Some sort of hidden, concealed, clandestine internal QoS implementation in Windows. Reserving a portion of network bandwidth for high priority traffic sounds like a good concept, but I don't like the fact that this is so hidden (I've been working with computers for many years and I've never heard of it until now), and that the mechanism to determine the priority of a packet is unknown.
Nevertheless, some unknown implementation can have bugs and things can go wrong and there's nothing you can do about it, short of "rebooting" or d̷o̶w̸s̸i̷n̴g̸ ̴t̶h̸e̷ ̸h̵a̵r̵d̷ ̵d̷r̶i̴v̶e̷ ̵w̶i̴t̸h̷ ̸̞̺͠h̵̺͙̎̍o̸͔͠ͅḻ̷̀̇y̵͚͍̎ ̷͉̅̅w̸͎̔a̷̧̫̒́t̶̼̉̓ę̵̾͗r̶̫͑͑ ̴̣̿͒(̷͙̎a̸̬̺͝͝n̸̞̓̓d̴̬͌̍ ̸͇͕͌͝s̷̡̯̓͝u̸̡̳̇͝b̴̳͜͠s̷͍̘̽ë̵̜q̷̝͐̄ȕ̵̞̐e̷̲̠̐́ń̴̨̙͝t̸̛̬͝l̶̮̔͠y̴͕̪̑͝ ̵̖̆ḃ̴̪̟u̶̢͓͑̌y̵̜̤͌̏i̵̦̋ň̴̨͚̀g̸͓͑ ̴͍̬̽à̶͜ ̴͇͔̓n̴̬͂͜ì̷̢̛̯c̴̤̖̈́e̶̼̫̐̊ ̵̹̏͝f̸̙̀̑r̷̪̩͆͆e̸̤̫͛͋s̷̢̙̏h̷͇͔́ ̸̭̆͝N̷̰͗͛͜V̶͇͒̚M̸̟̍͜ě̷̛̟ ̸̢̞́͝a̷͙͔͒͒n̷̻͇͝d̸̘̥͌̾ ̴̜͓͑p̷̬͑͊ŭ̸̮̏t̸̲̀t̴̡͚̽í̶͎͓̑n̴͕̘̒̈́g̴͓̰̓͝ ̵͓̎a̴̻̼͗ ̷̦̍̈́s̷̥̅̈l̴̝̂e̴̞̅͊ḛ̴̊̅k̷͚̕ ̵̛̼̬͗D̴̻̾̽e̵̙͂̊b̷̝͘ī̵̢͇ą̵̂n̴͖̑ ̶̼̚h̴̼͂͑e̷̲͆̆a̵̡̋d̸̢͔̈l̶͕̍̍e̸̛͕̙̒s̶̞͔̀͠s̸̯͖̕ ̵͍̦̈́̉ ̸̨̨̓i̸̙͖͗̌ņ̶̯̍s̸̡̖͗̇ṯ̷́̒ä̵̦́̎l̶̼̄l̵̨͊̊ ̴̳͑͗ó̵͎̅ǹ̴͈̚ ̷͖͊͝i̷̠͇̊t̷̼̞͒͘)̵͎̤̔͌
Yeah, if I were Microsoft I would implement spyware in a way that is least intrusive to the user experience. Prioritizing the telemetry data using QoS would only incentivize users to find ways to disable the telemetry, while providing no benefit to Microsoft. What's the use for them receiving the telemetry data slightly faster, it's much more important to them that it arrives at all
Well not spyware per se but over the years they found over and over bugs which are really just highways left open in your system ready to be exploited. But to be honest that's not limited to windows.
It's not, and in a vacuum I don't think anyone would mind. It is the fact that it is concealed that is really shitty.
"It reserves bandwidth for high-priority tasks such as Windows Update over other tasks that compete for internet bandwidth, like streaming a movie"
As much as I'd like to keep my system up to date (and I really do), if I'm watching a movie then that is my priority. Any task I'm currently using the bandwidth on, should be considered my system's priority. This is akin to rebooting the computer when it determines it is necessary, with the user having little control to stop it; it's intend isn't malicious, and it is meant to protect the user, but all it achieves is upsetting the user and make us find ways around it or turn it off completely.
If you're using an "unofficial" license, it's probably normal to disable updates and afferent services.
I remember from years ago when I was modding Windows XP installations with nLite to try to purge all the unnecessary bits and install some useful stuff. Superfetch was this annoying service that supposedly ruined online gaming due to lag. :)
Prefetch and superfecth are just obnoxious services that waste disk space. You can safely disable them, there is no downside to not using prefetch or superfect on modern SSDs. On regular spinning drives, yes, they did make loading programs a bit faster.
Superfetch was keeping an index of file relationships in RAM and pre-loading files you were probably going to use next. It didn't ping your network at all, but it could easily eat up a ton of disk resources and RAM. It was really only an issue on old 5400rpm laptop HDDs from what I remember.
99.99% of the Windows user base doesn't give the tiniest semblance of a shit about any of that. Hell I run Windows on my gaming pc still and have never had cause to do any of that.
I'm going to be honest with you, as often as this has been memed and for as long as I have been using Windows on my work computer, I have never once been forced to restart on the spot by an automatic update.
I'm sure those who have will be quick to reply but at this point I'm 90% confident it's a loud minority.
I've seen an entire factory shut down for hours because two critical Win10 computers tried and failed to update. It's never an issue until it becomes one.
Plus a failed update is the whole reason I nuked my C: drive and switched to Manjaro (now running Arch, put down the pitchforks).
Neither of those options were available. It was written by a third-party for some old .NET Framework version, and the server and GUI components were written as a single application. Putting it on a server wasn't an option either because the application's GUI was constantly used for the management of assembly machines, and other applications were used for monitoring and administrative stuff.
If you had been there, you'd know why this was a low-priority risk. That place was bleeding from a thousand wounds. At least this had some redundancy, for all it was worth in the end...
(edit) I actually contributed to that software, even though it's not open-source! I managed to nail down an issue where loading a project file using one locale would result in a crash, but not in others. The .NET stack trace was printed to an XHR response's payload and I used that to locate a float.ToString() call where CurrentCulture was passed as the cultureInfo instead of InvariantCulture, so depending on the computer's locale, it would try to parse CSV data either using a decimal dot or a decimal comma. I mailed this to the maintainer and the fix was released within the month.
The operating system is called "Windows Server". It doesn't necessarily have to run on a mainframe. It has the regular Windows GUI (with a few differences, the first you'll notice is "Cntr+Alt+Del to log in") and can run regular Windows programs.
I work in IT. Windows 10/11 Enterprise is still a bad choice. If it's a mission-critical system and you must choose Windows, pony up the cash for Windows Server.
The difference between Windows Enterprise and Pro/Home editions is that there are features on it that make my job easier, but it's still the same shitty operating system under the hood. Windows Server is much more robust and reliable in my experience. Still shit, but slightly less so. It's designed to run on machines with 24/7 uptime. Windows Enterprise still expects you to regularly restart it for updates and upgrades. That's alright since we can just set Susan from Finance's computer to update at 03:00. It's not okay if that computer controls the entire factory.
I'm saying it's never happened to me. Not once. Zero times. Zero is less than one.
Normal Windows updates don't take an hour long. Give me a break. The ones that do are the version upgrades. That's like the equivalent of a distro upgrade.
That happened in 2013 with random laptop they gave me. I kid you not it took that long, could have been a bug somewhere in the OEM, never cared enough to find out.
But my experience is just as real as much as yours.
Correct. But who can tell the difference beforehand between a normal update and an abnormal one? The problem is Windows tends to hide those details. I've sat on support calls where a server needs to be rebooted for some configuration change, and Windows insists on applying updates because hey, you're rebooting anyway, so what if it takes 1/2 hour to do this thing that should take 5 minutes...
Sure Windows gives you warning, but after a while it FORCES you to install, even if for whatever reason that new branch bricks your computer. I had a good 6 months of that where every time my computer got shut off, it would force the update and fail like 40 times before it finally let me revert and use my computer. There was no way to tell it to STOP UPDATING
Open services.msc, disable the windows update service, and set the start type to disabled. The go to C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and delete the entire folder.
Ive not had "must update on the spot right this very second," but ive had countless, "we will update the second u power off or attempt a restart. If you try and restart into ur linux partition, we will somehow ensure u fail to boot right up until u got thru with our forced update." Which also sometimes goes hand in hand with, "oops, i was supposed to update, but i shit myself instead. Youre going to need to try again at least once or twice. Dont worry, whether the update goes thru or not, itll only take a maximum of 90 minutes."
Windows can fuck its facehole thru its ass as far as its auto updates are concerned for all i care.
Near 25 years Linux desktop user, only use Windows when for example helping out family, need to do crap on windows at work, that sort of thing. I've seen this so SO many times, especially when you want to shutdown or reboot now, but WAIT! THERE IS MORE! Windows is updating without asking for the next 30 minutes, don't shut down, screw your planned date. This most have happened more than 30% of the small amount of times I touched windows and it taught me to stay the f away from that stuff, don't want to touch it with a 10 feet pole
It's more like when you shut the laptop down, then turn it on only to be greeted with such message. So, I also haven't seen much of those back when, but only due to the unhealthy habit of maximizing uptime.
You'd normally use a software raid implementation these days, and Linux has a number of those. But yeah, dual booting can expose some quirks and filesystems and disk setup in general is one of the most prominent.
The point I was trying to make is that if you ever want to do something that is not covered with an out of the box install, it's typically far harder to do in Linux than in Windows (although my ~15 years as a windows sysadmin probably bias my opinion)
Windows is turning into a telemetry nightmare because about 10 years ago Microsoft figured out that they could sell ad space and monetize user data, so I'm trying to get off the platform before my LTSC install hits EOL. But I have to admit it's a hard path.
(although my ~15 years as a windows sysadmin probably bias my opinion)
So basically: it's not any harder in linux, but you have more than a decade of muscle memory in windows, so it's harder for you.
That's like saying "Japanese is a less efficient language than English, all of the words are different, and when I want to say a word, I have to learn it first, but in English I just know the words! English is so much better! (My 30 years speaking english probably bias my opinion)"
Things are certainly different, but its hard to compare which is "harder" for the advanced use cases.
There's no shame in having long term experience with one platform and having that shape your expectation about how a solution should look.
But in your example raid controller driver was covered in an out of the box install in windows. If it wasn't you'll still need to do pretty much the same.
Also there was a couple of weird steps in your linux list like switching DE to run a couple of CLI commands and disabling AHCI for some reason.
Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.
I'm actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.
For advanced, power user stuff, I find Linux to be much friendlier and faster. Just being able to do everything in a Terminal instead of having to mess around with a mix of inconsistent GUI menus in the two different control panels, gpedit, regedit (which is an entire headache by itself), a mix of cmd and Powershell (and whatever Windows Terminal is) is just so much less of a headache.
Also I find things easier to script in Linux compared to Windows.
Not to mention the mess that is Windows Update, which doesn't even upgrade third party software, and takes a long time to actually do the updates. Package management is a godsend. Windows has chocolatey and winget, but those are poor substitutes.
And I say all of this as someone who is technically proficient in both.
This is kind of the same situation I'm in, but I'm not quite as tech savvy and I'm more resistant to learning linux even though I'll still probably want to migrate over at some point.
What I don't really understand is, or, what I understand, but I suppose I find mildly amusing, or confusing, is how many criticisms I've seen of windows that kind of just don't apply to LTSC as much, if at all? It's kind of to the point where I wonder why anyone would really use any other version.
Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn't. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux, but it's also hot garbage that's software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux
That is what I actually meant.
I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.
That's why you don't do RAID at all on a daily driver. You make/buy a NAS for that kind of thing. Maybe just RAID1 in hardware, cuz that's easy to set up and generally just works, even with low end hardware solutions.
Beware of the W̷̞̬̍̌͘͜ĭ̴̬̹̟͕̒̆̈́n̸̢̧̙̈́̅̂̆̕͜ͅd̵̟̟̪͎̀̀ő̴̼̺̺́̐̂͘w̵̨͊̀s̵̡͎̭̊ ̸͔̬͔̜̊́̈́̌̈́ͅŬ̴͉͚̳̌̉͘͝p̸̼̅̆͐̃̑d̸̜͂ǎ̵̛̯̏͝ť̷̰é̸͇͝ as it can screw up/overwrite your other bootloader completely.
Kinda sucks, when you've got a meeting/work and you find out that forced update made your system unbootable/partially unbootable and you now get to live boot in and go fixing the EFI partition manually, in the CLI.
That happened to me once and that's when I decided feature parity was less important than a reliable system that "just works" for getting things done on a schedule. (I removed windows completely, in case that wasn't clear)
Anyhow, make sure you install windows to a separate drive that can't see any others during the windows install, then will keep the bootloader separate.
I ran into similar issues before. My plan was to install Linux on a separate M.2 so Windows won't interfere and manually boot the OS I want to manually.
After a while, you'll hit a point where parity is impossible going the other way.
I'm running a striped partition and a mirrored partition with only two drives, and using an SSD to bcache the whole thing. I've even got snapshotting set up so I can take live backups.
I have no idea where to start with that setup on Windows.
I had a hell of a time just trying to get Mint to write to an external drive, including unmounting and remounting the drive countless times trying to get it to mount as rewritable (adding it as a mount option wouldn't work in terminal or in "Disks"), it would just refuse to let me write to it, I could still read everything fine. I finally quit, got a second drive, backed all my stuff up and reformatted the first one, which Mint now sees and writes to just fine despite being configured exactly the same way it was before.
That is a massively condensed story, and if I ever have to look at fstab again I might just have an aneurysm. Y'know how hard it is to write things to an external drive in Windows? You plug it the fuck in.
Anyone who says Linux is ready for the masses is deluding themselves. It's fine for nerds, people who like to work on their computer, but it is absolutely not ready for people who like to do work on their computer. Not when something as simple as "yes I'd like to save this to an external drive please" turns into a days-long rabbithole of bullshit that culminates in me buying an extra 8TB drive off Amazon.
I mean, you don't HAVE to do any of that stuff in Windows, it's just helps a bit.
I'm sure there are plenty of windows horror stories. But almost every Windows computer I've had in the last decade, both custom and OEM, has worked pretty well out of the box.
And almost every Ubuntu computer I've had over the last decade has had problems that weren't trivial to fix.
I like Linux, but when people compare these problems like they're the same just are missing the point.
The reality is, for 98% plus of windows users, NONE of that matters. MS could give a shit about tech. nerds that want to de-bloat, reduce resources, install crazy niche thingyawidget....
Pretty much everyone in this community is not their target.
Car analogy! You are car guys running custom block modified street racers shitting on electric cars...
Reminder that Group Policy settings are disabled in home versions, and even some of the registry entries for updates are missing. To get a full package of windows with all the options you have to pay like $400 to $600 for their LTSC or maybe some of their Enterprise versions. Honestly, if anybody pirates Windows, then definitely pirate the LTSC.
Though, yes, I do recommend LTSC as well (high seas and all that, since they cost a small fortune) vs. a Pro license. It's basically what Windows users were used to, a Windows install that's stuck in time, no new features, only security updates.
Oh, and no store and all that app crap, the only app installed is the settings app and there is no way to install any other store app (well, there is, but it's complicated and I would do it only of there is absolutely no other way).
I don’t think many dual booters actually pay for Windows licenses.
You probably got a license when you bought that laptop you got in 2010. And carried it forward. Just because Microsoft didn't charge for the upgrade path to get to windows 11 doesn't mean you didn't pay something for the license.
No, I actually haven't bought a single laptop in my entire life. All my laptops are give/throw aways. The newest I have is a 3rd gen i7.
Did someone actually pay for a Windows license when he/she bought the laptop? Can't say for sure, but yes, most probably. For a Win7 license most likely since that was what was sood back then. Now I have LTSC and Linux on all of my PCs.
