’m perpetually pissed at. (Very often with good reason)
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”. Often they do “just work”, and well, with a broad feature set by default.
Most of us are willing to forgo that for the privacy and shear customizability of Linux, but do we assume too much of the tech we use and the tech we don’t?
Thoughts?
After all, Linux is mine. I care for it. Grow it like a garden.
We live in a world where the idea of community has been destroyed by rampant capitalism and the death of third spaces.
While there is indeed a lot to be said for something that “just works,” that “just works” demand is borne from a capitalist/consumer process that is literally in the process of going off the rails.
Why do we get so mad at Windows? Because it isn’t ours. Microsoft grows it like a weed on our property. Its roots begin sticking out new places all the time (“hey what’s that new bullshit on my taskbar?”) and has zero respect for your needs as opposed to its needs. Windows only cares for Microsoft’s needs, and it makes that readily evident in how you’re forced to use it.
Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.
In other words, Linux is better than we think it is.
Love the image of wheeds just popping up all over your garden where you don’t want them.
It’s a great metaphor for the “HEY, TRY THIS NEW THING!” shit microsoft pulls.Thank you for this. It is brilliantly put.
Sort of like the difference between the cathedral and a bazaar?
I like to think of Windows as the Zelda sidekick of OSes.
Non-stop interrupting what you’re doing to tell you something you don’t need to know or care about, and constant “HEY LISTEN” nags for all sorts of shit that you either already figured out, knew about, or don’t give a shit about.
Don’t you dare talk about Navi like that!
Linux is the communal kibbutz, Windows is the corporate city.
I was 100% with you until you decided to go and diss cities.
Cities are great and neighborhoods within them can have plenty of sense of community; it’s soulless car-dependant suburbs that are like Windows!
I think they dissed “corporate cities,” which I interpreted as related to company towns, like the so-called Foxconn City or iPhone City in China. Not cities in general.
Some suburbs are nice, too.
You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.
If course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you should want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.
Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.
Sometimes making an iThing (iPhone) work with another iThing (Fiancée ´s Apple TV) isn’t as easy as it should. Streaming the nba app from my phone to the Apple TV was a nightmare a few years ago. Now I just use my PlayStation as the nba is hostile to Linux even in a browser.
So, taking into account the fact that Linux is free and works on almost any hardware, I can only congratulate the people making Linux possible.
Or the purposeful incompatibility between Android/iOS and others.
Like how Google pulled miracast from Android to push Chromecast as the standard. Now I can’t stream to an Amazon FireStick even though it’s also fucking Android at its core.
A lot of these private companies purposefully put in “pain points” to get you to spend more money in their ecosystems.
The “pain points” in Linux are “you have to learn something.”
This too is an excellent take. “Artificial pain points” for capitalism, or “learn some shit” for Linux. Love it.
A lot of these private companies purposefully put in “pain points” to get you to spend more money in their ecosystems.
Aka Walled Gardens.
Barbed wire gardens. Painful to get in, painful to get out.
I resonate with that point, since I do a digital art/tech class, which uses Macs. I find app crashes and the inaccessibility of certain menus quite infuriating, i even somewhat rage internally for a while until i either quit what i was doing or search it up.
When my 8 year old Fedora laptop freezes, crashes, or sound drivers crash like what happened yesterday, I stay very calm and think of a solution, such as updating and restarting.
even if I haven’t built the OS myself or really customised it at all, i find it more calming that i have options to completely change the software compared to locked down OSes.
Have you messed at all with macs “under the hood” so to speak?
Part of the reason my Linux nerd friend swears by them is because command line, they’re super similar to Linux since it’s actually certified UNIX.
So, it’s definitely not 1-to-1 but I’d say macOS is closer to Linux than Windows, including being able to fix shit via CLI.
But that aside, do we give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work”.
No, I don’t think so. There should be an expected difference between Windows (for example) and Linux as far as “it just works” goes, simply by virtue of the fact that one is actively developed by a company with eleventy-bajillion dollars and the other is developed by lots of hobbyists and a handful of profitable companies.
If Windows doesn’t work, it’s not unreasonable to expect that it should. If Linux doesn’t work, it is unreasonable to expect that it always will.
To be fair, a big portion of the work that goes into Linux (at least the kernel) is done by paid developers working for big corporations.
That’s true, it’s not just hobbyists. I meant that the paid effort is relatively small potatoes compared to giant companies like MS.
Additionally much software (and hardware even more) primarely targets windows as a platform. The way printers mostly “just work”™ on Linux still amazes me, because printer vendors have all the incentives to make their stuff work for the most used platform, which sadly isn’t Linux right now.
And let’s not forget that printer vendors historically bungle even that much. That they work at all on Linux is a testament to the various Linux devs.
Pls stop giving billion dollar corporations so much credit.
The difference comes from windows dominant (home pc) market position meaning that almost all software and hardware is specifically made to work with it, with even things that officially support linux being afterthoughts.
Exactly. I give more credits to linux, and it deserves this. I like your garden metaphor, yes my linux pc is like my garden and linux behaves to be, unlike windows.
