Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are "if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout".
Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn't quite there. This wasn't a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.
I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
I found several form or reddit posts indicating there was so setting. I kind abandoned the whole thing once I found several pieces of software are no longer releasing deb files and are using some kind of flatpack that wasn't working. I'm completely ignorant of current linux, but I can't help but feel like it was easier to manage back in 2008 when I daily drove it.
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
What do you mean by installation quirk? Having a GPU and needing a driver?
That seems pretty common to me. I also know people interested in PC gaming who are also low skill and I certainly wouldn't recommend Linux to them (only exception being the Steam Deck).
More like to them its either 'does work' or 'doesnt work'. If they ever had a running system they'd most likely never change anything and end up breaking the gpu driver.
For the most part I'd say installers succeed automatically installing drivers too (or are preinstalled in the laptop case)
i've supported end users in homes and small business for over twenty years. yup. for the most part, they're dumb as bricks. they can do the things they've learned through repetition or have been taught to them (often repeatedly), but stray off that well-worn path and they're completely clueless. when i ask them to look at the icons next to the clock on their desktop--a full half don't even know where the clock is on the screen, even though it's there, like, all the time. and if i gave each of them a blank pc and a bootable usb with (any) os installer, i'd guess that maybe 1 out of 50 could get it booted up and installed--and that'd only be if the pc auto-booted to that usb and started the installer after seeing no boot files on the internal storage.
Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
"It doesn't work."
"OK, what does it say on the screen."
"I don't know."
Like, they can read. I've seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven't seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like "hey, we need to install something, is that fine?" they can't parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.
So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question "Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No" is an unsurmountable obstacle.
And lest you think this is just end users and non-tech people: I have gotten the same sort of responses from system admins for major companies when I try to walk them through something.
I’d argue that most people, including the ones who administer systems, don’t know how computers work. They’ve learned some things by rote, sure, but beyond that they’re helpless.
Oh, but we haven't talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody's happy.
I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you're doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it's honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.
The folks who know enough to know they need processes aren't the problem. If you give them instructions they'll follow them and things will be okay.
It's the folks who don't know that they need processes who are the problem. The folks who, after having walked them through something ten times, ask you to do it. They see an error message like "TCP connection timeout" and have no idea where to start looking, except to send me an email so I can tell them that they probably have network issues.
I agree: The fact that it works at all is astounding.
It's not, though. Some of the people I'm talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that's not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can't.
There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they're not wrong.
I'm now hearing of people coming into the work force that don't know how to use "a computer" and want to do all their work on iPads. It's purely anecdotal, but the person telling me the tale was saying this person wasn't going to make it through their probation period for this reason alone.
It wasn't even a technology company. A finance firm or something.
A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine
I can only see it being the case if there is an implicit assumption these people are already familiar with Windows. If we remove that assumption, I can see it going either way, but it's not even remotely "definitely more likely to confuse".
The Windows market share has wavered between 90 and 70% over the years.
I don't know that you can ignore that assumption.
It depends on the application anwyay. My last set up for a non-techie was a Samsung Android tablet with a keyboard cover. It's now harder to get that person on either a Windows or Linux computer.
To be fair, most people in the workforce were never trained on the likes of Microsoft Teams. Learning this for most people takes a little bit of fucking around and taking notes of certain buttons while you were doing things the way you are used to.
I know most people don't seem to have the ability to look through menus and identify the thing closest to what they want to do. I think software might be more difficult to use now, too - the trend for "clean" design means that usability and discoverability goes out the window.
I think it's also that people aren't encouraged to explore. A bit of clicking around and eyeballing the options you do have can go a long way. I had to teach myself how to use and exploit Open shift this way lol
I enjoy Linux, I'm even suse certified for what that's worth, but even I have to admit that there is a difference between a computer that will turn on and compute with Linux and a computer that has all of the correct drivers and works correctly in Linux.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
And most users don't even notice the issues - I feel lime the bar has really become can I click on, enter password and open a web browser, a bar which limux has surpassed for decades
Though most linux users probably also scare away the layman with the hacky stuff we got going on lol
You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
That's manufacturer support. Not Windows or Microsoft. Try installing any discrete graphics card under Windows on arm. It's a nightmare. Installing them under Linux on arm can be very temperamental too, but it is a better experience than on Windows
I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
I'd argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you've made the guy's point. That's already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
Yeah I think it’s a similar problem to federation. Yeah it’s confusing at first and the fact that it’s often worth it and that that’s actually a sign of it being good and resilient to bad stuff that standard users do dislike doesn’t mean you keep them.
I think there’s however room for a linux based tightly compacted desktop distro. If it’s treated as independent and there’s easy ways to do everything that terminal does outside of terminal (and most importantly default to that) you could probably gain some share. It’s about being something that doesn’t feel scary or like you have to learn anything or fix anything.
Yep, that was my point. There's nothing fundamentally alien to using desktop Linux for most tasks when it's standardized and preinstalled, you see that with the Raspberry Pi and Steam OS and so on. The problem is that people like to point at that (and less viable examples like ChromeOS or Android) as examples that desktop Linux is already great and intuitive and novice-friendly, and that's just not realistic. I've run Linux on multiple platforms on and off since the 90s, and to this day the notion of getting it up and running on a desktop PC with mainstream hardware feels like a hassle and the idea of getting it going in a bunch of more arcane hardware, like tablet hybrids or laptops with first party drivers just doesn't feel reasonable unless it's as a hobbyist project.
Pop OS tried to do this with reasonable success. System76, the developer, sells their own line of laptops with Pop OS preinstalled. And like other Ubuntu forks, it's easy to use enough for just about anyone to understand.
TECHNICALLY Google did the same thing with Chromebooks, but the Linux community doesn't like to acknowledge that ChromeOS is a Linux distro because it sucks so hard.
I'm not splitting hairs, I'm calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that's a bad take.
Here's how I know it's a bad take: if I come over to any of the "what Distro should I use first" threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you're probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.
But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that's your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?
No, I'm not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.
But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that's already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It's literally right there in my first response to you.
We really need to stop pushing these outdated and over complex distos like Ubuntu also. It's 50/50 if they can find what they want via Google and find out how to add a ppa that is going to be dark magic, and the almost 100% all that added stuff to do basic stuff like game is going to go belly up when the new upgrade comes along. Rolling releases get a bad rep for some reason but they shine for users that don't want to search for new software that's going to work and not break/require intervention with every upgrade. /rant
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
The Windows Hello camera enumerates under Linux as just another webcam that activates the flashing LEDs when it turns on (I've found a number of neat uses for this, including having a ridiculously low gain IR camera that I can just use for whatever and have what would be a surprisingly good emulation of the Wii sensor bar for use with Dolphin if it weren't constantly flashing on and off), and there is software (Howdy) for using it to sign in. Unfortunately, signing in with your face of course precludes using your password for decryption, meaning that after you start some applications you'll be prompted to type your password anyway to unlock your system keyring, and perhaps more importanty SDDM isn't smart enough to interface with fprintd/howdy properly and doesn't even try to activate the biometric sensor until you type something in the password box.