But me personally? No, I have never paid for a Windows license. All of the installs I have ever done for myself were pirated. From Win98 and XP onward.
Utilize what. They're most probably Win7 Home licenses that could be exchanged for a Win10 Home license at a certain point in time, but not any more... and I wouldn't use a Home license anyway, it's crippled AF.
Why did I go through the hassle of installing enterprise and doing a bunch of PowerShell crap to put the Ms store and Xbox interface in months later when friends pressured me into playing unmodded Minecraft bedrock?
Edit: I remembered I think. It's the telemetry flag that can't be set to 0 in pro even with gpe but can in enterprise, but the stuff to make xbl gaming work probably undermines whatever it does, if it did anything in the first place.
Huh? You only need the Pro version for Group Policy and all the registry settings, and you can get licenses for ~$20 if you buy an OEM license through an authorized reseller.
There's some limitations to the OEM licenses, but I've never run into them.
As far as I'm aware, LTSC just effects the update channel that Windows Update pulls from, with LTSC getting non-critical updates later and for longer after support "ends". Usually you can switch that in the registry.
I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of every windows version, but OEM versions are made to order by manufacturers and that comes with it's own special place in hell that I'm not even going to go into. LTSC has everything with no downsides, Home has Group Policy disabled, that was my comment. Despite your standoffish comment you didn't argue against any of that.
This is just speculation, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft stopped caring about people pirating windows and using licences they shouldn't have. They would rather you use windows as a pirate than not use windows at all.
To anyone downvoting the comment above, you can use windows indefinitely without a key. The only thing that happens is you get some text on the screen (that sometimes goes away for no reason) and you can't change the background. They don't give two f's. They could easily block keys / stop them from working if misused, but they don't care. Same reason why every laptop comes with a license. They put it there because it costs them nothing. They'd rather have market share, than get money upfront. They probably make bank on other things (i.e. the analytics, ads, etc)
Been like that since the 90s really. Microsoft's "secret sauce" is that they never gave a shit about the end users.
They make bank by courting enterprise users: Big companies with hundreds of employees, OEMs, governments, schools, etc.
In recent times they found a way to double-dip by putting in telemetry/data collection/ads/adware -- But before that they just didn't care.
It does help that windows makes the user develop learned helplessness and so by the time they are getting their own computer, they'll want to stay in the windows environment. So they also get the inflated marketshare, which feeds back into their pitch when they are courting those enterprises.
Look at the answer on Microsoft forum. What does "legitimate" mean to you? The fact that the system will work with this key does not mean that you have the right to use Windows legally.
"Windows Reserved Bandwidth" is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time. You can turn it off I guess, if quality of service isn't your vibe.
Windows and Linux are both easy to use... Provided that everything works out of the box.
Once you have to actually start solving problems, Windows really starts to fall down because you have to spend ages looking through settings and perhaps installing tools like bcd editors. Like seriously, the number of places you can manage your microphone settings are insane.
At this point, I think the only people that say Windows is easier are those that have never had to reinstall it or who have been using it since the XP days and haven't realised that it is all learned knowledge.
I certainly think Linux tooling could be improved (a graphical fstab editor would be nice), but I struggle to see how troubleshooting in Windows is any easier than Linux.
That's potentially my biggest issue woth Windows. You aren't actually made to understand what went wrong. Linux will give you lots of information. It can be overwhelming if you're just used to seeing "This app stopped working, wait or close it?", but once you're used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
but once you’re used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
That's the thing right? I'm very much a non-tech person. But Linux error messages are nice and informative to the point that, even if I don't personally know what the fuck they are saying --
-- I can just copy them to my browser search bar. Oh look, someone else had the same issue. And someone who knew what they were talking about presented a solution. Nice, now I can get back to work!
And even when I am forced to troubleshoot on my own, the error messages and terminal logs often give enough of a clue that I can trial-and-error my way into making shit work.
What... you don't like the smiley face and QR code that leads you to a dead link on a rando microsoft website? You sure you need more information other than "Critical Process Died"?
My cousin had an old Dell that had an HDD with that "optane" crap, you know a 16GB NVMe "cache" that allegedly did anything. I was going to pull that out, put in a proper NVMe drive, leave the old hard drive in there as additional space, and install Windows 10.
There are apparently BIOS settings that need to be altered for this to work, and Windows would throw "UNEXPECTED ERROR 0x1C4B332AFE943CE2C4 or something to that effect and wouldn't finish installing. Mind you, you don't get a usable Windows environment, so you have to copy that long string of text by hand into another device to find...nothing. Nearly no results out there.
After awhile of trying to get a functioning Windows install media (which is difficult to do from a Linux machine. Way to go burning that bridge, Microsoft) I eventually decided to put Mint on this thing, which also gave an error. This error read something like "Unable to install, probably because there's a problem with the NVMe storage settings, you may need to disable TLVRQ (or whatever the generic term for Optane was) and try again. See this page in the Wiki for more information." And it gave a link to that page, because of course we're booted into a fully functioning live environment with internet access and a web browser, and it also gave a QR code link to that same wiki page so you could view it on mobile.
Never ever buy combo shit. Remember the DVD reader/CD burner combo crap back in the day? They were good at neither reading or burning anything. Thank god the fully featured DVD burners went down in price and these things died.
Windows 7 was usable. The ten different places to hide settings started with 8 iirc. But I haven't used Windows in almost a decade, so I might be wrong.
No, you're on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn't super pretty if we're all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE's settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn't seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it's still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
My guess is, they had to run it in parallel. So many things relied on the old UI, not to mention run/cmd commands (printui, netplwiz to name a few), that simply just putting modern replacements for those things would have broken every single printer share, user credentials manager, etc., there is out there. So, they decided to run them in parallel. Smart choice if you ask me, since they own most of the desktop market share, if they decided to make a 180 turn on this, that would have cut a significant portion of their user market share... not to mention companies that heavily rely on MS products being pissed AF.
They were transitioning to the new Metro look, that's why the 10 different places for the same setting.
And seeing how slowly Control Panel is being transitioned to the new Metro Settings app, I'd have to guess that that thing is so deeply intertwined in the OS and so many things rely on it, that moving to something new is painfully slow.
Agreed. Linux troubleshooting is easier for sure, assuming you know your way around a terminal. Many beginners tremble in fear when they see it. In windows nearly everything is labeled and clickable... removing the need to memorize commands.
Me: Can you please just not change the UI?
Microsoft: now you need to expand the right click menu to access your most used actions.
Me: what?
Microsoft: and we replaced all the cpl and msc files, so now you can't use the old settings interfaces.
Me: wait!
Microsoft: and ALL the new settings uses edge webviewer, so if you manage to remove edge you've fucked your install up
Me: sounds terrible, surely I can just reinstall edge
Microsoft: you can try but all links to edge on our website are just links that launches edge, because you can't remove it - so why provide an installer?
Me: do you expect me to die?
Microsoft: no Mr User, we expect you to cry! Muwhahahaha
Meme's not wrong and I daily Linux, but how we got here is all that crap on the bottom has a pretty low chance of leaving you bricked and getting back from bricking windows is usually marginally trivial. The same people get lost in Linux, don't read warnings, do stupid shit without thinking then spend forever trying to muddle through how to fix it. Mr. LTT did it himself.
I discovered yesterday that Windows has a command line package manager in Powershell that can install, uninstall and update basically every software you might ever want to install on a Windows PC. winget search "" winget list winget upgrade
I actually thought PS was gonna be better than cmd... turns out consistency is a lot better in cmd... can't make heads or tails in PS. I still use cmd to invoke stuff in PS, but only if there is no other way.
I own my own instance. Your "license" is not accepted. Your instance sharing content with mine is an automatic agreement to my instance's terms.
1.2 Grant of License: By uploading User Content, you grant Saik0-Lemmy a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, distribute, publicly display, and modify your User Content
See how silly this is? Your license means nothing. It's just wasted screen space. And nobody is pissed. People are just trying to talk sense to you.
Well, it's under a permissive license, so there is little he can do legally, except maybe sue them for not mentioning the original project, which I'm sure they will add and that will be that eventually.
That's true. A little recognition would've been nice and I think that's all he was asking for. Microsoft had a whole team work on it when they could've just given him a job to maintain it.
It's their choice. I'm sure they also had this in the works as well, but it eventually didn't work out (why pay another dev when we can have the ones already working for us do this as a side project... they basically just have to clone the repo and change a few things, that's it).
As I said, he can sue for not mentioning the original project, but not much more... maybe he'll think a bit more about what license to choose when publishing big projects like this publically.
And you never dug any further to see WHY you're being denied access or WHY that file is not found.
Simple example, some distros will block regular user access to /root. That doesn't mean that you can't access those files, it just means that YOUR user can't see them WHILE you're logged in with that user... which is why bash file/dir completion will not work if you cd to /root/path/to/dir. Log in as root in the terminal and it works just fine. Some even might out right not see the files if you're logged in as a user, instead of root, regardless if that user in the sudoers file or not (you type in the exact path to a dir/file in the terminal and it won't open/cd to it). In those cases, even sudo won't work for some things, you just HAVE TO work with root.
To be honest, this is very rare and has happened to me like once or twice (on some distros). In most situations/distros, sudo will work just fine.
Unpopular opinion: The Windows Registry, a centralized, strongly typed key:value database for application settings, is actually superior to hundreds of individual dotfiles, each one written in its own janky customized DSL, with its own idea of where it should live in the file system, etc.
Edit: for people that also haven't watched it: Linus tried to use Pop-OS for gaming. When he tried to install Steam it uninstalled his desktop-environment leaving him with only a terminal.
Just watched that portion. When he scrolls down to "yes do as I say" you can literally see two lines above it stating it will remove desktop environment.
And that is why Linux isn't as widely distributed as Windows. Linux is great, if you know what you are doing. But most of the world doesn't have the time needed to learn Linux well enough to avoid major fuck-ups like this.
Linux gives you a wall of text when all the user did (at least what they thought they did) is say install this program. The system ask "Are you sure?" And the user is like "Yes, just do it!" I can't imagine anything on Windows doing that lol.
I like Linux and I think it's great, but I can certainly understand why the majority of people are wary of it.
He specifically did it in the terminal, which is aimed for power user (unfortunately most guides tell people to use the terminal at this point, but this is starting to change), and typed the text with the warning above saying essential component will be removed, with the components clearly listed, and he read it.
When he did the install on store, which is meant for regular user, the installer did stop him and tell him essential part will be removed, and refuse to go through.
Installer problem will happen, most installer on windows run as admin, and can also break stuff if they want to.
So please pardon me, but I honestly don't see how much more user friendly this can be, maybe you have some ideas? The only option I can think of is to not give anyone the opportunity to remove desktop environment, but that is like android won't let you remove any launcher app.
To be fair, I think that the majority who knows what Linux is but never used thinks that the way to install things is with the terminal and doesn't know the Store GUI.
Like I said, the installer has a bug. Softwares have bugs and installers are softwares. Installer bug can happen on Windows, Linux, and probably macOS too.
The obligation of the OS is to stop the installer when potentially unwanted behavior is detected. And the store and terminal are both doing that. The store even tells linus that this will likely be fixed later, and he can try again.
So I personally don't see what more reason the store can provide than "this installer is trying to remove essential software, try again later". Maybe the developer can be more specific to say that "this can brick your system", "remove your desktop environment", or "you will be booted into a terminal", but I doubt an average users will know what that means either.
A big reason people see less software bugs on Windows is because more people are using it and reporting bugs. This is why many linux user are tirelessly (perhaps annoyingly, to some) preaching Linux. Because getting more user to Linux is the only way to ensure our future of stable and free softwares.
A big reason people see less software bugs on Windows is because more people are using it and reporting bugs. This is why many linux user are tirelessly (perhaps annoyingly, to some) preaching Linux.
A particular version of the steam.deb file got pushed to the Ubuntu repository that had some bugged prerequisites. If it didn't recognize the exact DE you were using, it would deem it incompatible and try to remove it. This wasn't a problem for a lot of more popular distros running more popular DEs, but it caught Pop!_OS and their goofy fork of Gnome.
Prior to That Video, this issue had been found, reported and fixed. But it just so happens that bugged version was what was in the apt cache at the time the install image Linus used was made.
Further, Pop!_OS didn't ever suggest Linus do a system update after a fresh install, nor did it update the apt cache when launching the Pop!_Shop, so that out of date apt cache was used.
Further, instead of googling an error message he was given and trying to solve the problem, the child that walks like a CEO threw a tantrum about "you have to use the terminal" looked up the command to install Linux via apt, also failed to do an update first (which you typically do; most guides about installing something tell you do an apt update && apt upgrade first) and he just plowed right through to a borked install.
To play devils advocate, I'd say that the bigger issue is that Linus ended up in the terminal to start with, when he had no idea what he was doing in there.
If Linux is to hit the masses, then a beginner friendly distro should have the convention to install apps be by GUI instead of TUI, and guides should be updated to reflect this. That GUI-based installer should see that the "Yes, do as I say" prompt was triggered and in a clear and concise way, inform the user that important packages will be removed if they continue and they should not.
Effectively just having a much better interface for the user is what I'm saying.
a beginner friendly distro should have the convention to install apps be by GUI instead of TUI, and guides should be updated to reflect this
It is a lot harder (and less helpful) in a written guide to tell someone to press a button in menu such-and-such; telling someone to open the terminal and copy paste a command is easier.
In addition (though I do not know if it applies so much to gui package managers) GUI apps also have the tendency to not have a stable interface, so a blender 2 tutorial will often not be useful for someone using blender 3, because the interface will have changed and buttons that were once in one place now are somewhere else or no longer exist. CLI programs for some reason are a lot more backwards compatible in my experience.
I think GUI apps should ideally be designed to be usable without the user knowing where something is beforehand (though that is not always possible, like in complex software handling a lot of stuff a new user may not be familiar with, when they only want to achieve a certain specific goal), making mentioning how the UI works almost superfluous in those cases.
Effectively just having a much better interface for the user is what I’m saying.
It amazes me the amount of grognards that despise any interface that isn't a command line terminal. "I can do everything on the terminal!" - True, but that's because the UI sucks and lacks proper buttons, widgets and whatnot. That no linux distro comes with a "builtin" icon (available after an installation) or shortcut to "update all programs" or "update only security packages", or even an easy solution to auto update everything on the background, without having to type the command, really shows how little thought is given to user experience. All solutions recquiring a terminal automatically fail in regards to bringing people to linux.
It amazes me the amount of grognards that despise any interface that isn't a command line terminal. "I can do everything on the terminal!" - True, but that's because the UI sucks and lacks proper buttons, widgets and whatnot.
For me, it's not despising anything that is not the terminal but a simple preference for the terminal. Having started learning computers in a CLI and having worked professionally for over a decade mainly on the CLI, it's comfortable and familiar. I also like having scripting and regex capabilities built into my interface - a reason that I much prefer (neo)vim to VSCode and others.
Could I do nearly everything that I do in the terminal in a modern DE? Probably. I'm just not as familiar, so, it would take longer. Like writing in cursive for someone who rarely does anything but block letters.
That no linux distro comes with a "builtin" icon (available after an installation) or shortcut to "update all programs" or "update only security packages", or even an easy solution to auto update everything on the background, without having to type the command, really shows how little thought is given to user experience.
That's not very accurate. Every modern desktop distro that I've used has this, from *buntu to SteamOS. Linux Mint probably has one of the best UI experiences for updates that I've seen and I frequently use it for managing kernels as it's much simpler to do with that tool than any other that I've used.
All solutions recquiring a terminal automatically fail in regards to bringing people to linux.
This is one that is somewhat tricky. Linux tends to be more geared towards more technical users. Probably a lot of us chronic Linux users came to computing when it was more of a niche thing for nerds and knowing how to use a computer meant more than writing documents, editing spreadsheets, or playing games on Newgrounds. A fault that many Linux users and devs have is an antipathy or indifference towards non-technical users. I know that I'm frequently guilty of the latter. Many of us, perhaps short-sightedly, are not concerned or interested in growing the userbase of the OS, which makes efforts like SteamOS particularly great due to their enabling of non-technical users.