" “things that just work”.
That certainly not how I will describe the Linux desktop experience.
I have a reoccurring problem in Linux, happening in both Nobara 39 and 40 as well as Fedora 40. I understand that Nobara is Fedora based.
Sometimes my USB headset just does not detect, at all. Plug it in, no notification sound that it has been plugged in and does not appear as an audio device.
I have tried 3 different headsets and none detect. I have to reboot to solve the issue.
A friend of mine is also running Nobara and also comes across the same issue from time to time. It happened again for me today.
While I like Linux, I would love to stop using Windows and make Linux my main OS… I just cannot. Loads of my games and apps do not work in Linux as well as a lot of hardware control software. It took me ages just to get some software to control my GPU fans and I am unable to control my PC fans. From what I understand my motherboard has no Linux support, I cannot see a single sensor in any software I try. I eventually manually set up fan curves in BIOS.
I definitely does not just work for sure.
Adding my Manjaro experience, not good.
I tried it 3 times, fresh installs but it locks up my PC. If my screens turn off after a set amount of time I cannot wake up my PC. I turned off any sleep/standby/hibernate modes, only the screens turn off. If I head out for lunch and come back, the only way to get back in is to hard reboot.
Or there’s a lot of things where it works, but only in the way the developer intended it to.
Just like Apple or MS’s approach, but without a UX team to say yes or no; it’s just one guy’s opinion. Sure most things on Linux are designed to be flexible, but shit’s still a pain to find something that works well.
Generally, when things work on windows, it is the effort of whomever made the device or software. Microsoft generally does not develop drivers. However, when things work on GNU/Linux it is the effort of GNU, Linux, or the community. The manufacturer probably did nothing. This simply explains why we are generally relaxed or “give Linux too much benefit of the doubt relative to the “things that just work””.
So fairly comparing a Linux distro to raw windows, Linux is better. When you install a distro, things just work, when you install windows, most stuff do not work and you need to complete setup. Unless you use tools provided by the manufacturer, but then again, it is same story.
Windows works nearly every time any more - I don’t have to do anything during setup. Drivers are automatic during setup.
Not sure where you get this idea from.
My Logitech mouse doesn’t work at all on Linux unless I search for why and go find third-party software for it. Windows sees it as a generic HID and treats it as such. I can go get the Logitech software if I want, but have no need of it. Linux? Nope. Probably the most prolific mouse on the planet and Linux can’t even use it, at all, natively.
On windows it just works.
Now let’s go deploy 300, or 3000 machines.
I have the opposite. Old Logitech bluetooth mouse on W10, Windows will pair with it but next boot it totally will not reconnect, no matter what, unless I delete paired device and re-add it. It was fine on W7. Linux has no issue reconnecting to it.
You get your panties in a twist because you have to install Solaar?
It’s a very simple, very functional piece of software Built For Logitech Devices.
All my keyboards & mice are (mostly second hand) Logitech. No problems here.
Not even sure I’ve had to install Solaar with Mint or Ubuntu in the last 10 years.
Then you must not be very bright. All my Logitech and Razer hardware just works on every Linux distro I jump on while distro hopping.
First of all you’re missing the point.
Drivers are automatic during setup.
That still means third-party drivers, so it’s still not a Windows win but rather a “windows is so ubiquitous that Logitech (or whoever) was forced to release a driver for it”, which is what the comment you’re replying was talking about.
Secondly, bullshit. In my 20 years using Linux I have never, ever, plugged in a mouse that didn’t get immediately recognized and worked as expected. What mouse do you have? You said Logitech, which model? The only thing that I ever needed specialized software on a Logitech mouse was to configure extra buttons or to pair it to a different dongle (both stuffs that also need specialized software only provided by Logitech on Windows)
Linux is far, far better at handling generic USB devices than Windows. Your inability to plug in a peripheral seems like PEBCAK.
You forgot to mention you use Arch, btw.
Is Linux As Good As We Think It Is?
No, it’s better.
Seriously, when something that I paid for it doesn’t work is annoying when something that I choose to use doesn’t work is somewhat my fault, I think that’s the difference.
Like anything else, can be, depending on your needs.
I’m annoyed when things don’t work. I’m even more annoyed when something can’t be made to work.
I find the first kind of annoyance much more ephemeral.
I think about this a lot, and my take is that Linux is waaayyy better if you have perfect or close-to-perfect knowledge of how the operating system works and what software is available. Similarly, I think an argument can be made for Linux being better if all you need is a web browser and you’re not using really unusual hardware.
Where things fall apart is for people who have very specific needs that are complex, even if they only need it 1% of the time, and they don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it with the power-user tools available. Microsoft has spent decades paying developers to handle these edge cases and ensuring GUI settings discoverability.
At the same time, schools and workplaces have taught people the design language of Windows, and the network effect of having so much of the world’s end-user PCs running on Windows means that there are vast resources available targeted at people without technical knowledge. At this point, for better or worse, Microsoft’s design language is the global default for non-technical people.