(Also, hilariously, because of how I set it up initially to accept my face instead of a password for sudo, I couldn't configure it to check whether the terminal was remote, so when I ssh'd in and tried to sudo, it turned on the hello camera however far away that was and looked for my face, only prompting me for a password after facial rec timed out.)
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but ... I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer "does" is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like CreateWindowEx() in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.
The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we're disqualifying it because "it requires you to install a package", then we also consequently:
Add things like "print stuff", "display graphical applications", and "play audio" to the list of "things Linux can't do"
Disqualifies Windows from "natively executing" any .NET applications (a Microsoft-built first-party framework), since .NET applications require you to install .NET.
Edit: Actual response. You took time to type all that out, I should at least say why I disagree.
WINE is a compatibility layer. A translator. It helps a non-native language speaker speak the native language. The whole reason WINE exists is to make a non-native executable execute outside of its native environment. Even if the code is very functionally similar to something like .NET, the function of WINE is to enable non-native code to run as though it were designed for Linux. Downloading WINE doesn't suddenly make those .EXE files be retroactively designed with Linux in mind. It's still not native code.
You're correct in that it is a compatibility layer - And I'm not disagreeing with that. Also to be clear: Not just arguing to argue or trying to start a fight, mind you. I just find this to be an interesting topic of discussion. If you don't find it to be a fun thought experiment, feel free to shoo me away and I'll apologize and leave it alone.
That said, we appear to only be arguing semantics - Specifically around "native" having multiple contextual definitions:
I am using 'native' to mean "the instructions are executed directly by the CPU, rather than through interpretation or emulation" ... which WINE definitely enables for Windows executables running on Linux. It's the reason why Proton/DXVK enables gaming with largely equal (and sometimes faster) performance: There is no interception of execution, there is simply provision of API endpoints. Much like creating a symlink in a directory where something expects it to be: tricking it into thinking the thing(s) it needs are where it expects them to be.
However, you are using 'native' to mean "within the environment intended by the developer", and if that's the agreed definition then you're correct.
That's where this becomes an interesting thought experiment to me. It hits me as a very subjective definition for "native", since "within the intended environment" could mean a lot of things.
Is that just 'within a system that provides an implementation of the Win32 API'? If so, WINE passes that test.
If I provide an older/fixed/patched version of a DLL (by just placing it in the same directory) to fix an issue caused by a breaking change to a program that is running on Windows, is that no longer native?
Or is it just ultimately that the machine must run the NT kernel, since that's where the developer intended for it to run?
Does that make sense? I hear a statement like that and I find myself wondering Which layer along the chain makes it "native"? - I find myself curious at what point the definition changes, in a "Ship of Theseus" kind of way.
It seems to me that if we agree that the above means "running in WINE is not native", then we must also agree that "anything written running for .NET (or any other framework, really) is not native", since .NET apps are written for the .NET framework (Which is not only officially available for Windows, mind you) and often don't include anything truly Windows-specific. Ultimately, both are providing natively-executed instructions that just translate API calls to the appropriate system calls under the hood.
I hope that does a better job of characterizing what I meant.
You clearly know more about this than I do, and you've thought a lot about it. Your points deserve a better response than I can give at this time, but I wanted to acknowledge that at least. I also wanted to say you aren't pedantic and I'm sorry I said that. You spent time and thought on making a good conversation and I wish I had been more engaging with that instead of trying to be correct. Thank you for still conversing instead of arguing even after I was less than perfect of a conversation partner. I hope in the future I see more of your comments. Have a really nice day.
I appreciate your acknowledgement - and I commend the humility it takes to write a comment like this! No hard feelings at all, and I hope things are pleasant for you as well.
It's folks like you and interactions like this that make Lemmy a platform worth engaging on.
I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.
Open source software is free as in freedom, not as in price. Open source software does tend to cost nothing, but it's not illegal to charge money for it.
What you pay for with Redhat is mostly a support package and very long-term kernel patches.
I really like RedHat's product line as a way to move a business towards the FOSS ecosystem. I really wish they hadn't done their enshitfitcation of their products, but even after that they are still better than most enterprise alternatives.
I make sure to include OpenEL as the spec we are building on instead of RHEL. I like the architecture, just not the liability their non-foss policies put on us. We got hit by HashiCorps license change too, rough bit of time to be honest.
Who are you looking at? Suse and Rancher are two I am keeping an eye on.
We are an MSSP so it's a bit different. Since we can offload license costs to customers and as long as they prefer having this party support and it's not losing us bids we are ok.
But we have been looking at Ubuntu and CentOS previously, the main issue is how to replace Satellite.
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.
But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
When i deactivate wol, it sleeps just as it should. It goes to sleep after a while and only comes back if i hit a button on the mouse or a key on the keyboard.
I'm not sure what else could be conflicting with wol, but the sleep function only goes haywire when it's enabled.
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn't wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn't perfect still but it's way better than windows was.
Because Bluetooth is a separate hardware module than the CPU. "Sleep" is just a low-power state for the CPU, one of the "S" states. Other modules on the motherboard are still powered and can handle their own tasks, like Wake on LAN received at your network card, or keeping your RAM hot with your running programs.
Right. And it does so with minimal battery loss like any competent hardware in the 2020s. Most of the x86/64 world (Intel really) just can’t figure this concept out apparently. I’ve had a total of 1 PC laptop that did and it’s an AMD Ryzen 5000. That thing sleeps beautifully. I blame Intel for most of the weird issues people see.
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue
*I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
It's not just Nvidia, though... I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn't supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Just had a similar experience with Bitwarden. Works flawlessly on every device, but the linux vesion doesn't integrate with the browser (the app not the browser extension). I also had to do some special tinkering to make it accept self-hosted vaultwarden with self-signed certificate, because electron apps on linux don't use the internal's system trusted cert store ? Nah, you have to install certutil, and add it to a "sql database"... ⋮/
And i'm just starting as a linux power user, and it already begins to show why linux isn't "there" right now... But I don't see it as something bad, quite the opposite, linux is supposed to be flexible, open source, a playing ground for nerds... But people's desire to overcome GAFAMS monopoly slowly turns linux into something I hope won't hurt the community or make them part of GAFAM acronym...
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
Yeah and I'm sure they'd respond "well it doesn't matter WHY, the average person just needs blah blah"
Yeah, ok sort of fair I guess, but imagine how good Linux would get if all the big software and hardware companies standardized on some support for Linux! It's this good now, despite the challenges outside the control of Linux devs. Fuck you, Nvidias all around.
Honestly don't see why all the big software devs wouldn't hugely benefit from leaving behind Microsoft's bullshit. It wouldn't be great short term for adoption time, but afterwards they're good!
This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
What wasn't working that you couldn't use Linux? If it was wine then I totally understand and it sounds like you're a media editor or something in which case you're stuck with Mac or Windows. I personally just always dual boot and run Linux 99% of the time and only open windows when I really need it, which is almost never.
Sure, but there's a big difference between the support existing within the Linux architecture and it not. Almost every issue in the parent comment could be fixed without any input from Linux developers at all.
But fundamentally Linux and open source are ethically orthogonal to for-profit software. The fact that big software companies don't prioritize Linux is in some ways a feature, and is why we actually have the proliferation of high-quality open source alternatives. I doubt Blender or GIMP would exist if the proprietary leaders in their fields offered Linux versions from the beginning, especially if they were free.