What distros don't come with that? I'm running Debian and I get a notification on the desktop when I have updates available and it takes two clicks from that point to get them installed.
Counterpoint: Installing widely used software and following common instructions to do so should not ever put you one confirmation away from destroying your desktop environment, no matter how explicit that confirmation is.
I just accidentally deleted my crontab about an hour ago because r is right next to e.
Fortunately my computer backs itself up often so I could just grab the old crontab but it was annoying and would have been problematic if I didn't.
I also had to recover my computer a few months back because someone whoopsied the default apt repositories for Ubuntu x64 arch and pushed the x86 software there instead.
Counterpoint: Destroying my desktop environment is exactly the thing I want to do. For real, this is one of the first things I do on the regular. One safety-net for noobs is exactly enough, any more and it will become frustrating to power users.
...and installing Steam is the route you want to use to do that?
If you want to be able to tear down your environment and rebuild it or use something else yourself that's great. I don't want that taken away from you.
It absolutely should not be in the chain of possible effects from trying to install a common piece of desktop software with a broad target audience.
…and installing Steam is the route you want to use to do that?
Not at all, and that's a good point that it'd make sense for a package manager to somehow discern someone doing install steam from ones doing purge gnome-desktop. But then, if the first resolves to the latter, something has already gone catastrophically wrong, any action here would be a stop-gap, which this whole "do as I say" thing essentially was. The good thing, at least, is that it's in our hands to come up with a better solution and propose it in a form of pull request.
I did a similar thing on linux mint while trying to get my audio system working how I wanted. Luckily it comes with terminal-accessible rollback by default via timeshift and I was able to revert the mistake.
Linux's modularity and customizability vectors for complications which Windows lacks, which is both an advantage and an issue. I prefer having it over not, though.
Linus is dunning-kruger crystallized and refined. He routinely talks authoritatively about subjects he knows little about. His qubit analogy is particularly wrong and annoying, and he doesn't stop bringing it up.
Either way, more idiot filters have been installed in front of that and you'll have to do way more work (likely learning something in the process) to fuck your system up like that.
The fact there are so many distros and only a handful are "the good ones" (which changes with every user you ask) is one of the major reasons Linux is is not user friendly at all.
Making users make a very major decision before they even install an OS is definitely not a good way to retain users, especially when there’s someone saying they’re wrong no matter what they pick
It's a problem with APT not updating it's packages/programs/version list before installing a software.
He should do "sudo apt update", before "sudo apt install steam", but of course it's apt problem for not doing it automatically.
Someone who uses Linux for longer would install it from Flatpak app store or something, but it's clearly not simple "wrong distro, bro".
This is the exact reason I'm finally done with Windows. Customization and troubleshooting have become a nightmare since they started gi try and become more like Apple
I recently discovered, after a while of wondering why the audio quality in windows was worse than fedora that the automatic windows audio enhancements actually made the audio significantly worse 😅 meanwhile I still haven't figured out how to stop windows from randomly switching the audio source from my headphones to my nonexistent display monitor audio.
it would be "simple", if start->settings wouldn't point me in an completely wrong direction. As it is, you need to know the secret phrase "device manager" (or "control panel" or "management console") to find the hidden settings-dialogs that will actually solve the problem.
Right-click on the Sound icon, then Sound Settings.
You get to: System > Sound
You can do stuff directly in the first panel, but scroll down:
System > Sound > All Sound Devices
Find your Display there, it could look like:
Click on it.
The first option in the detail view is to toggle it as a sound "output" device:
The options are "Allow" or "Don't allow". Once it's blocked, it's no longer in the list of options for switching easily between sound output devices (automatically or manually).
You should be able to disable your monitor's non-existant audio device in one of the settings menus. On Windows 10 it's in the old style control panel's audio device settings.
A big hurdle in any technological change is the "power users". People that have learned a lot about the old tech and have to face that knowledge becoming obsolete. And then having to learn a bunch of new things.
The same goes for Windows power users as people who know a lot about fossil fuel powered cars.
Linux: You can mostly stick to the GUI to install software, touch the terminal for obscure/command line applications and install GPU drivers and you have a functioning system
Windows: Forced to go into regedit and services.msc to fix high resource usage on a fresh install, debloat scripts to remove bloat on Windows and need to update system, scower the internet for drivers and all the software you need
I can see why I got fed up very fast trying to use Windows 11 in QEMU tbh...never trying that shitshow again...
Edit the only packages I had to install through Bash are: Neofetch, Htop, OpenSeeFace, Brave Browser, Wine, Nvidia drivers and ProtonVPN. Linux is very user friendly imo
7 packages from the command line isn't that many, but you're failing to account for the fact that to most Windows users, the amount they'll realistically install is 0, both because they don't know how to use the command line and because they don't know what to install. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/
It's not exactly a fair comparison, the tweaks in the bottom panel aren't necessary for most users to do, yet a new user to Linux will need to get over a learning curve to do fairly basic tasks.
My litmus test for when Linux will be "ready" is can you do everything you need to do without using the terminal. So far I've yet to see a distribution that has achieved this.
I set up Linux Mint for my parents a few months ago. Never touched the terminal, everything was done in Mint's UI; the initial installation, Timeshift setup, theme customizing, app installations for Spotify, OnlyOffice, VLC, and Chrome, automatic updates, printer and scanner setup.
Yeah I honestly rarely use the terminal on my mint install. And that's even as a developer.
To be fair I initially had to do some odd tweaks at first, namely getting my keyboard function key working how I wanted. But even that was just editing some config files, and a non-power user probably wouldn't have the kind of mechanical keyboard I have anyway.
What about Mint or PopOS? Also I don't agree with your definition of "ready". The stigma around the terminal must go!
the current state of linux on ANY popular distro is: everyting can be done via GUI but some things are just easier to do in the terminal and it's not linux's faulth that terminal is just so good
There's no stigma with the terminal, the terminal isn't bad, I love the terminal.
However, it's not grandma friendly. It never will be. You need to think less about your preferences and more about a truly novice user. Most people don't want to tinker with their machines, they just want it to work.
Do you mind mentioning the others you've tried and what snags you hit?
I've worked with Arch, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and SteamOS, and I would say that while arch and Ubuntu can have a learning curve, Linux Mint is on par with SteamOS in usability.
I went through an episode of trying to swap to Linux about a year ago.
I tried Arch, got it all setup but had issues with smoothness just on the desktop. Tried Wayland and didnt work well with Nvidia, after trawling through random fixes to attempt, gave up.
I tried PopOS, just because it was apparently the best out of the box for games, which setup was easy, but again it was sluggish.
I went back to Arch again, got it setup and thought I would just put up with the laggy dragging of windows, to give the rest a chance. I use a slightly advanced audio setup on Windows with Voicemeeter and could not get a similar setup working on Arch. I couldnt even use apps such as Discord in the same way, along with other little things piling up I just went back to Windows which "just works".
I was running multi-monitor and apparently there's no simple support for mismatched refresh rates and Nvidia GPUs still have trouble in general.
I run a Pi and Linux is great for that, I like it, but in my opinion Linux is far from becoming a good Desktop OS.
That is some fair criticisms mixed with some things that are unfortunately not tackleable by linux devs. Arch is more a toy for configuring IMO; you lose alot of productivity up front getting it set up. I can't really speak for Wayland.
I've also been a fan of using Voicemeeter Banana, since it allowed me to output to both my speakers and headphones simultaneously, but only binding the audio control buttons to my headphones. Currently nothing like that functionally exists on linux that I've been able to find yet.
Nvidia has historically dragged its feet when providing support for its GPUs, and I definitely noticed alot of issues when running an Nvidia GPU back in the day, though I can't speak for how much of that is explicitly Nvidia and how much that's linux Dev lag.
Discord is even worse. It was news to me when switching back this year, but Discord has altogether stopped maintaining audio for game streaming. It's closed source, though, so there's nothing that can really be done about it. Overall, a not insignificant blow for gaming on linux.
I still get bad vibes from PopOS and have steered clear of it because of it. I would recommend you try Linux Mint at some point, since I've had a good experience with it and I regularly see others who equally recommend it.
Yeah, it's no surprise that the trillion dollar company's product is more functional. Linux is good for people who want to tinker and mess around, but we are kidding ourselves if we think it's ready for general adoption as a desktop OS. It works well for specific usecases like SteamOS because it's custom built to run with certain hardware.
I was going to try more, but honestly couldn't be bothered, I have everything I need with Windows without issue and while I was open to fiddle a bit, all the issues left a sour taste, so I will probably wait some time for the distros to mature a bit further,
You have to understand that, one, Linux and the devs that do work on FOSS software, do so in their free time. Two, the devs that develop anything FOSS related usually develop things to fix/overcome personal problems they might be having in their own setup or workflow. If someone else happens to like using that, great, if not, hey, I just put it out there 🤷. Three, there is no guarantee that a particular piece of software that you like and is something niche, will be supported in the future. There are hundreds of examples like this in Linux and FOSS history in general. There isn't enough interest for it, the main dev drops development, so the project dies 🤷. Another project might take it's place, it might get forker, but if it's niche enough, you probably won't see that happen. So, the only other alternative you have is to get your hands dirty and keep patching the software to work on your particular setup, or in case of closed source software, patch your setup to make it work with that piece of software for the foreseeable future, until another piece of similar software pops up on the radar and then you can switch.
I'm sorry, it's just how things are. Linux and any other non-commercial OS project is basically a community effort thing. If everyone in the world knew how to code or patch, or at least 80% of people, then these projects would thrive, no doubt there, cuz the workload would be balanced between the users. That is not the case, so 10% of the people that use FOSS software are basically the maintainers of what is out there. That is just not enough 🤷.
You cannot say that definitely. There's every chance my problems are fixed, the more people who adopt linux the more similar problems people will have.
I agree that Linux desktop will probably never take off due to the nature of its development, but we dont know that for sure. If companies like Valve want to keep investing into it, there's always a chance.
I tried a similar setup and eventually gave up after the monitor problems. Having 4 displays with different resolutions and refresh types just doesn’t seem to work at all.
Yeah, apparently Linux users mainly use single monitor setups! Multi-monitor is so important and very common, so it was the last thing I expected to have issues with. Oh well.
To be honest, yes, I use a single monitor setup... though I don't think many Linux users use a single monitor setup, they just use matched monitors (buy 2, 3 of the same kind).
Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).
I use the terminal out of preference, and because it's where I'm comfortable, but I can't think of any situation it's actually needed for general desktop use.
That is impossible. It's like saying for Windows "can you do everything that you can do in a GUI, in PS or cmd". That can never come true because the OS was just never designed that way.
Likewise, in Linux or any other POSIX compatible OS, you can't expect that. Everything UI related is designed to just be a wrapper around the shell. You can't expect everything to be configurable through a UI when everything in that OS is designed to run in the terminal (a few exceptions, but generally, yes, this is true).
windows sucks ass for this exact reason but linux is definitely complicated and filled with weird bugs as well lol. i guess those bugs are better than spyware though
The problem with RTFM is that TFM often does not cover the problem, and broader knowledge of the OS is required. You can't expect every app to come with a manual that covers how the entire OS works, but that knowledge is often required to get work done in Linux.
People familiar with the guts of Linux or Windows will encounter these kinds of outside-the-instructions problems and know from experience what arcane setting to change or what 3rd party software needs to be installed before the procedures written in the manual will work as expected.
IMO, the Windows GUI lowers the bar to begin trial-and-error learning and makes the learning process faster.
"WhY iS pAcKaGe MaNaGeMeNt So HaRd" my brother in Christ you got one broken Deb that was packaged and provided for free by someone other than the vendor, the vendor provides their own installer you could have used that wouldn't have had the issue. You could have also used a flatpak. You were literally offered three ways to install the software on any operating system you could choose, and you gave up after the marginally simplest one failed and you were too lazy to troubleshoot it.
The donkey doesn't even know the first thing about package management or any part of the build process, and has no right whatsoever to talk about it as if the maintainers of the stack are to blame.
The great thing about Linux is if something has weird behavior and you're already exhausted all possible options to solve it, it is still possible to figure it out on your own because the source code is available.
I still don't know how windows people figure out how to fix such and such problems on windows with some registry entries. Did they ask a Microsoft employee, or did they mess around with the registry blindly until it's magically fixed?
Not everyone is a developer, but the vast majority of people use Windows. When an issue arises, it's easier for a non-programmer to search for help than look at code.
Sure, you also have that option on Linux, which would be the first thing you do anyway. But after you searched everywhere and found nothing, on Linux you still have an option to dig into the source code yourself, while on windows you're pretty much done unless you have a support contract with ms.
When an issue arises, it's easier for a non-programmer to search for help than look at code.
Ahh, look! Its my nearly decade long experience with Linux in one sentence! So that whole non-user-friendliness thing about Linux being uncomprehensible to amateurs, that's surely just around the corner for me now, right? Right?!
Not trying to argue any point here, ur comment in this context just made me chuckle.
I’m not a super casual user, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to try to dive into source to try to understand a bug in my OS. I’m just going to work around it and never think of it again.
You may feel that way, but not every power user is like you. Linux distro is not a monolith, it's made up of thousands of small components made by different people and organizations. If you look at some of those components source control (e.g. on GitHub or GitLab), you'll see a large portion of pull requests are done by their users who found bugs and decided to submit a fix themselves. For example, just look at how many pull requests libgweather got, and they're mostly submitted by gnome users who were mildly annoyed with the weather app.
It is actually easier than you think. With the help of the devs, you could easily solve your problem, plus make them aware of the bug and fix it in upcoming releases. It might take a few days of messages on git back and forth with them, but in the end, yes, you will most probably solve your problem.
No, you Google the shit out of that particular problem, visiting reddit, forums, blogs and god knows what else, find a few bunch of registry files or reg snippets, copy/paste that, do a sanity check on each and every one of them, backup the registry (or a part of it at least), import them one by one in the hope that one of them fixes the problem... and then you discover that these were meant for Windows 7 and not 10 and that 10/11 had that shit removed or doesn't actually obey that registry entry (a bug, they will fix it... some day...) and then just give up and learn to live with the problem.
Windows is the much more difficult OS AFAIK. Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn't work well (pop up dialogs can be painful). I hate windows and managed to mostly avoid it until I switched jobs in 2017.
Plenty of modal dialogs flat out don't work with keyboard follows mouse. But now that you mention it, its windows dialogs (not from 3rd party apps) that seem to be the most problematic.
Yes, I do agree. The one that haunts my dreams: the credentials one 😤. Credentails come up and you start typing and... nothing.. god damn it, not again!
I think both Windows and Linux are scary when you want to exactly fits you need.
In using linux I started to know what is a DE, kernel, kernel argument, GRUB, systemd, selinux, etc. and I am the person that want to learn NOTHING about my OS, they just unfortunately pops up during troubleshooting.
So is Windows, device manager, ipconfig, registry table, chocolatey, cmd vs powershell, WSL, and many more. But I would say, if you don't care about bloat and ads, and are willing to make stupid compromises, like copy a email to a notepad, so you can see it while drafting a new email. Windows might breaks slightly less often than linux depending on your hardware. But that doesn't mean Windows don't break, in fact Windows broke just in the first linux challenge video.
For Linus's experiment, I don't really think it is a fair comparison between Linux and Windows. No one is going to learn a OS in a month, and expect to have the ability to not harm themselves, not on Windows not on Linux not on macOS.
But it does serve as a good simulation of a busy Windows enthusiast moving to linux. Personally, I don't think this should be the only criteria to judge the linux eco system, but it is a important criteria, and linux has many things they can improve in this regard (and they are indeed improving).
However, popOS installer for steam breaking DE is a legitimately rare event, and it happens to the most popular tech youtuber is even more rare...