If a person never has to touch a setting because all they need is a browser, they don’t hit any friction and they are happy. If they need to do even one thing that requires them to dig into settings or touch the terminal, the difference from Microsoft’s design language is enough for that one frustrating experience to give them a bad taste in their mouth about Linux as a whole.
At the same time, schools and workplaces have taught people the design language of Windows, and the network effect of having so much of the world’s end-user PCs running on Windows means that there are vast resources available targeted at people without technical knowledge. At this point, for better or worse, Microsoft’s design language is the global default for non-technical people.
People forget that this was purposeful, too.
Why did Microsoft not do really do anything about pirated Windows in the 1990s?
Because they were banking on the network effect of everyone being used to their operating system. It’s part of why they started essentially giving it away in the modern era to end-consumers.
It worked.
I use mint btw
Chad
Just this morning I tried to make Outlook on my work laptop to open on startup. I have to find and add a shortcut of Outlook, buried somewhere in the machine, to the startup folder, buried somewhere else in the machine. The startup apps settings menu was just an eclectic list of programs and is of no use at all.
With Mint on my home machine I just go to startup programs settings menu and I can add whatever I want just by pointing it to the right program. It just works.
WIN+R , “shell:startup” in future by the way.
The other list you saw is programs that have added thier own AutoRuns registry keys.
I’m actually kinda surprised that functionality isn’t in the new task manager yet. You can toggle on and off basically all startup items from there, but not add stuff.
XP-7 had this right with a folder in the start menu for startup items, just drag a file or shortcut there and it runs on startup.
Thing is, a well configured Linux system will just work, and continue to work for the foreseeable future. You have zero guarantee of this with Windows.
After being in tech for like 30 years, i’d say that every OS sucks, but the way they suck and the intensity of said sucking is very much not the same across them. Linux VERY MUCH has issues, yes, but most of the time they’re in your power to diagnose and fix, in Windows the main troubleshooting advice has remained mostly the same across decades, the 3 R’s, Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat, because many times you just don’t know and CANNOT know what went wrong.
I’m in IT too. Recently discussed with the help desk team that we should probably spend less time troubleshooting issues with only the affected device and just re-imaging it.
I am not a massive fan of this since sometimes the fixes are kind of interesting but they take far too long to get to while working around MS’s hidden walls. Mean while our Linux servers and clients are usually pretty damn easy to troubleshoot, documentation is readily available, not to mention it makes sense…
You forgot Read. As in read answers.microsoft.com. And then just give up
Yep, because there’s always the same conclusion there: reinstall Windows.
Linux is obviously very good, but you are right, we give Linux a pass sometimes because we ‘build’ it. We tend to overlook its flaws because we want it to be better than the competition.
I’ve recently had an upgrade fail to the point of a reinstall, a folder that I can’t share between two users on the same laptop, and shutdown buttons on two computers that disappeared. If those problems happened on Windows, I’d be really annoyed, but because they happened on Linux, I just fixed them and carried on.
It depends on what you’re using it for. Elaborate multi monitor setups? Starting a web server? Controlling a robot? A car’s ECU?
Linux isn’t a specific platform. Linux the kernel is a generic kernel that can be used and tuned for virtually any hardware. GNU/Linux the OS is also a generic OS that can be customized to work for variety of use cases. The most popular desktop Linux OSes are still very generic. Most of them aren’t built to be power efficient on laptops for example. Yet we know Linux can be very power efficient on variety of purpose-built mobile hardware.
Windows on the other hand was built from the start to be a desktop OS. The desktop and later on laptop use cases have always been primary. To the point of making other use cases more difficult. The same is true for macOS. So when you see them performing well in some desktop-related use cases where Linux might struggle a bit, it’s no surprise. If enough of us wanted it to be better at that, we could make it happen. If enough of us wanted macOS or Windows to do something Apple or MS didn’t, tough luck. So it’s just a matter of priorities and resources.
This is the best description I’ve seen.
It gets old hearing the “Linux is better, Windows sucks” mantra.
They’re different things with different use cases.
I despise Linux for a desktop, it’s an awful experience, because it hasn’t been developed/targeted for what I need to do, and I don’t have the time to play fuck-fuck with distros to work something out - I have other shit to do.
Like build and manage Proxmox/TrueNAS boxes, which are… LINUX! Because this is where Linux shines, as purpose-built solutions.
Kinda, however Linux is always better in one regard - we can change it and it generally serves the needs of its users since its users build and change it. Windows and macOS on the other hand serve the needs of Microsoft’s and Apple’s major shareholders and only in part of their users to the degree they can get away with. The goal is always gaining and retaining market share while extracting the most value from the users - money, data, etc.
If enough of us wanted a sleek, uber smooth desktop that has all UI bases covered, we could totally do it. We just don’t give enough shit and we’re content with what it is. Case in point, I know multi-monitor support isn’t amazing, so I buy a bigger monitor and use more windows. 🥹 Personally I’ve been content with the mainstream desktop Linux UX since 2012-14. You won’t see me digging into features in GNOME or Wayland.