There are people in the thread talking about how all Linux needs is for big software companies to ditch Microsoft and get with Linux, but that would never happen as they're imagining. Big for-profit tech would always put itself into a walled garden. What needs to happen is that the few big unassailable tech stacks that keep people chained to the proprietary products need real open replacements -- namely GIMP needs to get its redesign finished and figure out the last few features it needs for professional parity, and we need a real AutoCAD competitor. I think we already have good DAWs and professional audio through JACK/Pipewire, and there's probably a couple others that I'm forgetting... But if Photoshop and AutoCAD alone were not viewed as unreplaceable, that would be a massive boost in the number of people who could use Linux for their jobs.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
That's very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that's no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.
Yeah.... this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
Saying running anything out of the box is "impossible by design" on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven't succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I'd agree but at least you'd have leg to stand on.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there's almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it's not always clear what you're supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn't geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn't always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It's a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works "out of the box" better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It's pretty solid.
That's honestly super confusing to me. Not just experientially from using Ubuntu but also just I've never heard it described that way. It's definitely near the top of list of out-of-box friendly distros.
Graphical installer. Full App Store UI. Desktop versions that come with lots of common software. It's hard to get much simpler than that.
Truly, if anything, I would consider desktop Ubuntu to be somewhat power user unfriendly.
Ubuntu I would say is a terrible desktop OS full stop, and all the derivatives also, as well as Debian. They are fine for a server where someone wants stability of package change above all else, but as a desktop we should NOT be pushing new users to these distros full of outdated software when easier to use rolling distros are available, where adding anything new isn't adding a repo that is almost certainly going to break things on an OS update.
Ubuntu takes 6 monthly cuts from Debian Testing, adds some in house stuff puts them through QA and performs a release.
Linux Mint is produced by Cinnamon devs, similar to KDE Neon. They take the last Ubuntu LTS, remove many of the in house additions, add the latest Cinnamon desktop and release.
Cinnamon got upstreamed into Debian to make the process easier.
Yes, that is why I included Debian and the Ubuntu spins (Mint/etc.). They all run outdated software, and I don't think in 2024 they are a suitable desktop OS for someone new coming to Linux. They were fine back in the day when things were not moving as fast, but now, well running one of them is a disservice to the user IMHO. Unless your only using your system to make spreadsheets using an outdated version of LibreOffice and don't mind that your 6+ months behind the rest of the world.
Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
The person is correct in this isn't a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $user
To ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
That's a letter U problem. I can administer Linux a bajillion times easier than windows, because I do it for a living, and haven't touched MS since Server 2010. Also Docker in Windows is LOL. You're leveraging Linux to shit on Linux. Lets do that all in IIS and see how you feel.
Pointing out that you find it easy because you do it for a living isn't a very good counter to their point - most people do other things besides Linux for a living
He's.... not wrong though. I mean look, deploying things is somewhat inherently the task of professionals and enthusiasts. To say that deploying things on Windows is easier than Linux is going to be really really hard to defend. Not to even mention the docker layer.
I guess I can’t deny your experience is your experience, but again if you’re running Docker on Windows, Windows is just running a Linux VM or WSL to do this. And I can assure you that any serious person running containerized workloads for production type deployments will be doing this on a Linux host.
Docker has pretty good docs for installation on the major Linux distros, so without more info I can’t really say much else.
Permissions on Windows are notoriously insecure. By default, literally everything is executable in Windows. Docker is very much the same (insecure by default; in Windows).
Your permissions problems in Linux are a feature, not a bug. You just didn't understand what you were doing when you tried to get it set up. Otherwise you wouldn't be complaining about permissions errors. That's the very definition of complaining about your own ignorance.
I get that the point of this thread is something along the lines of, "running Docker images is a breeze" but I think a more relevant point would be, "Docker images run better" (in Linux).
Docker images will run much faster and more efficiently in Linux. It's just how it was meant to work. WSL doesn't work like WINE: it's actually an emulator and will always be slower than native Linux.
As you said, I am perfectly aware that in an ideal world security would be on lockdown. How it behaves on Linux is how it SHOULD work. That doesn't change the main point that you can't hit the ground running with Docker containers in Linux.
Yeah, I started working for a company with a lot of Windows servers two years ago and I still can't wrap my brain around them. I've been a Linux sysadmin/sysarchitect for 20+ years and I'm still completely lost how to get Windows to much of anything. I usually don't have to do much on those servers, but when I do its StackOverflow that's really administering them. It's because I lack foundational knowledge about windows and also because I'm fine not having that knowledge.
Hold on, did you just low-key state that running Linux docker containers on Windows ends up giving you the best of both worlds? Run Linux server software in docker containers, run client software natively on Windows?
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn't have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every "PC" game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.
Power management on certain chips is simply better than anything Linux has to offer (AMD Zen+ mobile for instance)
Modular driver architecture with drivers that aren't complete jank to manage and install. A lot of people see this as a pain point, but in reality it's not such a bad thing, especially nowadays.
This is a given, but as lots of stuff runs on Windows (namely older games), you can only really make stuff for Windows on Windows. So if you need to develop Win32 software, you really have to use Visual Studio for proper development. Mingw cross compile exists, I know, but that's never going to be as good.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
Nowadays I'd say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don't even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.
Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.
I'd also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.
You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it's just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
Nah I don't run anything related to graphics. Mainly clang compiler. Speaking of native speeds I mentioned, sysbench gives me pretty much the same results in WSL and in native Linux, with a margin of error here and there.
ITT: Many legitimate use-cases, and people shitting all over them.
This highlights one thing that Windows undoubtedly does better, and that's community support. With Windows and OSX things tend to just work, or to have limitations that people just accept. Linux becomes a lifestyle, when some people just want a tool that does a thing.
Run normal games like fortnite and warzone, and run other games not through steam without needing to install proto tricks and get the right dependencies for every damn game
Windows saves me prescious time to do other things.
I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does.
I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go
Full screen "please wait while we get your system ready for you" narrated by Cortana, and if you disable Cortana you still have to wait the amount of time it takes for the audio to complete. Like an invoiced video game narrator with unskippable lines.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I checked the Creative Cloud manager/installer for Adobe apps doesn't work on Wine, because it uses the windows system webview that Wine hasn't fully replicated. Only pirated copies or installations copied from a Windows machine work.
Fair enough, that might be true. I bought the creative suite back in the day for $2700 and those motherfuckers changed the whole business model like a year later, rendering that investment useless, so after that I vowed to never pay a red cent to adobe again.
Those aren’t drop-in replacements. GIMP for example doesn’t have anything close to Photoshop’s content-aware fill capabilities, I don’t think Krita does either.
Multiple screen RDP support. It is the only thing keeping me on Windows for my personal desktop. I RDP into my work laptop from my desktop so I can have all 4 of my monitors, but keep my systems separate.
The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect.
Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.
Podman container completely closed off. ChromeOS shows that everything is possible on Linux (their Linux integration is a VM, running a container with the Distro, and the apps are displayed over wayland on the local host)
Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
Running the desktop version of turbo tax. I will try again with wine or some other things. I did toy with the though of a vm on Linux that's running windows ten, but not sure.
Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works.
Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn't valid.
Edit: to clarify, i'm exclusively using linux since 2008 and i'm not 'afraid of editing config files', downvoting me doesn't fix the problem. I'm also not fond of fixing your header files for them to compile.
Despite not answering your question correctly, I have something where Windows is superior to macOS:
When you start a Windows program and want the program window to fill your screen completely, you just have to drag the window towards the upper edge of the screen and the window fills the whole size of the screen.
On macOS there is not such an option. You have to drag the program window manually to the full size of the screen. Although there is a full-screen mode (green button in the upper left of the window), when activated, the window is in full screen, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is hidden. However, at least macOS remembers the last size of the program window, so you don't have to drag it to full screen size again.
Windows is definitely easier to install older programs on. Linux is getting better, especially thanks to steam/valve imo, but it's impossible to recommend Linux to just about anyone that's not in IT or interested in tech as everything seems to have a caviat or workaround you have to do to get stuff either working or just limping along. For instance..I installed endeavor on my msi gaming laptop and getting it to use my 2070 card over my Intel graphics was a nightmare for a first timer. I can't recommend it especially when I just wanna game.
Windows has a better initial setup. Often, when installing a new distro I gotta spend a couple of hours installing, troubleshooting and customizing what I need on Linux (even on beginner distros) while on Windows, you just install it, download a couple of apps from the web and restart to catch up on updates.
1.- Make your computer slower and slower every year for no real reason.
2.- Get your files virus infected for not using an antivirus software.
3.- To be fair, get some really cool games.
What sort of crapware? I often hear a lot of lies out of Linux users these days... For a few months last year the rumors of start menu ads were relentless.
I'm quite certain windows has a huge list of problems, but it is quite functional. I build my PC's, though. I've always suspected third party installations are what turn most people off. Like, any HP computer pretty much is going to be trash due to their extra crap.
The largest OS for spyware and monopoly shenanigans is Google's android ecosystem and that's Linux based.
Honestly I don't understand all the Windows hate. Sure it made since back in 2001, but smartphones outshitify anything Windows ever did. The proof of it is that Redmond has been trying to phonify Windows since version 8 so they could be more shitty.
Just because there are other things that are worse, or at least as bad, doesn't mean we shouldn't call put bad behaviour when it happens. And written MS it keeps happening.
Man, I'm with you with being against the windows hate, but you lost me completely at the android hate.
I agree Google sucks, but let's not pretend iOS is better. And yes, I realize Apple loves to tell everyone how much they care, and that they love to exploit the fact android allows third party installations, which can (if you're an idiot) lead to all kinds of problems with viruses.
Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.
if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.
I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are "if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout".
Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn't quite there. This wasn't a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.
I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
Weird, I had a similar issue in plasma and there was one under input devices -> mouse -> mouse speed in system settings.
I'd be surprised if gnome has no equivalent
I found several form or reddit posts indicating there was so setting. I kind abandoned the whole thing once I found several pieces of software are no longer releasing deb files and are using some kind of flatpack that wasn't working. I'm completely ignorant of current linux, but I can't help but feel like it was easier to manage back in 2008 when I daily drove it.
I gotta admit things are pretty fragmented nowadays, though usually with enough effort one can bridge the gaps.
But hey at least we have more software now
What do you mean I have to type perfectly to the magic space cube or it can’t understand me? How the fuck is ‘sudo apt-get update’ English?
Just type the following into the Terminal:
It will fix everything.
LOL
For any Linux noobs watching, NEVER DO THIS.
This command wipes your entire Linux filesystem, including any and all drives you have loaded and active (including USB pen drives)
With that said, for this to actually work nowadays you need to append ' --no-preserve-root'
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
Exactly. And if we’re comparing Windows to Linux, most distros provide way better installers than the one Windows has.
What do you mean by installation quirk? Having a GPU and needing a driver?
That seems pretty common to me. I also know people interested in PC gaming who are also low skill and I certainly wouldn't recommend Linux to them (only exception being the Steam Deck).
More like to them its either 'does work' or 'doesnt work'. If they ever had a running system they'd most likely never change anything and end up breaking the gpu driver.
For the most part I'd say installers succeed automatically installing drivers too (or are preinstalled in the laptop case)
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Generally people are worse with computers than you think.
A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine
i've supported end users in homes and small business for over twenty years. yup. for the most part, they're dumb as bricks. they can do the things they've learned through repetition or have been taught to them (often repeatedly), but stray off that well-worn path and they're completely clueless. when i ask them to look at the icons next to the clock on their desktop--a full half don't even know where the clock is on the screen, even though it's there, like, all the time. and if i gave each of them a blank pc and a bootable usb with (any) os installer, i'd guess that maybe 1 out of 50 could get it booted up and installed--and that'd only be if the pc auto-booted to that usb and started the installer after seeing no boot files on the internal storage.
Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
"It doesn't work."
"OK, what does it say on the screen."
"I don't know."
Like, they can read. I've seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven't seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like "hey, we need to install something, is that fine?" they can't parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.
So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question "Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No" is an unsurmountable obstacle.
And lest you think this is just end users and non-tech people: I have gotten the same sort of responses from system admins for major companies when I try to walk them through something.
I’d argue that most people, including the ones who administer systems, don’t know how computers work. They’ve learned some things by rote, sure, but beyond that they’re helpless.
Oh, but we haven't talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody's happy.
I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you're doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it's honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.
The folks who know enough to know they need processes aren't the problem. If you give them instructions they'll follow them and things will be okay.
It's the folks who don't know that they need processes who are the problem. The folks who, after having walked them through something ten times, ask you to do it. They see an error message like "TCP connection timeout" and have no idea where to start looking, except to send me an email so I can tell them that they probably have network issues.
I agree: The fact that it works at all is astounding.
I find this so frustrating. It's willful ignorance at that point. They get a message and just refuse to read it
It's not, though. Some of the people I'm talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that's not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can't.
There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they're not wrong.
I'm now hearing of people coming into the work force that don't know how to use "a computer" and want to do all their work on iPads. It's purely anecdotal, but the person telling me the tale was saying this person wasn't going to make it through their probation period for this reason alone.
It wasn't even a technology company. A finance firm or something.
I can only see it being the case if there is an implicit assumption these people are already familiar with Windows. If we remove that assumption, I can see it going either way, but it's not even remotely "definitely more likely to confuse".
The Windows market share has wavered between 90 and 70% over the years.
I don't know that you can ignore that assumption.
It depends on the application anwyay. My last set up for a non-techie was a Samsung Android tablet with a keyboard cover. It's now harder to get that person on either a Windows or Linux computer.
I'd say it's definitely going to confuse but so would it if the computer was running windows
That's sobering reading.
95% are below this level. Wow.
To be fair, most people in the workforce were never trained on the likes of Microsoft Teams. Learning this for most people takes a little bit of fucking around and taking notes of certain buttons while you were doing things the way you are used to.
Something I missed first time was
Hopefully, it's better now (based on nothing).
I know most people don't seem to have the ability to look through menus and identify the thing closest to what they want to do. I think software might be more difficult to use now, too - the trend for "clean" design means that usability and discoverability goes out the window.