His recent video on the Fairphone is what did it for me.
His "deal breaker" is that the notification sound is too loud? Replacing a battery by heating up your phone, prying it open, disconnecting the flimsy battery cable and prying out the glued in battery is apparently just as easy as using your hands. Seriously?
Personal preferences exist you know. Also not being able to turn down the notification volume would annoy me personally to no end. But if it doesn't annoy you, is it still unimportant to be informed about this? So you know before you buy?
Calling something that can be fixed with a simple software update a deal breaker is strange to me, yes.
Adding it as critique so it can be fixed is fair, as a reviewer I expect them to note things like these. I do not need them to add their own opinion on whether this is a deal breaker or not.
I find opinions to be interesting and somewhat informative. I dont agree personally, but appreciate the input. If you view it as an opinion I think its okay. Everyone adds their personal opinion in one way or another, I think its good that its labeled that way.
His fairphone review was super based. Refusing to pander to deluded fanboys that are willing to pay $500 for a buggy pile of junk where the touchscreen software is broken.
Interestingly, I like to keep my network connected devices up to date. Why would I disable that on any OS?
For me, candy crush et al was never installed on my Windows computers by default, both on home and pro versions. There were install shortcuts, but never the actual programs themselves.
I expect a modern computer to be able to do whatever updates it wants in the background, and apply any kernel changes when I restart it. Ubuntu has been able to do both for years.
Actually, Linux in general, not just Ubuntu. You could even update the app while running said app (like your browser). It won't crash, you just have to restart it in order to use the new version. You could literally be running every single app that the update updates and it won't crash. Once loaded in RAM, there is nothing tying it to the place where it resides on disk. You could even delete the binary if you'd like, it would still keep running... unless you close it, then you won't be able to run it again, lol 😂. There are a few exceptions though, like services (daemons), but that is only in systemd land, other init/service managers will allow you to just restart the service and load the new updated version of it.
Keeping a Pro or a Home install up to date is not always a good thing. From a security standpoint, yes, I do agree, but when half your personal files go missing after an update... you kinda start wondering why you let this thing update automatically in the first place.
LTSC editions though, yes. I leave them to autoupdate. They do it like once a month anyway, so it's not that big of a deal anyway, it's not really such a big problem. And the updates don't take that long, no new features are added, just security updates and that's it.
So, if you're worried about security and being up to date, I'd recommend the Windows LTSC editions. That is the only thing I ever install if I have to install Windows.
One time I used the store UI thing in Ubuntu to install a package and it made it so that every subsequent time I opened it it would just freeze. I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it via the command line because it had some kind of lock on it. After awhile I gave up and reinstalled windows.
I believe that, in life, among the worst qualities is the obtuseness of those who do not make an effort to understand the reasons for things and settle on a reality of simplifications and superficiality.
Linux has the educational merit of forcing us to dig beyond that superficial layer.
I just spent the last 6 hours trying to get my home assistant VM to run on boot up because I’ve spent the last 6 months unable to get Linux to stop automatically rebooting for unattended upgrades.
I’m far from a power user but it shouldn’t be so fucking hard. It’s like 3 clicks to disable automatic upgrades/reboots in Windows.
Also with LLMs getting good the less informed user can make changes they want and learn as they do with less effort so lower barrier to entry. The Arch wiki isn't even that hard if you have a level headed 24/7 assistant that knows enough and can reason well enough to teach you something. Only if you make sure that you never expect perfection. I don't trust people's work blindly so why would I blindly trust an LLM? That's the lessen we gotta learn. Use the brain lol
I have also mentioned this on more than a few occasions. I dual boot (very rarely to Windows nowadays) and I always use LTSC installs on all my dual boot setups. 0 problems thus far regarding GRUB and other Windows update related issues.
I still don't know why people use Pro... maybe LTSC is more niche than I thought and MS is not pushing ads for that one out there.
A lot of misinformation for ltsc, people thinking its only for kiosks and cant be used as a daily.
Given the choice for sketchy script messing with registry or sketchy key I'm going sketchy key, at least I know windows iso is legitimate, crazy so few know of ltsc and choose the latter.
Yeah, I'm surprised as well. Not enough research I guess... MS is very clear about what LTSC is and what it's not, as well as what it can do and what not.
Oh well, I spread the word when and where I can, will keep doing so. I hope dual booters catch on the LTSC installs and have less problems with GRUB.
The only real issue I've had with Linux is trying to get my old Drobo 5C to work. (it's a self-managed dynamically adjustable/resizable raid array that just presents itself as a single 70tb usb hard disk. The company that made them dissolved a few years ago)
It's formatted in ntfs and loaded with 25tb+ of data from when I ran windows primarily.
It'll mount and work temporarily, but quickly stops responding, with anything that tries to access it frozen. Particularly docker containers.
Then it'll drop into some internal data recovery routine (it's a 'black box' with very little user control, definitely wouldn't be my choice again, but here we are), refusing to interact with the attached system for half an hour or so. When it finally comes back, linux refuses to mount it. 'dirty filesystem', but ntfsfix won't touch it either. Off to windows and chkdsk, then rinse and repeat.
I gave up when one of those attempts resulted in corrupt data (a bunch of mkvs that wouldn't play from the beginning, but would play if you skipped past the first second or two). I can't backup this data, (no alternative storage or funds to acquire it) so that was enough tempting fate.
I ended up attaching it to an old windows laptop that's now dedicated to serving it via samba :(
Really looking forward to setting up a proper raid array eventually, but till then I'm stuck with 11mbps. I'd love to rent storage temporarily so I can move the data and try a different fs on the drobo...
I'd need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn't upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop...
I've got a second desktop that's got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that'd probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.
Ah, if the thing has USB 3.0, then the NIC in the laptop is probably 100Mbit (lower end models had 100Mbit even if they were newer), that's your main issue, not SMB. SMB is a TCP/IP protocol, has nothing to do with hardware implementation and has no speed limits (at least none that I'm aware of). It goes as fast as the slowest part in the chain.
Meanwhile if you wanna play a game on linux you have to research on forums with neckbeards that act all high horsey and get mad at you for asking questions they deem simple. If they do answer its cryptic like: "oh you just use simplinuxuser-bash-sh bro". Then by the time you get the game to run you better hope its not on a laptop with integrated graphics and a nvidia card because by god making the game only see the nvidia card over the integrated graphics if the game doesnt have the option to swap which card youre using good luck to any new user.
Windows users just go to steams website, install steam, install game, play. Windows 10+ will install basic nvidia drivers without you doing anything at first bootup with internet connection. Look, I use linux, windows, macos in my house..windows is still my primary driver even with my steam deck being a close second these days. Im all for linux getting more use but its not easy stop acting like it is..its a hobby, its fun, thats it.
whenever someone comes to me asking for help on windows, I first tell them straightway that windows is shit, and I know nothing about it. then I spend half an hour searching for answers to resolve the problem, only to curse it again and give up, before telling then again to use a better operating system(i.e., GNU/Linux).
Not true ,
Show me on Linux except may be one or two flavours how to add program in start-up, a windows 98 and windows 11 has same place and is all known.
Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux , unlike plug and use in windows
Just stop saying Ng Linux is better , it's not for regular use . I know you dudebros will get hurt and downvote me . Linux is not easy, does not have MANY MANY Utilities which are present for windows and it's just not usable for users .
You're just more familiar with windows. You likely grew up with it and depending on your age were taught it in school. You're biggest gripe seems to be having to touch the terminal to install things, but to me, I think it's weird to use a browser to install things. This is where that esoteric knowledge comes in.. you know which download button is the real one that won't download a virus.
I would agree a few years ago, but saying that it's generally not usable for users is (in my opinion) wrong. If you're only going to use a browser, and watch some videos, Linux is fine.
If you're a gamer and only use Steam, Linux is fine. Linux was also fine for me when installing Lutris to run other Windows games like Trackmania. For both those cases, I didn't even have to touch the command line.
If you're a programmer, Linux is probably fine, because you have more knowledge on how command lines work anyways.
If you have any kind of advanced use case that doesn't have a well established solution, and you have to research (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), that's probably not fine for a normal user. But more and more tools do have established solutions that work out of the box, so I'd say it's getting more fine.
Whether Windows, Mac or Linux is better is a question of use case and other factors in my opinion. You only used Windows your whole life and don't want to get used to a new thing? Then don't. You love the Apple ecosystem and want to pay the premium? Do so. But I feel like outright saying Linux isn't for regular use has become false in the recent years, as there are quite a few use cases by now that can use Linux without problems.
I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the "IT guy" I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about "being in the same place for 25 years". This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let's not start about systemd now, I don't care), but one new "skill" to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I've learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.
Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux
Hum, all of them I've been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it's been a feature for a long time. I don't like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it's target then name or the other way around).
The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn't use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it's not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.
I've seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I've never used KDE, it's a long story, but I guess the same would apply).
For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).
100% agreed. Once you disable all the unnecessary stuff Windows comes with you'll be left with a stable system that is compatible with everything from professional to hobbyist software. Meanwhile under Linux you'll spend all your days on getting a basic system to run properly (for some distros) or trying Wine, virtualization and other subpar hacks to get any kind productivity and ability to cooperate with others. :)
These both happened to me. I was already looking into switching to Linux in 2020, and the last update did it for me. Have been only been using Linux at home ever since.
Just wait for the next version of insert-non-debian-linux-distro and you won't be able to boot after trying an update. :)
I find it very interesting that I always see a lot of people complaining about those kinds of updates breaking Windows all the time. In my experience I've only seen it happening with old ass , cheap hardware computers. Never had issues myself with mid range and hardware from reputable brands. If you've a computer from Aliexpress or some Chinese brand, oh well, you get what you payed for.
I run both on the same machine in VMs, had this fedora install since 2019 and kept up with the version upgrades every year. Its just worked without issue during that whole period. I use office in the web app.
Windows is there to run cad/cam software. It feels more gross with all the candy crush etc that you have to remove, but it works fine to run the software I need it for.
What's with all the hyperbole above? Did someone hurt you?
And now you suddenly have to manage two operating systems with all their quirks. Nice!
Going full Linux desktop kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays.
Why not just give in an manage A SINGLE yet productive OS that is widely supported by every vender and tool you might need? To Microsoft's credit they made WSL and Windows Terminal very well and it's way easier to run the 1 or 2 Linux-only applications on those than the other way around.
Err OK. I passthrough a card to each, switch with KVM. Its like having 2 native machines. According to you I have loads of issues, I guess I just haven't found them yet?
What should I be giving in to?
This is really weird,
ps, I sometimes game on either system, still can't tell any performance difference from when it was bare metal. I guess I could be super lucky considering all those issues I should be having. Or maybe things aren't quite as dramatic as you've portrayed them
How are you getting your video back into the main system? Some kind of remote desktop protocol? That adds delay. Unless your VM is attached to e dedicated screen you'll have issues there.
The host is headless, no video output. The 2 VMs have a GPU passed directly through vfio, so there is no additional delay. Both GPUs connect to the same 2 monitors and USB by a KVM, so its one button press to flip between systems.
Though I often run the cad software over RDP, as a little extra latency when using that doesn't bother me.
This highly dependent on what you do, do you do graphics or video editing then you are right, do you do non-Windows specific coding? Its the exact opposite.
Ahaha while you aren't wrong, you're a bit off as well. I know lots of developers doing their jobs under Windows and they'll be really annoyed if forced to deal with Linux for their jobs. Not everything is lower level shenanigans and to be fair almost nothing is low shenanigans nowadays. Your run-of-the-mill average developer is doing stuff in web related technologies and can get just fine under Windows. After all there's always WSL and Docker and Microsoft did a nice job with Windows Terminal.
You may find it hard to believe but Microsoft positioned themselves very well to take a large chunk of the current and future developer ecosystem, be it via WSL, nice tools, IDEs or whatever.
Nah, Wine runs most XP-times software better, Windows 10+ sometimes not at all. Some people do hacks like running wine in WSL because of this.
There goes your compatibility. Not to mention that Windows is probably the most incompatible OS (to the rest) in wide use (filesystem, non-POSIX, drivers, etc.)
You're full of shit. Wine still fails at basic Win32 API calls available since Windows 95 and most thing that fail under modern Windows versions are usually GPU related tasks like games and the fact that you don't have specific DirectX or DirectPlay features available on your modern OS and/or GPU and those cases there's dgVoodoo2.
Do you really want to talk about compatibility? Just try to install MS Office 2003 and Photoshop 6 under Windows 11 - you'll fine that both will work just fine without hacks.
I won't consider using dozens of random debloating scripts made by reverse engineering Windows binary files a stable experience.
Also the second part is clearly frustration of running Windows-only software on Linux.
Like, just look at installing Linux vs Windows experience. On Windows there is no live ISO, super outdated look, terrible user unfriendly partitioning section and after that they don't even show you a nice welcoming overview of the system like Gnome or KDE now have.
I won’t consider using dozens of random debloating scripts made by reverse engineering Windows binary files a stable experience.
The thing is that this isn't correct.
Windows' bloat/spyware can be disabled via group policy and it works really well because it was designed to allow it. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable the "spyware" otherwise they couldn't use it.
I'm not saying Windows is good, I'm just saying it delivers and for the hassle that it takes to run Windows-only software (that most people require) under Linux, most people might be better off by spending a quarter of that time debloating Windows.
Reserved bandwidth??
Some sort of hidden, concealed, clandestine internal QoS implementation in Windows. Reserving a portion of network bandwidth for high priority traffic sounds like a good concept, but I don't like the fact that this is so hidden (I've been working with computers for many years and I've never heard of it until now), and that the mechanism to determine the priority of a packet is unknown.
We know windows spyware traffic have the top priority.
I love shitting on Windows as much as anyone, but that is a completely baseless, fictitious accusation. And if not, give me a credible source.
If anything, I'd keep spyware traffic as low-profile as reasonable in Microsoft's place.
I tend to agree.
Nevertheless, some unknown implementation can have bugs and things can go wrong and there's nothing you can do about it, short of "rebooting" or d̷o̶w̸s̸i̷n̴g̸ ̴t̶h̸e̷ ̸h̵a̵r̵d̷ ̵d̷r̶i̴v̶e̷ ̵w̶i̴t̸h̷ ̸̞̺͠h̵̺͙̎̍o̸͔͠ͅḻ̷̀̇y̵͚͍̎ ̷͉̅̅w̸͎̔a̷̧̫̒́t̶̼̉̓ę̵̾͗r̶̫͑͑ ̴̣̿͒(̷͙̎a̸̬̺͝͝n̸̞̓̓d̴̬͌̍ ̸͇͕͌͝s̷̡̯̓͝u̸̡̳̇͝b̴̳͜͠s̷͍̘̽ë̵̜q̷̝͐̄ȕ̵̞̐e̷̲̠̐́ń̴̨̙͝t̸̛̬͝l̶̮̔͠y̴͕̪̑͝ ̵̖̆ḃ̴̪̟u̶̢͓͑̌y̵̜̤͌̏i̵̦̋ň̴̨͚̀g̸͓͑ ̴͍̬̽à̶͜ ̴͇͔̓n̴̬͂͜ì̷̢̛̯c̴̤̖̈́e̶̼̫̐̊ ̵̹̏͝f̸̙̀̑r̷̪̩͆͆e̸̤̫͛͋s̷̢̙̏h̷͇͔́ ̸̭̆͝N̷̰͗͛͜V̶͇͒̚M̸̟̍͜ě̷̛̟ ̸̢̞́͝a̷͙͔͒͒n̷̻͇͝d̸̘̥͌̾ ̴̜͓͑p̷̬͑͊ŭ̸̮̏t̸̲̀t̴̡͚̽í̶͎͓̑n̴͕̘̒̈́g̴͓̰̓͝ ̵͓̎a̴̻̼͗ ̷̦̍̈́s̷̥̅̈l̴̝̂e̴̞̅͊ḛ̴̊̅k̷͚̕ ̵̛̼̬͗D̴̻̾̽e̵̙͂̊b̷̝͘ī̵̢͇ą̵̂n̴͖̑ ̶̼̚h̴̼͂͑e̷̲͆̆a̵̡̋d̸̢͔̈l̶͕̍̍e̸̛͕̙̒s̶̞͔̀͠s̸̯͖̕ ̵͍̦̈́̉ ̸̨̨̓i̸̙͖͗̌ņ̶̯̍s̸̡̖͗̇ṯ̷́̒ä̵̦́̎l̶̼̄l̵̨͊̊ ̴̳͑͗ó̵͎̅ǹ̴͈̚ ̷͖͊͝i̷̠͇̊t̷̼̞͒͘)̵͎̤̔͌
Yeah, if I were Microsoft I would implement spyware in a way that is least intrusive to the user experience. Prioritizing the telemetry data using QoS would only incentivize users to find ways to disable the telemetry, while providing no benefit to Microsoft. What's the use for them receiving the telemetry data slightly faster, it's much more important to them that it arrives at all
Well not spyware per se but over the years they found over and over bugs which are really just highways left open in your system ready to be exploited. But to be honest that's not limited to windows.
https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-limit-reservable-bandwidth/
It's not as scary as it sounds.
