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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.
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
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.
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.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
I wish I could do that, but CGNAT makes ipv6 the much preferred option for a lot of things.
But it’s good to know that this might be the cause…
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.
Yeah, I run Linux as my main OS and am able to say that it’s not ready to go mainstream, biased as fuck
It’s telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn’t, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It’s because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won’t face those problems in the first place on Windows while they’ll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn’t a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can’t tell what OS they’re using in the first place) and the solution doesn’t come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with “don’t just trust random people”.
The “What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!” argument falls apart when you realize that it’s not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you’re trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don’t even need to know that it has a terminal.
There, happy?
You can’t bullshit me man. I ‘ve been using solving peoples’ issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won’t see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends’ pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Sounds like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair because I’ve never had issues installing AMD drivers on Windows 10, never had Windows update issues and so on.
Maybe you would be better off getting a iPad.
I’ve used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready
On Linux I’d have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn’t user ready
Yeah, Linux was ready long ago
you know, I’m begining to think this whole “readiness” idea is completely arbitrary. The same people who today complain about linux’s supposed difficulty, were just fine using their home micro-computer in the 80’s. If you ask me, the only people who are defining what “ready” means, is Microsoft’s marketing department.
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.
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.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
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.
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
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 think you guys have hit the nail on the head. So much of the Linux argument has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with what people already know.
Everyone forgets the bugs and crashes they’ve always had to deal with even exist, because they become background noise. Then they change to a new OS and might run into completely new “roadblocks” and cry about how broken and useless the OS is even though their new problems are just as minor (or more so) than the problems they left behind.
In reality, any OS is a complicated piece of kit. The more you do with it, the more likely you are going to run into something that does something you don’t expect - and the more tech literate you believe yourself to be, the more likely you think the OS doing something you don’t expect means it is broken.
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
Last year with Ubuntu.
Installed it on an old laptop. Booted once then never again.
Installed windows. Worked like a charm.
This is Ubuntu, the OS that makes all the decisions for you like windows.
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.
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-adminThen in the location bar type:
admin:It’ll prompt you for your password and then:
You’ve given me instructions that require terminal use, your argument is invalid. If it doesn’t either work out of the box or is immediately fixable without going into the terminal, then it’s not ready yet.
if installing a plugin and typing something into the admin bar requries a terminal then every password prompt on windows is also a terminal.
I’m not making an argument, I’m telling you how to fix your problem.
Even if the instructions required terminal use, you’re on Linux. You’re not going to make it very far if you confuse having to use the terminal with a failure in the software.
Regardless, literally none of what I said requires you to use the terminal. It requires you to install a specifically named software package and type 5 characters into the Dolphin bar (note, the picture).
Counter arguments are not allowed on Lemmy. Especially this topic. It’s non negotiable and you will always be wrong or downvoted for being right
Ok, I’ll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn’t work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.
The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don’t have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.
Bazzite is your answer in most cases imo. It’s the most functional distro Ive ever used
I love how you’re getting downvoted. Kind of says it all
My assumption for the downvotes is that it’s a pretty new (~1 year) and niche (gaming-oriented) distro, and largely irrelevant to your issue.
I don’t understand how it’s irrelevant? The drivers work great and it’s a solid distro that doesn’t have the issues of package updates breaking your pc without a way back easily.
To me it fixed every issue that I had with Ubuntu /shrug
They can downvote if they want, it’s just internet points. I still recommend bazzite
I guess that info not having been explained earlier maybe? I’d never even heard of Bazzite, and I’ve recently been looking up what new distro options are out there.
Fwiw bazzite itself is new but it’s just built on top of Fedora and is really stable. I have only had one issue with kernel panic on boot but rolling back was as easy as picking my version before the last update. Was fixed in less than a day
I’ve heard of issues connecting to Eduroam a few times on Linux, but I just don’t get it.
I’m on Debian with KDE Plasma, and it was very much plug-and-play when connecting to Eduroam. What issues did you have?
I had this issue, using pop. It just would not connect without specifying some parameters (I can’t remember which, domain or something and a few others). I had the same problem on Android, with the same solution.
Ah yeah, that’s just what you need to do to connect to Eduroam on anything, since you need to authenticate via your institution.
On windows, I only had to enter username and password.
And was your username <name/ID>@<domain>?
Because that’s the same thing as entering the name/ID and domain separately. It’s just put into a different field.