I think it's also that people aren't encouraged to explore. A bit of clicking around and eyeballing the options you do have can go a long way. I had to teach myself how to use and exploit Open shift this way lol
I just accidentally stumbled across some proof for my looks-over-usability statement:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
That's part of the issue. Unfortunately Linux pre-installed devices are scarce.
I enjoy Linux, I'm even suse certified for what that's worth, but even I have to admit that there is a difference between a computer that will turn on and compute with Linux and a computer that has all of the correct drivers and works correctly in Linux.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
And most users don't even notice the issues - I feel lime the bar has really become can I click on, enter password and open a web browser, a bar which limux has surpassed for decades
Though most linux users probably also scare away the layman with the hacky stuff we got going on lol
You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
Yeah, never had to set a graphics device driver for Android. That always just works.
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple."
...but in truth even that isn't very intuitive 🤷
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary
ppl who know how to use MacOS or Windows should have no issue using those
That's manufacturer support. Not Windows or Microsoft. Try installing any discrete graphics card under Windows on arm. It's a nightmare. Installing them under Linux on arm can be very temperamental too, but it is a better experience than on Windows
That would have been true a decade ago. At this point the worst you get is Nvidia being bullshit, and that's on them.
Except you’re wrong because Android is Linux based and Ubuntu basically fits your criteria
I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
I'd argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you've made the guy's point. That's already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
Yeah I think it’s a similar problem to federation. Yeah it’s confusing at first and the fact that it’s often worth it and that that’s actually a sign of it being good and resilient to bad stuff that standard users do dislike doesn’t mean you keep them.
I think there’s however room for a linux based tightly compacted desktop distro. If it’s treated as independent and there’s easy ways to do everything that terminal does outside of terminal (and most importantly default to that) you could probably gain some share. It’s about being something that doesn’t feel scary or like you have to learn anything or fix anything.
Yep, that was my point. There's nothing fundamentally alien to using desktop Linux for most tasks when it's standardized and preinstalled, you see that with the Raspberry Pi and Steam OS and so on. The problem is that people like to point at that (and less viable examples like ChromeOS or Android) as examples that desktop Linux is already great and intuitive and novice-friendly, and that's just not realistic. I've run Linux on multiple platforms on and off since the 90s, and to this day the notion of getting it up and running on a desktop PC with mainstream hardware feels like a hassle and the idea of getting it going in a bunch of more arcane hardware, like tablet hybrids or laptops with first party drivers just doesn't feel reasonable unless it's as a hobbyist project.
Those things aren't comparable.
Pop OS tried to do this with reasonable success. System76, the developer, sells their own line of laptops with Pop OS preinstalled. And like other Ubuntu forks, it's easy to use enough for just about anyone to understand.
TECHNICALLY Google did the same thing with Chromebooks, but the Linux community doesn't like to acknowledge that ChromeOS is a Linux distro because it sucks so hard.
Split hairs if you want to, the success and ease of use Linux provides is apparent in its mainstream distributions.
I'm not splitting hairs, I'm calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that's a bad take.
Here's how I know it's a bad take: if I come over to any of the "what Distro should I use first" threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you're probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.
But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that's your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?
Notice how I mentioned Ubuntu as well? Talk past it more if you’d like.
No, I'm not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.
But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that's already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It's literally right there in my first response to you.
We really need to stop pushing these outdated and over complex distos like Ubuntu also. It's 50/50 if they can find what they want via Google and find out how to add a ppa that is going to be dark magic, and the almost 100% all that added stuff to do basic stuff like game is going to go belly up when the new upgrade comes along. Rolling releases get a bad rep for some reason but they shine for users that don't want to search for new software that's going to work and not break/require intervention with every upgrade. /rant
That's nonsense.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Setup right it’s a lot faster than passwords. So I guess it automatically wins vs more secure methods.
I didn’t write the rules of average human thought processes.
The Windows Hello camera enumerates under Linux as just another webcam that activates the flashing LEDs when it turns on (I've found a number of neat uses for this, including having a ridiculously low gain IR camera that I can just use for whatever and have what would be a surprisingly good emulation of the Wii sensor bar for use with Dolphin if it weren't constantly flashing on and off), and there is software (Howdy) for using it to sign in. Unfortunately, signing in with your face of course precludes using your password for decryption, meaning that after you start some applications you'll be prompted to type your password anyway to unlock your system keyring, and perhaps more importanty SDDM isn't smart enough to interface with fprintd/howdy properly and doesn't even try to activate the biometric sensor until you type something in the password box.
(Also, hilariously, because of how I set it up initially to accept my face instead of a password for sudo, I couldn't configure it to check whether the terminal was remote, so when I ssh'd in and tried to sudo, it turned on the hello camera however far away that was and looked for my face, only prompting me for a password after facial rec timed out.)
In KDE and I think GNOME the setup is fine. But there are no usb fingerprint readers that work with Linux, at least that you can buy.
I had to scroll this far for a legitimate answer?
I made almost that exact comment in this post. 🤣
You don't suppose the fingerprint thing is a standard API kind of thing though? That was my assumption.
So in other words, you can’t use it in Linux…
Natively run Windows software. Do I win?
that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity
Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?
its mostly goat barn
You misspelled “naivety” lol
Wine’s not an emulator…
That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but ... I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer "does" is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like
CreateWindowEx()in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we're disqualifying it because "it requires you to install a package", then we also consequently:
You're right, you are being pedantic.Edit: Actual response. You took time to type all that out, I should at least say why I disagree.
WINE is a compatibility layer. A translator. It helps a non-native language speaker speak the native language. The whole reason WINE exists is to make a non-native executable execute outside of its native environment. Even if the code is very functionally similar to something like .NET, the function of WINE is to enable non-native code to run as though it were designed for Linux. Downloading WINE doesn't suddenly make those .EXE files be retroactively designed with Linux in mind. It's still not native code.
You're correct in that it is a compatibility layer - And I'm not disagreeing with that. Also to be clear: Not just arguing to argue or trying to start a fight, mind you. I just find this to be an interesting topic of discussion. If you don't find it to be a fun thought experiment, feel free to shoo me away and I'll apologize and leave it alone.
That said, we appear to only be arguing semantics - Specifically around "native" having multiple contextual definitions:
I am using 'native' to mean "the instructions are executed directly by the CPU, rather than through interpretation or emulation" ... which WINE definitely enables for Windows executables running on Linux. It's the reason why Proton/DXVK enables gaming with largely equal (and sometimes faster) performance: There is no interception of execution, there is simply provision of API endpoints. Much like creating a symlink in a directory where something expects it to be: tricking it into thinking the thing(s) it needs are where it expects them to be.
However, you are using 'native' to mean "within the environment intended by the developer", and if that's the agreed definition then you're correct.
That's where this becomes an interesting thought experiment to me. It hits me as a very subjective definition for "native", since "within the intended environment" could mean a lot of things.
Does that make sense? I hear a statement like that and I find myself wondering Which layer along the chain makes it "native"? - I find myself curious at what point the definition changes, in a "Ship of Theseus" kind of way.