It's not, and in a vacuum I don't think anyone would mind. It is the fact that it is concealed that is really shitty.
As much as I'd like to keep my system up to date (and I really do), if I'm watching a movie then that is my priority. Any task I'm currently using the bandwidth on, should be considered my system's priority. This is akin to rebooting the computer when it determines it is necessary, with the user having little control to stop it; it's intend isn't malicious, and it is meant to protect the user, but all it achieves is upsetting the user and make us find ways around it or turn it off completely.
It's used for updates. I'm not sure if it works all the time.
I think that it used to be called
superfetchin the old days. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/superfetch-service-disable-helps-to-increase-speed/3c4d5b4b-edef-4eb7-9456-52fd304e606cIf you're using an "unofficial" license, it's probably normal to disable updates and afferent services.
I remember from years ago when I was modding Windows XP installations with nLite to try to purge all the unnecessary bits and install some useful stuff. Superfetch was this annoying service that supposedly ruined online gaming due to lag. :)
Prefetch and superfecth are just obnoxious services that waste disk space. You can safely disable them, there is no downside to not using prefetch or superfect on modern SSDs. On regular spinning drives, yes, they did make loading programs a bit faster.
Superfetch was keeping an index of file relationships in RAM and pre-loading files you were probably going to use next. It didn't ping your network at all, but it could easily eat up a ton of disk resources and RAM. It was really only an issue on old 5400rpm laptop HDDs from what I remember.
Might be thinking of windows search indexing.
Yes, disable Windows search indexing as well. No point in having that on an SSD, it's pointless, it just wastes disk space.
I mean that only matters for people like us.
99.99% of the Windows user base doesn't give the tiniest semblance of a shit about any of that. Hell I run Windows on my gaming pc still and have never had cause to do any of that.
I'm going to be honest with you, as often as this has been memed and for as long as I have been using Windows on my work computer, I have never once been forced to restart on the spot by an automatic update.
I'm sure those who have will be quick to reply but at this point I'm 90% confident it's a loud minority.
I've seen an entire factory shut down for hours because two critical Win10 computers tried and failed to update. It's never an issue until it becomes one.
Plus a failed update is the whole reason I nuked my C: drive and switched to Manjaro (now running Arch, put down the pitchforks).
Well, running Windows 10, a consumer user-oriented operating system, to control mission-critical machines is mistake number 1.
This wouldn't have happened if they had used Windows Server or something actually designed for that task (like Linux!).
Neither of those options were available. It was written by a third-party for some old .NET Framework version, and the server and GUI components were written as a single application. Putting it on a server wasn't an option either because the application's GUI was constantly used for the management of assembly machines, and other applications were used for monitoring and administrative stuff.
If you had been there, you'd know why this was a low-priority risk. That place was bleeding from a thousand wounds. At least this had some redundancy, for all it was worth in the end...
(edit) I actually contributed to that software, even though it's not open-source! I managed to nail down an issue where loading a project file using one locale would result in a crash, but not in others. The .NET stack trace was printed to an XHR response's payload and I used that to locate a
float.ToString()call whereCurrentCulturewas passed as the cultureInfo instead ofInvariantCulture, so depending on the computer's locale, it would try to parse CSV data either using a decimal dot or a decimal comma. I mailed this to the maintainer and the fix was released within the month.Windows Server is an option.
The operating system is called "Windows Server". It doesn't necessarily have to run on a mainframe. It has the regular Windows GUI (with a few differences, the first you'll notice is "Cntr+Alt+Del to log in") and can run regular Windows programs.
Huh... I wonder why there's versions of it called "Enterprise" then. You might want to talk with Microsoft about their clear mistake. I mean clearly https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/windows-11-enterprise is in error since you're correct right?
I work in IT. Windows 10/11 Enterprise is still a bad choice. If it's a mission-critical system and you must choose Windows, pony up the cash for Windows Server.
The difference between Windows Enterprise and Pro/Home editions is that there are features on it that make my job easier, but it's still the same shitty operating system under the hood. Windows Server is much more robust and reliable in my experience. Still shit, but slightly less so. It's designed to run on machines with 24/7 uptime. Windows Enterprise still expects you to regularly restart it for updates and upgrades. That's alright since we can just set Susan from Finance's computer to update at 03:00. It's not okay if that computer controls the entire factory.
I too work in IT... Just because I have some HR users that need to run Quickbooks, I don't buy them Windows server 2022.
Or even just running the critical machines offline
Yes, because even once is too many.
In a corporate, I spent an hour and half every morning waiting for Windows to update. Then my coworker handed me Fedora DVD and I never looked back.
I'm saying it's never happened to me. Not once. Zero times. Zero is less than one.
Normal Windows updates don't take an hour long. Give me a break. The ones that do are the version upgrades. That's like the equivalent of a distro upgrade.
Sure, your experience may be different.
That happened in 2013 with random laptop they gave me. I kid you not it took that long, could have been a bug somewhere in the OEM, never cared enough to find out.
But my experience is just as real as much as yours.
Correct. But who can tell the difference beforehand between a normal update and an abnormal one? The problem is Windows tends to hide those details. I've sat on support calls where a server needs to be rebooted for some configuration change, and Windows insists on applying updates because hey, you're rebooting anyway, so what if it takes 1/2 hour to do this thing that should take 5 minutes...
Sure Windows gives you warning, but after a while it FORCES you to install, even if for whatever reason that new branch bricks your computer. I had a good 6 months of that where every time my computer got shut off, it would force the update and fail like 40 times before it finally let me revert and use my computer. There was no way to tell it to STOP UPDATING
Open services.msc, disable the windows update service, and set the start type to disabled. The go to C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and delete the entire folder.
Ive not had "must update on the spot right this very second," but ive had countless, "we will update the second u power off or attempt a restart. If you try and restart into ur linux partition, we will somehow ensure u fail to boot right up until u got thru with our forced update." Which also sometimes goes hand in hand with, "oops, i was supposed to update, but i shit myself instead. Youre going to need to try again at least once or twice. Dont worry, whether the update goes thru or not, itll only take a maximum of 90 minutes."
Windows can fuck its facehole thru its ass as far as its auto updates are concerned for all i care.
Use LTSC and this and never worry about Windows deleting shit in Home or updates breaking something, do it ONLY when YOU want to update.
Near 25 years Linux desktop user, only use Windows when for example helping out family, need to do crap on windows at work, that sort of thing. I've seen this so SO many times, especially when you want to shutdown or reboot now, but WAIT! THERE IS MORE! Windows is updating without asking for the next 30 minutes, don't shut down, screw your planned date. This most have happened more than 30% of the small amount of times I touched windows and it taught me to stay the f away from that stuff, don't want to touch it with a 10 feet pole
It's more like when you shut the laptop down, then turn it on only to be greeted with such message. So, I also haven't seen much of those back when, but only due to the unhealthy habit of maximizing uptime.
I am with you but it's the wrong place to be discussing this.
That is on you for using a Home license and not a pro license.
20 years ago, a friend said "Windows does whatever you don't tell it not to do". It is as true now as it was then.
90% of configuring Windows is disabling shit.
To the reader that needs it and is too afraid to ask: https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
Look at that powershell nonsense. We had shit for this already Microsoft.
I am currently dual booting and trying to get feature parity in my Linux install as a reletave newbie.
So far the largest hurdle I've been able to solve was getting my RAID array recognized. That sent me down a rabbit hole.
To get it working in Linux I needed to:
To get it working in Windows I needed to:
You'd normally use a software raid implementation these days, and Linux has a number of those. But yeah, dual booting can expose some quirks and filesystems and disk setup in general is one of the most prominent.
This. How an advanced use case is accomplished is not a point against a system's usability.
The point I was trying to make is that if you ever want to do something that is not covered with an out of the box install, it's typically far harder to do in Linux than in Windows (although my ~15 years as a windows sysadmin probably bias my opinion)
Windows is turning into a telemetry nightmare because about 10 years ago Microsoft figured out that they could sell ad space and monetize user data, so I'm trying to get off the platform before my LTSC install hits EOL. But I have to admit it's a hard path.
Now do a raid like it's typical for Linux and get it to work on Windows.
Oof, hoops you have to jump through to get two disks in a mirror on windows still haunt my dreams sometimes
So basically: it's not any harder in linux, but you have more than a decade of muscle memory in windows, so it's harder for you.
That's like saying "Japanese is a less efficient language than English, all of the words are different, and when I want to say a word, I have to learn it first, but in English I just know the words! English is so much better! (My 30 years speaking english probably bias my opinion)"
Things are certainly different, but its hard to compare which is "harder" for the advanced use cases.
There's no shame in having long term experience with one platform and having that shape your expectation about how a solution should look.
But in your example raid controller driver was covered in an out of the box install in windows. If it wasn't you'll still need to do pretty much the same. Also there was a couple of weird steps in your linux list like switching DE to run a couple of CLI commands and disabling AHCI for some reason.
Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.
I'm actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.
For advanced, power user stuff, I find Linux to be much friendlier and faster. Just being able to do everything in a Terminal instead of having to mess around with a mix of inconsistent GUI menus in the two different control panels, gpedit, regedit (which is an entire headache by itself), a mix of cmd and Powershell (and whatever Windows Terminal is) is just so much less of a headache.
Also I find things easier to script in Linux compared to Windows.
Not to mention the mess that is Windows Update, which doesn't even upgrade third party software, and takes a long time to actually do the updates. Package management is a godsend. Windows has chocolatey and winget, but those are poor substitutes.
And I say all of this as someone who is technically proficient in both.
This is kind of the same situation I'm in, but I'm not quite as tech savvy and I'm more resistant to learning linux even though I'll still probably want to migrate over at some point.
What I don't really understand is, or, what I understand, but I suppose I find mildly amusing, or confusing, is how many criticisms I've seen of windows that kind of just don't apply to LTSC as much, if at all? It's kind of to the point where I wonder why anyone would really use any other version.
20 years ago it was PCMCIA wifi drivers.
Now it seems like it’s always some kind of disk boot filesystem issue.
Are you using hardware RAID? yeah, that doesn't go too well with Linux... works perfectly in Windows though, cuz their softraid solutions are shit.
Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn't. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux, but it's also hot garbage that's software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.
That is what I actually meant.
That's why you don't do RAID at all on a daily driver. You make/buy a NAS for that kind of thing. Maybe just RAID1 in hardware, cuz that's easy to set up and generally just works, even with low end hardware solutions.
It's called FakeRAID for a reason.
Why have I never thought about this? Dual boot and bit by bit work on feature parity while still having an OS that's my daily driver.
Beware of the W̷̞̬̍̌͘͜ĭ̴̬̹̟͕̒̆̈́n̸̢̧̙̈́̅̂̆̕͜ͅd̵̟̟̪͎̀̀ő̴̼̺̺́̐̂͘w̵̨͊̀s̵̡͎̭̊ ̸͔̬͔̜̊́̈́̌̈́ͅŬ̴͉͚̳̌̉͘͝p̸̼̅̆͐̃̑d̸̜͂ǎ̵̛̯̏͝ť̷̰é̸͇͝ as it can screw up/overwrite your other bootloader completely.
Kinda sucks, when you've got a meeting/work and you find out that forced update made your system unbootable/partially unbootable and you now get to live boot in and go fixing the EFI partition manually, in the CLI.
That happened to me once and that's when I decided feature parity was less important than a reliable system that "just works" for getting things done on a schedule. (I removed windows completely, in case that wasn't clear)
Anyhow, make sure you install windows to a separate drive that can't see any others during the windows install, then will keep the bootloader separate.
I ran into similar issues before. My plan was to install Linux on a separate M.2 so Windows won't interfere and manually boot the OS I want to manually.
Proprietary RAID in linux is a shit show. That's why everyone uses software RAID.
After a while, you'll hit a point where parity is impossible going the other way.
I'm running a striped partition and a mirrored partition with only two drives, and using an SSD to bcache the whole thing. I've even got snapshotting set up so I can take live backups.
I have no idea where to start with that setup on Windows.
I've been using Linux for too long because that list of steps sounded completely reasonable to me.
I had a hell of a time just trying to get Mint to write to an external drive, including unmounting and remounting the drive countless times trying to get it to mount as rewritable (adding it as a mount option wouldn't work in terminal or in "Disks"), it would just refuse to let me write to it, I could still read everything fine. I finally quit, got a second drive, backed all my stuff up and reformatted the first one, which Mint now sees and writes to just fine despite being configured exactly the same way it was before.
That is a massively condensed story, and if I ever have to look at fstab again I might just have an aneurysm. Y'know how hard it is to write things to an external drive in Windows? You plug it the fuck in.
Anyone who says Linux is ready for the masses is deluding themselves. It's fine for nerds, people who like to work on their computer, but it is absolutely not ready for people who like to do work on their computer. Not when something as simple as "yes I'd like to save this to an external drive please" turns into a days-long rabbithole of bullshit that culminates in me buying an extra 8TB drive off Amazon.
I mean, you don't HAVE to do any of that stuff in Windows, it's just helps a bit.
I'm sure there are plenty of windows horror stories. But almost every Windows computer I've had in the last decade, both custom and OEM, has worked pretty well out of the box. And almost every Ubuntu computer I've had over the last decade has had problems that weren't trivial to fix.
I like Linux, but when people compare these problems like they're the same just are missing the point.
The reality is, for 98% plus of windows users, NONE of that matters. MS could give a shit about tech. nerds that want to de-bloat, reduce resources, install crazy niche thingyawidget....
Pretty much everyone in this community is not their target.
Car analogy! You are car guys running custom block modified street racers shitting on electric cars...
Reminder that Group Policy settings are disabled in home versions, and even some of the registry entries for updates are missing. To get a full package of windows with all the options you have to pay like $400 to $600 for their LTSC or maybe some of their Enterprise versions. Honestly, if anybody pirates Windows, then definitely pirate the LTSC.
I don't think many dual booters actually pay for Windows licenses.
Though, yes, I do recommend LTSC as well (high seas and all that, since they cost a small fortune) vs. a Pro license. It's basically what Windows users were used to, a Windows install that's stuck in time, no new features, only security updates.
Oh, and no store and all that app crap, the only app installed is the settings app and there is no way to install any other store app (well, there is, but it's complicated and I would do it only of there is absolutely no other way).
You probably got a license when you bought that laptop you got in 2010. And carried it forward. Just because Microsoft didn't charge for the upgrade path to get to windows 11 doesn't mean you didn't pay something for the license.
No, I actually haven't bought a single laptop in my entire life. All my laptops are give/throw aways. The newest I have is a 3rd gen i7.