This is the information I had to specify when I connected from Linux and Android:
Security: WPA2 Enterprise/802.1xEAP Encryption/EAP: PEAP EAP Phase 2 authentication: MSCHAPv2 CA certificate: <domain>
That is in addition to a username and password I had to create via the university’s website. On Windows, username and password sufficient.
“Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?”
“WTF is a computer?”
Everything’s computer!
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…
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.
And Active Directory
Kinda but … they go together, and Active Directory is more or less LDAP+Kerberos with a sprinkling of standardization on top.
I don’t think Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, whatever is “ready yet” either. operating systems are always in development. There are things I can do on my linux machine that I can’t do on my windows machine, and vice versa.
Nah…windows 2000 was ready…windows 7 was ready. The enshitification of everything since has had made everything “not ready”.
The end goal of every modern product is to shove ads down your throat. I’ll eat a little bit of pain from Linux to avoid that.
If you want to see what linux was like 15 years ago try installing OpenBSD lol
Is there a use case that makes openBSD desirable? I’ve heard of it but don’t know the main selling point
Simplicity in all the good and bad ways. They also claim to be more secure but I’m not sure if that really applies anymore.
Many security-related things started as an OpenBSD project, like openssh. They don’t shy away from making drastic decisions for the sake of quality. For instance, in 2014 when they noticed their bluetooth stack or bluetooth as a concept sort of sucked, they didn’t rewrite it. They removed it. I don’t think it has been rewritten yet.
Wait, so no Bluetooth is better than bad Bluetooth?
That seems to be their position, yes.
Wow
The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.
I’ve been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.
There are also just a lot of personalization options that just aren’t there, particularly for power-lite users, because Linix power users use the terminal for everything.
Like, heaven forbid you want a full featured, advanced file manager or something, but aren’t interested in learning bash scripting…
you want a full featured, advanced file manager or something
Which means you are shit out of luck in windows, but comes by default in Plasma. Go figure.
Windows File Manager is superior to any linux file manager I’ve tried. I have tried switching to Linux many times and it’s really great, except the damn file managers, which always ends with me switching back to Windows. I just ended my last run with Linux Mint as my daily driver for 3 months. I really enjoyed it and had it configured just the way I wanted. But the file manager(s) just isn’t mature enough, so I caved in, again, and moved back to Windows. Oh well, maybe next time will be the one.
You can’t be serious? People buy other file managers because the Windows one sucks so bad. I would know, I purchase our software.
I’m not saying windows file manager is perfect and there isn’t better alternatives. But for my work flow, I haven’t found any linux file manager that fits the bill.
What file manager are you using, and what features does it have that makes it the right fit for you?
Wow, so many wrong comments. My parents using Linux laptops for 10 years (which i give them second hand when i buy a new one). Now i set up NixOS with auto updates, and never needed to touch it again myself.
Do your parents never need/want to download anything?
If you mean documents, they do it with phones.
If you see this meme and think “well actually, I had a really difficult time last time I tried to install Linux” - did you ask for help? That’s what the internet is for.
did you ask for help? That’s what the internet is for.
And wait 3-5 business days for whatever menial problem
It’s almost like people have gotten really used to instant gratification and it’s not reasonable. A certain amount of figuring it out should be expected.
It’s almost like people have gotten really used to instant gratification
Being able to work is not “instant gratification”. People need it to be able to afford to live, and often in doing jobs that are directly essential for the life or quality of life of others. Incredibly out of touch take imo
I’m obviously going to be downvoted for this, but the second you ask me to use the terminal is the second the OS is not ready.
Last week I reinstalled Windows after trying MintOS. I have a 54" Ultrawide screen monitor and I wanted the windows to snap in 3 sections.
I spent a few hours in terminal trying to install something after trying everything in flatpak. Windows 11 split screens out of the box. It can even tile. You can even use hotkeys to snap left and right.
In order for normies like me to switch, you have to make the OS at as easy to use as Windows. Don’t make us use terminal like I’m on DOS.
I think you want KDE. I’m using KDE on vanilla EndeavourOS and it snaps windows just fine. Hotkeys work too, just slightly different (super + page up instead of up arrow to maximize).
I will admit In have not tried KDE. I have tried popOS and Ubuntu outside of MintOS. Does it snap into 3 or 4 sections? I’ll give it a try if it does.
It is the most ‘Windows-like’ of the mainstream desktop environments. I don’t usually snap into quadrants but you can, here’s an example of how that would look in KDE.
This is exactly what I am looking for. Thank you .