It seems to me that if we agree that the above means "running in WINE is not native", then we must also agree that "anything written running for .NET (or any other framework, really) is not native", since .NET apps are written for the .NET framework (Which is not only officially available for Windows, mind you) and often don't include anything truly Windows-specific. Ultimately, both are providing natively-executed instructions that just translate API calls to the appropriate system calls under the hood.
I hope that does a better job of characterizing what I meant.
You clearly know more about this than I do, and you've thought a lot about it. Your points deserve a better response than I can give at this time, but I wanted to acknowledge that at least. I also wanted to say you aren't pedantic and I'm sorry I said that. You spent time and thought on making a good conversation and I wish I had been more engaging with that instead of trying to be correct. Thank you for still conversing instead of arguing even after I was less than perfect of a conversation partner. I hope in the future I see more of your comments. Have a really nice day.
I appreciate your acknowledgement - and I commend the humility it takes to write a comment like this! No hard feelings at all, and I hope things are pleasant for you as well.
It's folks like you and interactions like this that make Lemmy a platform worth engaging on.
You windows
Windows does what Nintendon't? Wait, that's not it...
Do I lin?
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.
I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.
Spy on users
Ubuntu and DNF chuckles
"popularity contest" is an opt-in on Debian. It's not malicious, and it's not for financial gain, but it is in a loose sense spying.
Spying on people OOTB without them knowing*
Play lots of AAA games
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton's advancement and the steam deck's popularity, too.
Yeah, and I don't give two shits about the publishers who think they need to seize control of my machine for their idea of fairness.
Selling copies for 200$
Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
Can they legally do that?
Of course, red hat is the biggest linux enterprise vendor
Nothing in the license prevents you from selling it.
Open source software is free as in freedom, not as in price. Open source software does tend to cost nothing, but it's not illegal to charge money for it.
What you pay for with Redhat is mostly a support package and very long-term kernel patches.
Well the more you know. Thank you stranger!
obviously not, they bribe the police in helicopter
As another commenter noted, I guess you haven't met red hat
They sell support more than anything
They have a fair amount of features, like satellite
I really like RedHat's product line as a way to move a business towards the FOSS ecosystem. I really wish they hadn't done their enshitfitcation of their products, but even after that they are still better than most enterprise alternatives.
Yeah we are looking to replace them ourselves tbh
I make sure to include OpenEL as the spec we are building on instead of RHEL. I like the architecture, just not the liability their non-foss policies put on us. We got hit by HashiCorps license change too, rough bit of time to be honest.
Who are you looking at? Suse and Rancher are two I am keeping an eye on.
We are an MSSP so it's a bit different. Since we can offload license costs to customers and as long as they prefer having this party support and it's not losing us bids we are ok.
But we have been looking at Ubuntu and CentOS previously, the main issue is how to replace Satellite.
For Kubernetes we run on k3OS
RHEL would like a word ;)
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:
You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
Run Microsoft Excel
I'm going to go with "be normal".
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a
.cand a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.
Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it's an adventure each time.
On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience
The wake on LAN option is an absolute joke too.
Leave computer for a while > goes to sleep
Come back in the morning > computer is on and room is warm
No magic packet was sent, it just decided it was going to wake up and then ignore the "sleep after X minutes" setting and just remain on.
Get your shit together Microsoft...
When i deactivate wol, it sleeps just as it should. It goes to sleep after a while and only comes back if i hit a button on the mouse or a key on the keyboard.
I'm not sure what else could be conflicting with wol, but the sleep function only goes haywire when it's enabled.
i hate Linux (users) as much as the next guy but my windows pc wouldnt stay asleep if i gave it an od of ambien
it wakes up randomly throughout the night fairly often
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn't wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn't perfect still but it's way better than windows was.
I think that's a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Mac really does not do this well. You're ostensibly just not noticing it.
I dislike apple as a company but I have about 19 years of experience very much to the opposite of this claim.
Why bluetooth on M1 Mac stays on while machine sleeps?
Because Bluetooth is a separate hardware module than the CPU. "Sleep" is just a low-power state for the CPU, one of the "S" states. Other modules on the motherboard are still powered and can handle their own tasks, like Wake on LAN received at your network card, or keeping your RAM hot with your running programs.
Right. And it does so with minimal battery loss like any competent hardware in the 2020s. Most of the x86/64 world (Intel really) just can’t figure this concept out apparently. I’ve had a total of 1 PC laptop that did and it’s an AMD Ryzen 5000. That thing sleeps beautifully. I blame Intel for most of the weird issues people see.
I'm not familiar with that (completely different) topic
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
True, but that's more due to Nvidia's stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
It's not just Nvidia, though... I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn't supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Mullvad has a decent Linux GUI, but you have to install their service. On the positive side, it works with and without systemd.
Just had a similar experience with Bitwarden. Works flawlessly on every device, but the linux vesion doesn't integrate with the browser (the app not the browser extension). I also had to do some special tinkering to make it accept self-hosted vaultwarden with self-signed certificate, because electron apps on linux don't use the internal's system trusted cert store ? Nah, you have to install certutil, and add it to a "sql database"... ⋮/
And i'm just starting as a linux power user, and it already begins to show why linux isn't "there" right now... But I don't see it as something bad, quite the opposite, linux is supposed to be flexible, open source, a playing ground for nerds... But people's desire to overcome GAFAMS monopoly slowly turns linux into something I hope won't hurt the community or make them part of GAFAM acronym...
I also had a similar experience with Nordvpn.
That's one the commercial software providers, not Linux
I'm guessing NordVPN?
True, I really do think Linus was right when he said "fuck Nvidia" but sadly it's still a point against Linux :(
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.
We got people pointing out software made by companies that go out of their way to make sure it won't work on Linux as if that's because Linux can't.
Yeah and I'm sure they'd respond "well it doesn't matter WHY, the average person just needs blah blah"
Yeah, ok sort of fair I guess, but imagine how good Linux would get if all the big software and hardware companies standardized on some support for Linux! It's this good now, despite the challenges outside the control of Linux devs. Fuck you, Nvidias all around.
Honestly don't see why all the big software devs wouldn't hugely benefit from leaving behind Microsoft's bullshit. It wouldn't be great short term for adoption time, but afterwards they're good!
That is a great point.
Can Linux mess with my default browser preferences every other time it applies updates? I'm pretty sure it can't.
Shit you got me there
This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
_ /\ _
What wasn't working that you couldn't use Linux? If it was wine then I totally understand and it sounds like you're a media editor or something in which case you're stuck with Mac or Windows. I personally just always dual boot and run Linux 99% of the time and only open windows when I really need it, which is almost never.
These aren't Linux issues that Windows does better. It's just companies that decided their software shouldn't run on Linux.
Well, then Windows is better at getting third party producers to support it. Same problem, same result, different wording.
Sure, but there's a big difference between the support existing within the Linux architecture and it not. Almost every issue in the parent comment could be fixed without any input from Linux developers at all.
But fundamentally Linux and open source are ethically orthogonal to for-profit software. The fact that big software companies don't prioritize Linux is in some ways a feature, and is why we actually have the proliferation of high-quality open source alternatives. I doubt Blender or GIMP would exist if the proprietary leaders in their fields offered Linux versions from the beginning, especially if they were free.