Did someone actually pay for a Windows license when he/she bought the laptop? Can't say for sure, but yes, most probably. For a Win7 license most likely since that was what was sood back then. Now I have LTSC and Linux on all of my PCs.
But me personally? No, I have never paid for a Windows license. All of the installs I have ever done for myself were pirated. From Win98 and XP onward.
Cool then you have licenses. Whether you utilized them or not is up to you. But you have licenses.
Utilize what. They're most probably Win7 Home licenses that could be exchanged for a Win10 Home license at a certain point in time, but not any more... and I wouldn't use a Home license anyway, it's crippled AF.
Windows 11 Pro is 199$
Isn't gpedit not even in pro anymore?
It definitely is in pro.
Why did I go through the hassle of installing enterprise and doing a bunch of PowerShell crap to put the Ms store and Xbox interface in months later when friends pressured me into playing unmodded Minecraft bedrock?
Edit: I remembered I think. It's the telemetry flag that can't be set to 0 in pro even with gpe but can in enterprise, but the stuff to make xbl gaming work probably undermines whatever it does, if it did anything in the first place.
Huh? You only need the Pro version for Group Policy and all the registry settings, and you can get licenses for ~$20 if you buy an OEM license through an authorized reseller.
There's some limitations to the OEM licenses, but I've never run into them.
As far as I'm aware, LTSC just effects the update channel that Windows Update pulls from, with LTSC getting non-critical updates later and for longer after support "ends". Usually you can switch that in the registry.
Huh? Huuuuuhhhh?
I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of every windows version, but OEM versions are made to order by manufacturers and that comes with it's own special place in hell that I'm not even going to go into. LTSC has everything with no downsides, Home has Group Policy disabled, that was my comment. Despite your standoffish comment you didn't argue against any of that.
Or just get it for like $4 from a reseller
https://www.allkeyshop.com/blog/buy-windows-11-enterprise-cd-key-compare-prices/
It's not a legal license anyway.
This is just speculation, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft stopped caring about people pirating windows and using licences they shouldn't have. They would rather you use windows as a pirate than not use windows at all.
To anyone downvoting the comment above, you can use windows indefinitely without a key. The only thing that happens is you get some text on the screen (that sometimes goes away for no reason) and you can't change the background. They don't give two f's. They could easily block keys / stop them from working if misused, but they don't care. Same reason why every laptop comes with a license. They put it there because it costs them nothing. They'd rather have market share, than get money upfront. They probably make bank on other things (i.e. the analytics, ads, etc)
Been like that since the 90s really. Microsoft's "secret sauce" is that they never gave a shit about the end users.
They make bank by courting enterprise users: Big companies with hundreds of employees, OEMs, governments, schools, etc.
In recent times they found a way to double-dip by putting in telemetry/data collection/ads/adware -- But before that they just didn't care.
It does help that windows makes the user develop learned helplessness and so by the time they are getting their own computer, they'll want to stay in the windows environment. So they also get the inflated marketshare, which feeds back into their pitch when they are courting those enterprises.
It's true. But why would anyone buy an illegal key if they can activate Windows for free?
No they are legal. It is just an upgraded Windows 7 or 8 license.
They were throwing those away by the boatload
Look at the answer on Microsoft forum. What does "legitimate" mean to you? The fact that the system will work with this key does not mean that you have the right to use Windows legally.
Microsoft allowed those licences to upgrade. They are most definitely legitimate.
No matter what a volunteer moderator says.
"Windows Reserved Bandwidth" is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time. You can turn it off I guess, if quality of service isn't your vibe.
Windows: Cannot print because error.
User: What error?
Windows: What error?
Windows and Linux are both easy to use... Provided that everything works out of the box.
Once you have to actually start solving problems, Windows really starts to fall down because you have to spend ages looking through settings and perhaps installing tools like bcd editors. Like seriously, the number of places you can manage your microphone settings are insane.
At this point, I think the only people that say Windows is easier are those that have never had to reinstall it or who have been using it since the XP days and haven't realised that it is all learned knowledge.
I certainly think Linux tooling could be improved (a graphical fstab editor would be nice), but I struggle to see how troubleshooting in Windows is any easier than Linux.
Linux applications often give you some descriptive error that you can paste into an internet search and usually find someone who had the same problem.
Windows applications just stop working and say "UNEXPECTED ERROR" or smth. Like thanks you literally didn't help at all.
That's potentially my biggest issue woth Windows. You aren't actually made to understand what went wrong. Linux will give you lots of information. It can be overwhelming if you're just used to seeing "This app stopped working, wait or close it?", but once you're used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.
That's the thing right? I'm very much a non-tech person. But Linux error messages are nice and informative to the point that, even if I don't personally know what the fuck they are saying --
-- I can just copy them to my browser search bar. Oh look, someone else had the same issue. And someone who knew what they were talking about presented a solution. Nice, now I can get back to work!
And even when I am forced to troubleshoot on my own, the error messages and terminal logs often give enough of a clue that I can trial-and-error my way into making shit work.
What... you don't like the smiley face and QR code that leads you to a dead link on a rando microsoft website? You sure you need more information other than "Critical Process Died"?
The first time I saw a sadface bsod I legitimately said out-loud "Are you JOKING?"
The memory dump it does is useless... like anyone is ever gonna take a look at that memory dump. Disable it, it just wastes disk space.
My cousin had an old Dell that had an HDD with that "optane" crap, you know a 16GB NVMe "cache" that allegedly did anything. I was going to pull that out, put in a proper NVMe drive, leave the old hard drive in there as additional space, and install Windows 10.
There are apparently BIOS settings that need to be altered for this to work, and Windows would throw "UNEXPECTED ERROR 0x1C4B332AFE943CE2C4 or something to that effect and wouldn't finish installing. Mind you, you don't get a usable Windows environment, so you have to copy that long string of text by hand into another device to find...nothing. Nearly no results out there.
After awhile of trying to get a functioning Windows install media (which is difficult to do from a Linux machine. Way to go burning that bridge, Microsoft) I eventually decided to put Mint on this thing, which also gave an error. This error read something like "Unable to install, probably because there's a problem with the NVMe storage settings, you may need to disable TLVRQ (or whatever the generic term for Optane was) and try again. See this page in the Wiki for more information." And it gave a link to that page, because of course we're booted into a fully functioning live environment with internet access and a web browser, and it also gave a QR code link to that same wiki page so you could view it on mobile.
Microsoft isn't even trying anymore.
Never ever buy combo shit. Remember the DVD reader/CD burner combo crap back in the day? They were good at neither reading or burning anything. Thank god the fully featured DVD burners went down in price and these things died.
Unexpected error, let's hope that the application writes into eventmgr or has some other logging system.
(and in most cases it doesn't. It just dies and leaves you in the dark as to what the fuck happened :3c)
Windows 7 was usable. The ten different places to hide settings started with 8 iirc. But I haven't used Windows in almost a decade, so I might be wrong.
No, you're on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn't super pretty if we're all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE's settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn't seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it's still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
My guess is, they had to run it in parallel. So many things relied on the old UI, not to mention run/cmd commands (
printui,netplwizto name a few), that simply just putting modern replacements for those things would have broken every single printer share, user credentials manager, etc., there is out there. So, they decided to run them in parallel. Smart choice if you ask me, since they own most of the desktop market share, if they decided to make a 180 turn on this, that would have cut a significant portion of their user market share... not to mention companies that heavily rely on MS products being pissed AF.They were transitioning to the new Metro look, that's why the 10 different places for the same setting.
And seeing how slowly Control Panel is being transitioned to the new Metro Settings app, I'd have to guess that that thing is so deeply intertwined in the OS and so many things rely on it, that moving to something new is painfully slow.
Agreed. Linux troubleshooting is easier for sure, assuming you know your way around a terminal. Many beginners tremble in fear when they see it. In windows nearly everything is labeled and clickable... removing the need to memorize commands.
And that is why I use fish. Well, one of the many reasons, lol 😂.
Learning Linux is learning how to use a computer.
Learning Windows is learning how to avoid big companies will when you want to use your computer.
Me: Can you please just not change the UI?
Microsoft: now you need to expand the right click menu to access your most used actions.
Me: what?
Microsoft: and we replaced all the cpl and msc files, so now you can't use the old settings interfaces.
Me: wait!
Microsoft: and ALL the new settings uses edge webviewer, so if you manage to remove edge you've fucked your install up
Me: sounds terrible, surely I can just reinstall edge
Microsoft: you can try but all links to edge on our website are just links that launches edge, because you can't remove it - so why provide an installer?
Me: do you expect me to die?
Microsoft: no Mr User, we expect you to cry! Muwhahahaha
Meme's not wrong and I daily Linux, but how we got here is all that crap on the bottom has a pretty low chance of leaving you bricked and getting back from bricking windows is usually marginally trivial. The same people get lost in Linux, don't read warnings, do stupid shit without thinking then spend forever trying to muddle through how to fix it. Mr. LTT did it himself.
Windows is easy to use if you don't care about privacy.
Ah, a man of culture I see 😌.
I know instantly how to get the packages I need in Linux but I had to do some research to enable the webcam in Windows 10.
The idea that one OS is easier than the other is misattributed familiarity.
I discovered yesterday that Windows has a command line package manager in Powershell that can install, uninstall and update basically every software you might ever want to install on a Windows PC.
winget search ""winget listwinget upgradeThey pulled a corporate and rewrote an opensource project to embed it into windows
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I had a feeling this tool and its syntax was much too simple and elegant for it to be created by Microsoft.
I actually thought PS was gonna be better than cmd... turns out consistency is a lot better in cmd... can't make heads or tails in PS. I still use cmd to invoke stuff in PS, but only if there is no other way.
Do you really need to license your comments?
(C) 2024 [email protected] - All Rights Reserved
(Plz don't sue me for making a derivative work based your comment and violating the license kthxbai)
I love it when people get pissed off about nothing that even affects them.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Yes sir I'm super pissed off how dare you do something goofy on the internet!
I dun gooed
I own my own instance. Your "license" is not accepted. Your instance sharing content with mine is an automatic agreement to my instance's terms.
See how silly this is? Your license means nothing. It's just wasted screen space. And nobody is pissed. People are just trying to talk sense to you.
idgaf
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Well, it's under a permissive license, so there is little he can do legally, except maybe sue them for not mentioning the original project, which I'm sure they will add and that will be that eventually.
That's true. A little recognition would've been nice and I think that's all he was asking for. Microsoft had a whole team work on it when they could've just given him a job to maintain it.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
It's their choice. I'm sure they also had this in the works as well, but it eventually didn't work out (why pay another dev when we can have the ones already working for us do this as a side project... they basically just have to clone the repo and change a few things, that's it).
As I said, he can sue for not mentioning the original project, but not much more... maybe he'll think a bit more about what license to choose when publishing big projects like this publically.
They copied the open source project AppGet and screwed the developer. It's an interesting read.
How do you know if you don't already know the package name?
I have to always Google for the package name, which similarly is what I do to find a Windows installer but instead of the name it's download link.
Or
Or
Thanks!
To enable the webcam on windows you just...open teams and start a call or use one of the apps that use the camera...
Unless the vendor decided to lock it down until you manually unlock it with the administrator account. Then even Teams can't see it.
It is almost like those Linux users are not really as technologically capable as they claim to be.
Or they are just lying and haven't used Windows in over a decade.
Even on Linux, to use the webcam you just plug it and open gnome cheese or Google meets...
Ok great so the webcam works easy without researching on both OSes.
Unlike what arthurpizza claims.
Exactly. OP's meme makes no sense to me. My experience has been that using Linux is a never ending series of file not found and access denied errors.
And you never dug any further to see WHY you're being denied access or WHY that file is not found.
Simple example, some distros will block regular user access to
/root. That doesn't mean that you can't access those files, it just means that YOUR user can't see them WHILE you're logged in with that user... which is why bash file/dir completion will not work if you cd to/root/path/to/dir. Log in as root in the terminal and it works just fine. Some even might out right not see the files if you're logged in as a user, instead of root, regardless if that user in the sudoers file or not (you type in the exact path to a dir/file in the terminal and it won't open/cd to it). In those cases, even sudo won't work for some things, you just HAVE TO work with root.To be honest, this is very rare and has happened to me like once or twice (on some distros). In most situations/distros, sudo will work just fine.
As a linux user and developer and someone who works with linux servers all day for 20 years.
Yes linux is complicated.
Unpopular opinion: The Windows Registry, a centralized, strongly typed key:value database for application settings, is actually superior to hundreds of individual dotfiles, each one written in its own janky customized DSL, with its own idea of where it should live in the file system, etc.
OP never watched the LTT Linux video
Edit: for people that also haven't watched it: Linus tried to use Pop-OS for gaming. When he tried to install Steam it uninstalled his desktop-environment leaving him with only a terminal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M
it did warn him to be fair. he had to type out "yes, do as i say", which is a HUGE red flag. even to me, a farely casual windows user.
Just watched that portion. When he scrolls down to "yes do as I say" you can literally see two lines above it stating it will remove desktop environment.
Outputs exist for a reason, folks.
And that is why Linux isn't as widely distributed as Windows. Linux is great, if you know what you are doing. But most of the world doesn't have the time needed to learn Linux well enough to avoid major fuck-ups like this.
Linux gives you a wall of text when all the user did (at least what they thought they did) is say install this program. The system ask "Are you sure?" And the user is like "Yes, just do it!" I can't imagine anything on Windows doing that lol.
I like Linux and I think it's great, but I can certainly understand why the majority of people are wary of it.
Windows would never show the user a wall of incomprehensible text with serious implications and expect them to just click yes!
Windows:
Linus was conditioned by Windows to just click "yes" on everything.
Because clicking yes will never catastrophically hose your environment.
That is an EULA ...
Most every piece of software has it.
Also, that EULA is 15 years old, couldn't find a more recent one?
Just read?
It was hidden in a massive wall of text. Ain't nobody got time for that
Man was installing Steam why does it even want to remove his desktop environment to begin with.
He specifically did it in the terminal, which is aimed for power user (unfortunately most guides tell people to use the terminal at this point, but this is starting to change), and typed the text with the warning above saying essential component will be removed, with the components clearly listed, and he read it.
When he did the install on store, which is meant for regular user, the installer did stop him and tell him essential part will be removed, and refuse to go through.
Installer problem will happen, most installer on windows run as admin, and can also break stuff if they want to.
So please pardon me, but I honestly don't see how much more user friendly this can be, maybe you have some ideas? The only option I can think of is to not give anyone the opportunity to remove desktop environment, but that is like android won't let you remove any launcher app.
To be fair, I think that the majority who knows what Linux is but never used thinks that the way to install things is with the terminal and doesn't know the Store GUI.
Maybe make it so it installs when you click it in the store?
The only reason he opened it in the terminal is because the store didn't work in the first place and it didn't give him any good explanation why.
Like I said, the installer has a bug. Softwares have bugs and installers are softwares. Installer bug can happen on Windows, Linux, and probably macOS too.
The obligation of the OS is to stop the installer when potentially unwanted behavior is detected. And the store and terminal are both doing that. The store even tells linus that this will likely be fixed later, and he can try again.
So I personally don't see what more reason the store can provide than "this installer is trying to remove essential software, try again later". Maybe the developer can be more specific to say that "this can brick your system", "remove your desktop environment", or "you will be booted into a terminal", but I doubt an average users will know what that means either.
A big reason people see less software bugs on Windows is because more people are using it and reporting bugs. This is why many linux user are tirelessly (perhaps annoyingly, to some) preaching Linux. Because getting more user to Linux is the only way to ensure our future of stable and free softwares.
Reminds me of bitcoin.
A particular version of the steam.deb file got pushed to the Ubuntu repository that had some bugged prerequisites. If it didn't recognize the exact DE you were using, it would deem it incompatible and try to remove it. This wasn't a problem for a lot of more popular distros running more popular DEs, but it caught Pop!_OS and their goofy fork of Gnome.