There are people in the thread talking about how all Linux needs is for big software companies to ditch Microsoft and get with Linux, but that would never happen as they're imagining. Big for-profit tech would always put itself into a walled garden. What needs to happen is that the few big unassailable tech stacks that keep people chained to the proprietary products need real open replacements -- namely GIMP needs to get its redesign finished and figure out the last few features it needs for professional parity, and we need a real AutoCAD competitor. I think we already have good DAWs and professional audio through JACK/Pipewire, and there's probably a couple others that I'm forgetting... But if Photoshop and AutoCAD alone were not viewed as unreplaceable, that would be a massive boost in the number of people who could use Linux for their jobs.
That's how business works. What company is going to dedicate a bunch of resources to make 1% of their market happy?
Right. I mean, macs used to be the bees' knees.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
That's very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that's no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.
Yeah.... this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
Saying running anything out of the box is "impossible by design" on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven't succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I'd agree but at least you'd have leg to stand on.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there's almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it's not always clear what you're supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn't geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn't always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It's a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works "out of the box" better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It's pretty solid.
Ubuntu is notoriously user unfriendly???
That's honestly super confusing to me. Not just experientially from using Ubuntu but also just I've never heard it described that way. It's definitely near the top of list of out-of-box friendly distros.
Graphical installer. Full App Store UI. Desktop versions that come with lots of common software. It's hard to get much simpler than that.
Truly, if anything, I would consider desktop Ubuntu to be somewhat power user unfriendly.
Ubuntu I would say is a terrible desktop OS full stop, and all the derivatives also, as well as Debian. They are fine for a server where someone wants stability of package change above all else, but as a desktop we should NOT be pushing new users to these distros full of outdated software when easier to use rolling distros are available, where adding anything new isn't adding a repo that is almost certainly going to break things on an OS update.
You realise Debian is the base distribution?
Ubuntu takes 6 monthly cuts from Debian Testing, adds some in house stuff puts them through QA and performs a release.
Linux Mint is produced by Cinnamon devs, similar to KDE Neon. They take the last Ubuntu LTS, remove many of the in house additions, add the latest Cinnamon desktop and release.
Cinnamon got upstreamed into Debian to make the process easier.
Yes, that is why I included Debian and the Ubuntu spins (Mint/etc.). They all run outdated software, and I don't think in 2024 they are a suitable desktop OS for someone new coming to Linux. They were fine back in the day when things were not moving as fast, but now, well running one of them is a disservice to the user IMHO. Unless your only using your system to make spreadsheets using an outdated version of LibreOffice and don't mind that your 6+ months behind the rest of the world.
I think they certainly have a place in the server world, but as a desktop new users should be looking at the EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Fedora, Nobara, Ultramarine, or even SUSE Tumbleweed.
Do you not know that mint is Ubuntu based?
Erm I'll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
The person is correct in this isn't a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $userTo ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
What happened the one time you were more frustrated?
Playing Final Fantasy XIII. That legitimately made me cry with how frustrating that game was to play.
Ah ok. Never played it, probably won't bother! :-)
That's a letter U problem. I can administer Linux a bajillion times easier than windows, because I do it for a living, and haven't touched MS since Server 2010. Also Docker in Windows is LOL. You're leveraging Linux to shit on Linux. Lets do that all in IIS and see how you feel.
Pointing out that you find it easy because you do it for a living isn't a very good counter to their point - most people do other things besides Linux for a living
He's.... not wrong though. I mean look, deploying things is somewhat inherently the task of professionals and enthusiasts. To say that deploying things on Windows is easier than Linux is going to be really really hard to defend. Not to even mention the docker layer.
I can run a Linux docker container on Windows and it just works. When I run it on Linux it is constant permission and access issues.
I guess I can’t deny your experience is your experience, but again if you’re running Docker on Windows, Windows is just running a Linux VM or WSL to do this. And I can assure you that any serious person running containerized workloads for production type deployments will be doing this on a Linux host.
Docker has pretty good docs for installation on the major Linux distros, so without more info I can’t really say much else.
Permissions on Windows are notoriously insecure. By default, literally everything is executable in Windows. Docker is very much the same (insecure by default; in Windows).
Your permissions problems in Linux are a feature, not a bug. You just didn't understand what you were doing when you tried to get it set up. Otherwise you wouldn't be complaining about permissions errors. That's the very definition of complaining about your own ignorance.
I get that the point of this thread is something along the lines of, "running Docker images is a breeze" but I think a more relevant point would be, "Docker images run better" (in Linux).
Docker images will run much faster and more efficiently in Linux. It's just how it was meant to work. WSL doesn't work like WINE: it's actually an emulator and will always be slower than native Linux.
As you said, I am perfectly aware that in an ideal world security would be on lockdown. How it behaves on Linux is how it SHOULD work. That doesn't change the main point that you can't hit the ground running with Docker containers in Linux.
What?
I used Windows from 95 onward. Docker on Windows is second class compared to running on Linux.
That being said, I don't think it's that people cannot learn to use something like Ubuntu, it's that if they don't need to, they won't.
Good enough, is fine for the vast majority of folks. And I think Windows 11 proves that.
Like I had to learn OSX for my work computer, which I ended up loving. But that took me a week or so to get the hang of.
Yeah, I started working for a company with a lot of Windows servers two years ago and I still can't wrap my brain around them. I've been a Linux sysadmin/sysarchitect for 20+ years and I'm still completely lost how to get Windows to much of anything. I usually don't have to do much on those servers, but when I do its StackOverflow that's really administering them. It's because I lack foundational knowledge about windows and also because I'm fine not having that knowledge.
IIS is not the same as Docker. Sounds to me you are shitting on IIS for the sake of trying to prove a point I wasn't trying to make.
This goes into my next point. Linux users are toxic as hell. They are elitist snobs who shit on newbies because they have years of experience.
Hold on, did you just low-key state that running Linux docker containers on Windows ends up giving you the best of both worlds? Run Linux server software in docker containers, run client software natively on Windows?
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.
But really it's not Linux's fault. All games could (probably) run on Linux if someone ported them
Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn't have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every "PC" game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.
Restore the screen resolution when an old game crashes
Blue screen. Embed advertising and spyware in everything.
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
Reinstall Candy Crush.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
Play all my laptop's speakers
Change your audio device seemingly at random.
Play games on GeForce NOW at a higher resolution than 1080p. :-/
Spy it's users
Linux can totally do that. Even if your distro doesn't package it, you can always install spyware from source.
Yeah boi, just run this command with sudo and I'll happily collect your keylog!
Redstar OS would like a word with you
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
Nowadays I'd say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don't even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.
Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.
I'd also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.
You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it's just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
Nah I don't run anything related to graphics. Mainly clang compiler. Speaking of native speeds I mentioned, sysbench gives me pretty much the same results in WSL and in native Linux, with a margin of error here and there.
Except for the Wacom tablet. Goddamn.
Except in the install process, which makes it pretty much unusable...
Play Netflix, etc at 4K.
ITT: Many legitimate use-cases, and people shitting all over them.
This highlights one thing that Windows undoubtedly does better, and that's community support. With Windows and OSX things tend to just work, or to have limitations that people just accept. Linux becomes a lifestyle, when some people just want a tool that does a thing.
i tried producing music with linux native daw and plugins via yabridge. pain in my stupid ass.
Run normal games like fortnite and warzone, and run other games not through steam without needing to install proto tricks and get the right dependencies for every damn game
Windows saves me prescious time to do other things. I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does. I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go
Literally everything easily with much less effort
upgrade my jabra headset firmware
Run fusion 360... Easily.
VBA support is non existant on Linux
Full screen "please wait while we get your system ready for you" narrated by Cortana, and if you disable Cortana you still have to wait the amount of time it takes for the audio to complete. Like an invoiced video game narrator with unskippable lines.
Validate Epic James's greedinessRun Fortnite or Valorant.Use the map editor for C&C Generals
Oh look, another command & conquer comment from me. How surprising.
Photoshop and Lightroom.
You can run both, but especially Lightroom is a bit slow especially when using RAW files. LR is slow even on Windows :'(
Correct me if I'm wrong, but last I checked the Creative Cloud manager/installer for Adobe apps doesn't work on Wine, because it uses the windows system webview that Wine hasn't fully replicated. Only pirated copies or installations copied from a Windows machine work.
Fair enough, that might be true. I bought the creative suite back in the day for $2700 and those motherfuckers changed the whole business model like a year later, rendering that investment useless, so after that I vowed to never pay a red cent to adobe again.
Gimp/krita and darktable?
Those aren’t drop-in replacements. GIMP for example doesn’t have anything close to Photoshop’s content-aware fill capabilities, I don’t think Krita does either.
Multiple screen RDP support. It is the only thing keeping me on Windows for my personal desktop. I RDP into my work laptop from my desktop so I can have all 4 of my monitors, but keep my systems separate.
The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect. Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.
I feel like android did that first, but I'm not sure.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sandboxing+on+linux&ia=web
Podman container completely closed off. ChromeOS shows that everything is possible on Linux (their Linux integration is a VM, running a container with the Distro, and the apps are displayed over wayland on the local host)
There simply is no good GUI integration
Play call of duty, for the better or the worse.
Flash a code plug to one of my Motorola radios.
Run MS mail servers
Take hours to update every 2nd Tuesday. Run like squat on old/low end hardware. Require an add blocker to stay safe.
Literally the only thing keeping me from switching:
Act as a host in Parsec. If hosting ever becomes available for the Linux release, I'll switch.
Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine https://moonlight-stream.org/
I switched to moonlight, because it works better for my use case. But parsec worked better on a bad connection for me. Also parsec is owned by unity.
Running the desktop version of turbo tax. I will try again with wine or some other things. I did toy with the though of a vm on Linux that's running windows ten, but not sure.
roblox
literally the only thing that took a minute.. i think i might have it now with vinegar. so i guess even thats kinda off the list
Works with vinegar perfectly.
All too true.
Install stuff without asking and then force reboot?
Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works. Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn't valid.
Edit: to clarify, i'm exclusively using linux since 2008 and i'm not 'afraid of editing config files', downvoting me doesn't fix the problem. I'm also not fond of fixing your header files for them to compile.
Have the Year of the Windows Desktop.
Which ones?
Do you mean in opposition to window or screen capture?
I feel like this is something you could add to a feature request on github.
winamp smoothly.
Booting from VHD. Booting from RAM. WimBoot Mode.
Despite not answering your question correctly, I have something where Windows is superior to macOS:
When you start a Windows program and want the program window to fill your screen completely, you just have to drag the window towards the upper edge of the screen and the window fills the whole size of the screen.
On macOS there is not such an option. You have to drag the program window manually to the full size of the screen. Although there is a full-screen mode (green button in the upper left of the window), when activated, the window is in full screen, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is hidden. However, at least macOS remembers the last size of the program window, so you don't have to drag it to full screen size again.
Make Edge the default browser on its own
Boot every day and expect everything to just work
Plug a random device in and it just works
drivers for lots of printers. no fuss gpu drivers. zero computer knowledge required.
Have a process crash and task manager still works. Being so much more robust than KDE while not as child-like and reduced as GNOME.
Serious question: Can Linux run all my smart devices (tvs, lights, plugs)?
Depends how those are connected. But check out Home Assistant.
I've got home assistant running on a linux machine that lets me control/monitor my smart devices [0] from my mac, windows, linux, and android phone.
[0] list of smart devices:
Yes
With voice control?
Yes
Linux, browsers, and hardware accelerated videos on the web don't go along well out of the box. Which is a total shame.
Linux is great, windows is great. Why not both? They both do things great
Windows is definitely easier to install older programs on. Linux is getting better, especially thanks to steam/valve imo, but it's impossible to recommend Linux to just about anyone that's not in IT or interested in tech as everything seems to have a caviat or workaround you have to do to get stuff either working or just limping along. For instance..I installed endeavor on my msi gaming laptop and getting it to use my 2070 card over my Intel graphics was a nightmare for a first timer. I can't recommend it especially when I just wanna game.
inverted (color) mouse cursor / pointer
Play Siege. So Linux wins again.
Playing some of the best games I own since XP/7 era forever. They just refuse to run on Linux.
Windows has a better initial setup. Often, when installing a new distro I gotta spend a couple of hours installing, troubleshooting and customizing what I need on Linux (even on beginner distros) while on Windows, you just install it, download a couple of apps from the web and restart to catch up on updates.
Manage app startup and profile settings
Force me to upgrade my hardware.
use 100% of the cpu (so efficient)!!!
Go fuck itself.
1.- Make your computer slower and slower every year for no real reason. 2.- Get your files virus infected for not using an antivirus software. 3.- To be fair, get some really cool games.
Boot a customized kennel tailored by the user.
Any of these commands https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/sysrq.html
Boot into another kernel while running https://linux.die.net/man/8/kexec
*coughs in snap*
Ubuntu ∈ Linux distributions ⇒ Linux can do that
Just the easiest ones. Also, please remember that M$ was forced to make edge removable.
Source: windows and linux admin.
What sort of crapware? I often hear a lot of lies out of Linux users these days... For a few months last year the rumors of start menu ads were relentless.
I'm quite certain windows has a huge list of problems, but it is quite functional. I build my PC's, though. I've always suspected third party installations are what turn most people off. Like, any HP computer pretty much is going to be trash due to their extra crap.
The largest OS for spyware and monopoly shenanigans is Google's android ecosystem and that's Linux based.
Honestly I don't understand all the Windows hate. Sure it made since back in 2001, but smartphones outshitify anything Windows ever did. The proof of it is that Redmond has been trying to phonify Windows since version 8 so they could be more shitty.
I'm not a Linux fan boy by any means, but you've at least got to give it a fair deal...
Saying Linux sucks because of Google's Android is the equivalent of saying you hate all vegetables because Brussel Sprouts suck.
I think it's more like saying you hate vegetables because one particular farmer grew a crappy brussel sprout
Just because there are other things that are worse, or at least as bad, doesn't mean we shouldn't call put bad behaviour when it happens. And written MS it keeps happening.
Man, I'm with you with being against the windows hate, but you lost me completely at the android hate.
I agree Google sucks, but let's not pretend iOS is better. And yes, I realize Apple loves to tell everyone how much they care, and that they love to exploit the fact android allows third party installations, which can (if you're an idiot) lead to all kinds of problems with viruses.