Prior to That Video, this issue had been found, reported and fixed. But it just so happens that bugged version was what was in the apt cache at the time the install image Linus used was made.
Further, Pop!_OS didn't ever suggest Linus do a system update after a fresh install, nor did it update the apt cache when launching the Pop!_Shop, so that out of date apt cache was used.
Further, instead of googling an error message he was given and trying to solve the problem, the child that walks like a CEO threw a tantrum about "you have to use the terminal" looked up the command to install Linux via apt, also failed to do an update first (which you typically do; most guides about installing something tell you do an apt update && apt upgrade first) and he just plowed right through to a borked install.
When there is text you are meant to read it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Ain't nobody got time for that
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
To play devils advocate, I'd say that the bigger issue is that Linus ended up in the terminal to start with, when he had no idea what he was doing in there.
If Linux is to hit the masses, then a beginner friendly distro should have the convention to install apps be by GUI instead of TUI, and guides should be updated to reflect this. That GUI-based installer should see that the "Yes, do as I say" prompt was triggered and in a clear and concise way, inform the user that important packages will be removed if they continue and they should not.
Effectively just having a much better interface for the user is what I'm saying.
It is a lot harder (and less helpful) in a written guide to tell someone to press a button in menu such-and-such; telling someone to open the terminal and copy paste a command is easier.
In addition (though I do not know if it applies so much to gui package managers) GUI apps also have the tendency to not have a stable interface, so a blender 2 tutorial will often not be useful for someone using blender 3, because the interface will have changed and buttons that were once in one place now are somewhere else or no longer exist. CLI programs for some reason are a lot more backwards compatible in my experience.
I think GUI apps should ideally be designed to be usable without the user knowing where something is beforehand (though that is not always possible, like in complex software handling a lot of stuff a new user may not be familiar with, when they only want to achieve a certain specific goal), making mentioning how the UI works almost superfluous in those cases.
No, it is most definitely not.
Any non-tech user would freeze at the mere sight of a command line. Let alone have to use it.
I've had people tell me I am a hacker because I open command prompt to ping something.
It amazes me the amount of grognards that despise any interface that isn't a command line terminal. "I can do everything on the terminal!" - True, but that's because the UI sucks and lacks proper buttons, widgets and whatnot. That no linux distro comes with a "builtin" icon (available after an installation) or shortcut to "update all programs" or "update only security packages", or even an easy solution to auto update everything on the background, without having to type the command, really shows how little thought is given to user experience. All solutions recquiring a terminal automatically fail in regards to bringing people to linux.
For me, it's not despising anything that is not the terminal but a simple preference for the terminal. Having started learning computers in a CLI and having worked professionally for over a decade mainly on the CLI, it's comfortable and familiar. I also like having scripting and regex capabilities built into my interface - a reason that I much prefer (neo)vim to VSCode and others.
Could I do nearly everything that I do in the terminal in a modern DE? Probably. I'm just not as familiar, so, it would take longer. Like writing in cursive for someone who rarely does anything but block letters.
That's not very accurate. Every modern desktop distro that I've used has this, from *buntu to SteamOS. Linux Mint probably has one of the best UI experiences for updates that I've seen and I frequently use it for managing kernels as it's much simpler to do with that tool than any other that I've used.
This is one that is somewhat tricky. Linux tends to be more geared towards more technical users. Probably a lot of us chronic Linux users came to computing when it was more of a niche thing for nerds and knowing how to use a computer meant more than writing documents, editing spreadsheets, or playing games on Newgrounds. A fault that many Linux users and devs have is an antipathy or indifference towards non-technical users. I know that I'm frequently guilty of the latter. Many of us, perhaps short-sightedly, are not concerned or interested in growing the userbase of the OS, which makes efforts like SteamOS particularly great due to their enabling of non-technical users.
What distros don't come with that? I'm running Debian and I get a notification on the desktop when I have updates available and it takes two clicks from that point to get them installed.
Several distributions do that. Opensuse for one
Counterpoint: Installing widely used software and following common instructions to do so should not ever put you one confirmation away from destroying your desktop environment, no matter how explicit that confirmation is.
I just accidentally deleted my crontab about an hour ago because r is right next to e.
Fortunately my computer backs itself up often so I could just grab the old crontab but it was annoying and would have been problematic if I didn't.
I also had to recover my computer a few months back because someone whoopsied the default apt repositories for Ubuntu x64 arch and pushed the x86 software there instead.
Counterpoint: Destroying my desktop environment is exactly the thing I want to do. For real, this is one of the first things I do on the regular. One safety-net for noobs is exactly enough, any more and it will become frustrating to power users.
...and installing Steam is the route you want to use to do that?
If you want to be able to tear down your environment and rebuild it or use something else yourself that's great. I don't want that taken away from you.
It absolutely should not be in the chain of possible effects from trying to install a common piece of desktop software with a broad target audience.
Not at all, and that's a good point that it'd make sense for a package manager to somehow discern someone doing
install steamfrom ones doingpurge gnome-desktop. But then, if the first resolves to the latter, something has already gone catastrophically wrong, any action here would be a stop-gap, which this whole "do as I say" thing essentially was. The good thing, at least, is that it's in our hands to come up with a better solution and propose it in a form of pull request.They should have made the confirmation be "unless I know what I am doing, this will break my system"
And Linus should have read more than one sentence of the scary warning.
Yeah lil bro is shadowboxing against a fictional, perceived "LTT".
I did a similar thing on linux mint while trying to get my audio system working how I wanted. Luckily it comes with terminal-accessible rollback by default via timeshift and I was able to revert the mistake.
Linux's modularity and customizability vectors for complications which Windows lacks, which is both an advantage and an issue. I prefer having it over not, though.
Linus is dunning-kruger crystallized and refined. He routinely talks authoritatively about subjects he knows little about. His qubit analogy is particularly wrong and annoying, and he doesn't stop bringing it up.
Either way, more idiot filters have been installed in front of that and you'll have to do way more work (likely learning something in the process) to fuck your system up like that.
Least condescending Linux user
Nah, it's just Linus. I have endless time for people who want to learn. Linus doesn't want to learn, he wants to be right.
The problem was using some esoteric loonix distro that's not Ubuntu or mint. Smh
Pop-OS is esoteric now?
Yes. Poop-OS
I suspect the actual problem was that Steam's Linux implementation is, uh... A little rough around the edges.
As in, there was at one point an error where the launcher could delete your entire hard drive.
The fact there are so many distros and only a handful are "the good ones" (which changes with every user you ask) is one of the major reasons Linux is is not user friendly at all.
Making users make a very major decision before they even install an OS is definitely not a good way to retain users, especially when there’s someone saying they’re wrong no matter what they pick
It's a problem with APT not updating it's packages/programs/version list before installing a software.
He should do "sudo apt update", before "sudo apt install steam", but of course it's apt problem for not doing it automatically. Someone who uses Linux for longer would install it from Flatpak app store or something, but it's clearly not simple "wrong distro, bro".
This is the exact reason I'm finally done with Windows. Customization and troubleshooting have become a nightmare since they started gi try and become more like Apple
I recently discovered, after a while of wondering why the audio quality in windows was worse than fedora that the automatic windows audio enhancements actually made the audio significantly worse 😅 meanwhile I still haven't figured out how to stop windows from randomly switching the audio source from my headphones to my nonexistent display monitor audio.
Open device manager, goto audio devices,then disable the audio driver for your monitor. Simple
it would be "simple", if start->settings wouldn't point me in an completely wrong direction. As it is, you need to know the secret phrase "device manager" (or "control panel" or "management console") to find the hidden settings-dialogs that will actually solve the problem.
Or you could right click the speaker icon in the taskbar
That's another secret you must remember.
be sure to click on "sounds" an not "open sound settings", because these are obviously total different things.
Thanks!
Right-click on the Sound icon, then Sound Settings.
You get to:
System > SoundYou can do stuff directly in the first panel, but scroll down:
System > Sound > All Sound DevicesFind your Display there, it could look like:
Click on it.
The first option in the detail view is to toggle it as a sound "output" device:
The options are "Allow" or "Don't allow". Once it's blocked, it's no longer in the list of options for switching easily between sound output devices (automatically or manually).
You should be able to disable your monitor's non-existant audio device in one of the settings menus. On Windows 10 it's in the old style control panel's audio device settings.
A big hurdle in any technological change is the "power users". People that have learned a lot about the old tech and have to face that knowledge becoming obsolete. And then having to learn a bunch of new things.
The same goes for Windows power users as people who know a lot about fossil fuel powered cars.
Linux: You can mostly stick to the GUI to install software, touch the terminal for obscure/command line applications and install GPU drivers and you have a functioning system
Windows: Forced to go into regedit and services.msc to fix high resource usage on a fresh install, debloat scripts to remove bloat on Windows and need to update system, scower the internet for drivers and all the software you need
I can see why I got fed up very fast trying to use Windows 11 in QEMU tbh...never trying that shitshow again...
Edit the only packages I had to install through Bash are: Neofetch, Htop, OpenSeeFace, Brave Browser, Wine, Nvidia drivers and ProtonVPN. Linux is very user friendly imo
7 packages from the command line isn't that many, but you're failing to account for the fact that to most Windows users, the amount they'll realistically install is 0, both because they don't know how to use the command line and because they don't know what to install. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/
And keeping your software up to date is a giant pain.
Use Winget or Chocolatey. If you use an app that's not packaged yet, it's easy to package it yourself.
But on Ubuntu I don't have to use the terminal to update my apps?
Scour
The longer i spend on lemmy the more curious i become about running linux.
You right click the candy crush icon and press remove.
Whotf does the other two things?
It's not exactly a fair comparison, the tweaks in the bottom panel aren't necessary for most users to do, yet a new user to Linux will need to get over a learning curve to do fairly basic tasks.
My litmus test for when Linux will be "ready" is can you do everything you need to do without using the terminal. So far I've yet to see a distribution that has achieved this.
The closest thing I've seen is SteamOS.
I set up Linux Mint for my parents a few months ago. Never touched the terminal, everything was done in Mint's UI; the initial installation, Timeshift setup, theme customizing, app installations for Spotify, OnlyOffice, VLC, and Chrome, automatic updates, printer and scanner setup.
Butter smooth so far.
Yeah I honestly rarely use the terminal on my mint install. And that's even as a developer.
To be fair I initially had to do some odd tweaks at first, namely getting my keyboard function key working how I wanted. But even that was just editing some config files, and a non-power user probably wouldn't have the kind of mechanical keyboard I have anyway.
What about Mint or PopOS? Also I don't agree with your definition of "ready". The stigma around the terminal must go! the current state of linux on ANY popular distro is: everyting can be done via GUI but some things are just easier to do in the terminal and it's not linux's faulth that terminal is just so good
There's no stigma with the terminal, the terminal isn't bad, I love the terminal.
However, it's not grandma friendly. It never will be. You need to think less about your preferences and more about a truly novice user. Most people don't want to tinker with their machines, they just want it to work.
There are plenty of distros out there that fit that criteria, Mint, Manjaro, EndeavourOS. You can do everything a normal user would do from a GUI.
SteamOS is the only good linux experience I have had, that's mostly due to the fact it's made specifically for the hardware that is running it.
Do you mind mentioning the others you've tried and what snags you hit?
I've worked with Arch, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and SteamOS, and I would say that while arch and Ubuntu can have a learning curve, Linux Mint is on par with SteamOS in usability.
I went through an episode of trying to swap to Linux about a year ago.
I tried Arch, got it all setup but had issues with smoothness just on the desktop. Tried Wayland and didnt work well with Nvidia, after trawling through random fixes to attempt, gave up.
I tried PopOS, just because it was apparently the best out of the box for games, which setup was easy, but again it was sluggish.
I went back to Arch again, got it setup and thought I would just put up with the laggy dragging of windows, to give the rest a chance. I use a slightly advanced audio setup on Windows with Voicemeeter and could not get a similar setup working on Arch. I couldnt even use apps such as Discord in the same way, along with other little things piling up I just went back to Windows which "just works".
I was running multi-monitor and apparently there's no simple support for mismatched refresh rates and Nvidia GPUs still have trouble in general.
I run a Pi and Linux is great for that, I like it, but in my opinion Linux is far from becoming a good Desktop OS.
That is some fair criticisms mixed with some things that are unfortunately not tackleable by linux devs. Arch is more a toy for configuring IMO; you lose alot of productivity up front getting it set up. I can't really speak for Wayland.
I've also been a fan of using Voicemeeter Banana, since it allowed me to output to both my speakers and headphones simultaneously, but only binding the audio control buttons to my headphones. Currently nothing like that functionally exists on linux that I've been able to find yet.
Nvidia has historically dragged its feet when providing support for its GPUs, and I definitely noticed alot of issues when running an Nvidia GPU back in the day, though I can't speak for how much of that is explicitly Nvidia and how much that's linux Dev lag.
Discord is even worse. It was news to me when switching back this year, but Discord has altogether stopped maintaining audio for game streaming. It's closed source, though, so there's nothing that can really be done about it. Overall, a not insignificant blow for gaming on linux.
I still get bad vibes from PopOS and have steered clear of it because of it. I would recommend you try Linux Mint at some point, since I've had a good experience with it and I regularly see others who equally recommend it.
Yeah, it's no surprise that the trillion dollar company's product is more functional. Linux is good for people who want to tinker and mess around, but we are kidding ourselves if we think it's ready for general adoption as a desktop OS. It works well for specific usecases like SteamOS because it's custom built to run with certain hardware.
I was going to try more, but honestly couldn't be bothered, I have everything I need with Windows without issue and while I was open to fiddle a bit, all the issues left a sour taste, so I will probably wait some time for the distros to mature a bit further,
That will probably never happen.
You have to understand that, one, Linux and the devs that do work on FOSS software, do so in their free time. Two, the devs that develop anything FOSS related usually develop things to fix/overcome personal problems they might be having in their own setup or workflow. If someone else happens to like using that, great, if not, hey, I just put it out there 🤷. Three, there is no guarantee that a particular piece of software that you like and is something niche, will be supported in the future. There are hundreds of examples like this in Linux and FOSS history in general. There isn't enough interest for it, the main dev drops development, so the project dies 🤷. Another project might take it's place, it might get forker, but if it's niche enough, you probably won't see that happen. So, the only other alternative you have is to get your hands dirty and keep patching the software to work on your particular setup, or in case of closed source software, patch your setup to make it work with that piece of software for the foreseeable future, until another piece of similar software pops up on the radar and then you can switch.
I'm sorry, it's just how things are. Linux and any other non-commercial OS project is basically a community effort thing. If everyone in the world knew how to code or patch, or at least 80% of people, then these projects would thrive, no doubt there, cuz the workload would be balanced between the users. That is not the case, so 10% of the people that use FOSS software are basically the maintainers of what is out there. That is just not enough 🤷.
You cannot say that definitely. There's every chance my problems are fixed, the more people who adopt linux the more similar problems people will have.
I agree that Linux desktop will probably never take off due to the nature of its development, but we dont know that for sure. If companies like Valve want to keep investing into it, there's always a chance.
+1 to all these issues.
I tried a similar setup and eventually gave up after the monitor problems. Having 4 displays with different resolutions and refresh types just doesn’t seem to work at all.
Yeah, apparently Linux users mainly use single monitor setups! Multi-monitor is so important and very common, so it was the last thing I expected to have issues with. Oh well.
To be honest, yes, I use a single monitor setup... though I don't think many Linux users use a single monitor setup, they just use matched monitors (buy 2, 3 of the same kind).
Even with matched refresh rates, the issues persisted.
Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).
I use the terminal out of preference, and because it's where I'm comfortable, but I can't think of any situation it's actually needed for general desktop use.
That is impossible. It's like saying for Windows "can you do everything that you can do in a GUI, in PS or cmd". That can never come true because the OS was just never designed that way.
Likewise, in Linux or any other POSIX compatible OS, you can't expect that. Everything UI related is designed to just be a wrapper around the shell. You can't expect everything to be configurable through a UI when everything in that OS is designed to run in the terminal (a few exceptions, but generally, yes, this is true).
Meanwhile on Windows 11 you need a terminal even for the basic installation and local user setup.
windows sucks ass for this exact reason but linux is definitely complicated and filled with weird bugs as well lol. i guess those bugs are better than spyware though
The problem with RTFM is that TFM often does not cover the problem, and broader knowledge of the OS is required. You can't expect every app to come with a manual that covers how the entire OS works, but that knowledge is often required to get work done in Linux.
People familiar with the guts of Linux or Windows will encounter these kinds of outside-the-instructions problems and know from experience what arcane setting to change or what 3rd party software needs to be installed before the procedures written in the manual will work as expected.
IMO, the Windows GUI lowers the bar to begin trial-and-error learning and makes the learning process faster.
Somethings are more complicated, others less and some others more entertaining if you like tinkering.
That's Linus of LTT in the top
"WhY iS pAcKaGe MaNaGeMeNt So HaRd" my brother in Christ you got one broken Deb that was packaged and provided for free by someone other than the vendor, the vendor provides their own installer you could have used that wouldn't have had the issue. You could have also used a flatpak. You were literally offered three ways to install the software on any operating system you could choose, and you gave up after the marginally simplest one failed and you were too lazy to troubleshoot it.
The donkey doesn't even know the first thing about package management or any part of the build process, and has no right whatsoever to talk about it as if the maintainers of the stack are to blame.
/rant fuck that self-absorbed short stack sponge
The great thing about Linux is if something has weird behavior and you're already exhausted all possible options to solve it, it is still possible to figure it out on your own because the source code is available.
I still don't know how windows people figure out how to fix such and such problems on windows with some registry entries. Did they ask a Microsoft employee, or did they mess around with the registry blindly until it's magically fixed?
Not everyone is a developer, but the vast majority of people use Windows. When an issue arises, it's easier for a non-programmer to search for help than look at code.
Sure, you also have that option on Linux, which would be the first thing you do anyway. But after you searched everywhere and found nothing, on Linux you still have an option to dig into the source code yourself, while on windows you're pretty much done unless you have a support contract with ms.
Ahh, look! Its my nearly decade long experience with Linux in one sentence! So that whole non-user-friendliness thing about Linux being uncomprehensible to amateurs, that's surely just around the corner for me now, right? Right?!
Not trying to argue any point here, ur comment in this context just made me chuckle.
I’m not a super casual user, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to try to dive into source to try to understand a bug in my OS. I’m just going to work around it and never think of it again.
You may feel that way, but not every power user is like you. Linux distro is not a monolith, it's made up of thousands of small components made by different people and organizations. If you look at some of those components source control (e.g. on GitHub or GitLab), you'll see a large portion of pull requests are done by their users who found bugs and decided to submit a fix themselves. For example, just look at how many pull requests libgweather got, and they're mostly submitted by gnome users who were mildly annoyed with the weather app.
It is actually easier than you think. With the help of the devs, you could easily solve your problem, plus make them aware of the bug and fix it in upcoming releases. It might take a few days of messages on git back and forth with them, but in the end, yes, you will most probably solve your problem.
No, you Google the shit out of that particular problem, visiting reddit, forums, blogs and god knows what else, find a few bunch of registry files or reg snippets, copy/paste that, do a sanity check on each and every one of them, backup the registry (or a part of it at least), import them one by one in the hope that one of them fixes the problem... and then you discover that these were meant for Windows 7 and not 10 and that 10/11 had that shit removed or doesn't actually obey that registry entry (a bug, they will fix it... some day...) and then just give up and learn to live with the problem.
They pay for books any expensive classes. I Boomer IT culture talent comes with money and age.
Source: Rejected several tiles for being too young to reasonably know Linux.
Windows is the much more difficult OS AFAIK. Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn't work well (pop up dialogs can be painful). I hate windows and managed to mostly avoid it until I switched jobs in 2017.
Ah, I see you have seen the UAC prompt as well.
Plenty of modal dialogs flat out don't work with keyboard follows mouse. But now that you mention it, its windows dialogs (not from 3rd party apps) that seem to be the most problematic.
Yes, I do agree. The one that haunts my dreams: the credentials one 😤. Credentails come up and you start typing and... nothing.. god damn it, not again!
I think it's obvious I'm a sysadmin 😂.
ltt is so cringe for all things linux and on reddit they are seen as the messia of linux WTF is even happening
I think both Windows and Linux are scary when you want to exactly fits you need.
In using linux I started to know what is a DE, kernel, kernel argument, GRUB, systemd, selinux, etc. and I am the person that want to learn NOTHING about my OS, they just unfortunately pops up during troubleshooting.
So is Windows, device manager, ipconfig, registry table, chocolatey, cmd vs powershell, WSL, and many more. But I would say, if you don't care about bloat and ads, and are willing to make stupid compromises, like copy a email to a notepad, so you can see it while drafting a new email. Windows might breaks slightly less often than linux depending on your hardware. But that doesn't mean Windows don't break, in fact Windows broke just in the first linux challenge video.
For Linus's experiment, I don't really think it is a fair comparison between Linux and Windows. No one is going to learn a OS in a month, and expect to have the ability to not harm themselves, not on Windows not on Linux not on macOS.
But it does serve as a good simulation of a busy Windows enthusiast moving to linux. Personally, I don't think this should be the only criteria to judge the linux eco system, but it is a important criteria, and linux has many things they can improve in this regard (and they are indeed improving).
However, popOS installer for steam breaking DE is a legitimately rare event, and it happens to the most popular tech youtuber is even more rare...
I haven't watched LTT for quite a while. A lot of his videos entertained me, but the guy himself...
His recent video on the Fairphone is what did it for me.
His "deal breaker" is that the notification sound is too loud? Replacing a battery by heating up your phone, prying it open, disconnecting the flimsy battery cable and prying out the glued in battery is apparently just as easy as using your hands. Seriously?
Personal preferences exist you know. Also not being able to turn down the notification volume would annoy me personally to no end. But if it doesn't annoy you, is it still unimportant to be informed about this? So you know before you buy?
Calling something that can be fixed with a simple software update a deal breaker is strange to me, yes.
Adding it as critique so it can be fixed is fair, as a reviewer I expect them to note things like these. I do not need them to add their own opinion on whether this is a deal breaker or not.
I find opinions to be interesting and somewhat informative. I dont agree personally, but appreciate the input. If you view it as an opinion I think its okay. Everyone adds their personal opinion in one way or another, I think its good that its labeled that way.
His fairphone review was super based. Refusing to pander to deluded fanboys that are willing to pay $500 for a buggy pile of junk where the touchscreen software is broken.
Interestingly, I like to keep my network connected devices up to date. Why would I disable that on any OS?
For me, candy crush et al was never installed on my Windows computers by default, both on home and pro versions. There were install shortcuts, but never the actual programs themselves.
I expect a modern computer to be able to do whatever updates it wants in the background, and apply any kernel changes when I restart it. Ubuntu has been able to do both for years.
Actually, Linux in general, not just Ubuntu. You could even update the app while running said app (like your browser). It won't crash, you just have to restart it in order to use the new version. You could literally be running every single app that the update updates and it won't crash. Once loaded in RAM, there is nothing tying it to the place where it resides on disk. You could even delete the binary if you'd like, it would still keep running... unless you close it, then you won't be able to run it again, lol 😂. There are a few exceptions though, like services (daemons), but that is only in systemd land, other init/service managers will allow you to just restart the service and load the new updated version of it.
Keeping a Pro or a Home install up to date is not always a good thing. From a security standpoint, yes, I do agree, but when half your personal files go missing after an update... you kinda start wondering why you let this thing update automatically in the first place.
LTSC editions though, yes. I leave them to autoupdate. They do it like once a month anyway, so it's not that big of a deal anyway, it's not really such a big problem. And the updates don't take that long, no new features are added, just security updates and that's it.
So, if you're worried about security and being up to date, I'd recommend the Windows LTSC editions. That is the only thing I ever install if I have to install Windows.
One time I used the store UI thing in Ubuntu to install a package and it made it so that every subsequent time I opened it it would just freeze. I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it via the command line because it had some kind of lock on it. After awhile I gave up and reinstalled windows.
Hostile != user-unfriendly
I believe that, in life, among the worst qualities is the obtuseness of those who do not make an effort to understand the reasons for things and settle on a reality of simplifications and superficiality. Linux has the educational merit of forcing us to dig beyond that superficial layer.
(Sorry for my poor english)
This is rage bait
I just spent the last 6 hours trying to get my home assistant VM to run on boot up because I’ve spent the last 6 months unable to get Linux to stop automatically rebooting for unattended upgrades.
I’m far from a power user but it shouldn’t be so fucking hard. It’s like 3 clicks to disable automatic upgrades/reboots in Windows.
Also with LLMs getting good the less informed user can make changes they want and learn as they do with less effort so lower barrier to entry. The Arch wiki isn't even that hard if you have a level headed 24/7 assistant that knows enough and can reason well enough to teach you something. Only if you make sure that you never expect perfection. I don't trust people's work blindly so why would I blindly trust an LLM? That's the lessen we gotta learn. Use the brain lol
Error, you app has unexpectedly closed!
havent used windows or mac in years. feels good.
Application has failed successfully.
Or use ltsc like a chad
I have also mentioned this on more than a few occasions. I dual boot (very rarely to Windows nowadays) and I always use LTSC installs on all my dual boot setups. 0 problems thus far regarding GRUB and other Windows update related issues.
I still don't know why people use Pro... maybe LTSC is more niche than I thought and MS is not pushing ads for that one out there.
A lot of misinformation for ltsc, people thinking its only for kiosks and cant be used as a daily.
Given the choice for sketchy script messing with registry or sketchy key I'm going sketchy key, at least I know windows iso is legitimate, crazy so few know of ltsc and choose the latter.
Yeah, I'm surprised as well. Not enough research I guess... MS is very clear about what LTSC is and what it's not, as well as what it can do and what not.
Oh well, I spread the word when and where I can, will keep doing so. I hope dual booters catch on the LTSC installs and have less problems with GRUB.
LTSC gang
The only real issue I've had with Linux is trying to get my old Drobo 5C to work. (it's a self-managed dynamically adjustable/resizable raid array that just presents itself as a single 70tb usb hard disk. The company that made them dissolved a few years ago)
It's formatted in ntfs and loaded with 25tb+ of data from when I ran windows primarily.
It'll mount and work temporarily, but quickly stops responding, with anything that tries to access it frozen. Particularly docker containers.
Then it'll drop into some internal data recovery routine (it's a 'black box' with very little user control, definitely wouldn't be my choice again, but here we are), refusing to interact with the attached system for half an hour or so. When it finally comes back, linux refuses to mount it. 'dirty filesystem', but ntfsfix won't touch it either. Off to windows and chkdsk, then rinse and repeat.
I gave up when one of those attempts resulted in corrupt data (a bunch of mkvs that wouldn't play from the beginning, but would play if you skipped past the first second or two). I can't backup this data, (no alternative storage or funds to acquire it) so that was enough tempting fate.
I ended up attaching it to an old windows laptop that's now dedicated to serving it via samba :(
Really looking forward to setting up a proper raid array eventually, but till then I'm stuck with 11mbps. I'd love to rent storage temporarily so I can move the data and try a different fs on the drobo...
You could probably get a Gbit LAN USB card added to that so you could at least get 30MB out of the thing 🤷.
I'd need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn't upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop...
I've got a second desktop that's got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that'd probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.
Idk, still thinking on it.
Ah, if the thing has USB 3.0, then the NIC in the laptop is probably 100Mbit (lower end models had 100Mbit even if they were newer), that's your main issue, not SMB. SMB is a TCP/IP protocol, has nothing to do with hardware implementation and has no speed limits (at least none that I'm aware of). It goes as fast as the slowest part in the chain.
Winaero Tweaker makes it as simple as a checkbox.
You can do all that without ever opening a single commandline.
You can't even do that to install software on the majority of Linux.
Meanwhile if you wanna play a game on linux you have to research on forums with neckbeards that act all high horsey and get mad at you for asking questions they deem simple. If they do answer its cryptic like: "oh you just use simplinuxuser-bash-sh bro". Then by the time you get the game to run you better hope its not on a laptop with integrated graphics and a nvidia card because by god making the game only see the nvidia card over the integrated graphics if the game doesnt have the option to swap which card youre using good luck to any new user.
Windows users just go to steams website, install steam, install game, play. Windows 10+ will install basic nvidia drivers without you doing anything at first bootup with internet connection. Look, I use linux, windows, macos in my house..windows is still my primary driver even with my steam deck being a close second these days. Im all for linux getting more use but its not easy stop acting like it is..its a hobby, its fun, thats it.
whenever someone comes to me asking for help on windows, I first tell them straightway that windows is shit, and I know nothing about it. then I spend half an hour searching for answers to resolve the problem, only to curse it again and give up, before telling then again to use a better operating system(i.e., GNU/Linux).
Not true , Show me on Linux except may be one or two flavours how to add program in start-up, a windows 98 and windows 11 has same place and is all known. Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux , unlike plug and use in windows
Just stop saying Ng Linux is better , it's not for regular use . I know you dudebros will get hurt and downvote me . Linux is not easy, does not have MANY MANY Utilities which are present for windows and it's just not usable for users .
You're just more familiar with windows. You likely grew up with it and depending on your age were taught it in school. You're biggest gripe seems to be having to touch the terminal to install things, but to me, I think it's weird to use a browser to install things. This is where that esoteric knowledge comes in.. you know which download button is the real one that won't download a virus.
I would agree a few years ago, but saying that it's generally not usable for users is (in my opinion) wrong. If you're only going to use a browser, and watch some videos, Linux is fine. If you're a gamer and only use Steam, Linux is fine. Linux was also fine for me when installing Lutris to run other Windows games like Trackmania. For both those cases, I didn't even have to touch the command line. If you're a programmer, Linux is probably fine, because you have more knowledge on how command lines work anyways.
If you have any kind of advanced use case that doesn't have a well established solution, and you have to research (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), that's probably not fine for a normal user. But more and more tools do have established solutions that work out of the box, so I'd say it's getting more fine.
Whether Windows, Mac or Linux is better is a question of use case and other factors in my opinion. You only used Windows your whole life and don't want to get used to a new thing? Then don't. You love the Apple ecosystem and want to pay the premium? Do so. But I feel like outright saying Linux isn't for regular use has become false in the recent years, as there are quite a few use cases by now that can use Linux without problems.
I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the "IT guy" I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about "being in the same place for 25 years". This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let's not start about systemd now, I don't care), but one new "skill" to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I've learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.
Hum, all of them I've been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it's been a feature for a long time. I don't like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it's target then name or the other way around).
The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn't use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it's not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.
I've seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I've never used KDE, it's a long story, but I guess the same would apply).
For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).
Ok Linus
100% agreed. Once you disable all the unnecessary stuff Windows comes with you'll be left with a stable system that is compatible with everything from professional to hobbyist software. Meanwhile under Linux you'll spend all your days on getting a basic system to run properly (for some distros) or trying Wine, virtualization and other subpar hacks to get any kind productivity and ability to cooperate with others. :)
Until next update, where they may just blacklist your CPU just because
Or an update where they delete all your files again.
2018: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-october-2018-update-file-deletion-bug-story 2020: https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/
These both happened to me. I was already looking into switching to Linux in 2020, and the last update did it for me. Have been only been using Linux at home ever since.
Just wait for the next version of insert-non-debian-linux-distro and you won't be able to boot after trying an update. :)
I find it very interesting that I always see a lot of people complaining about those kinds of updates breaking Windows all the time. In my experience I've only seen it happening with old ass , cheap hardware computers. Never had issues myself with mid range and hardware from reputable brands. If you've a computer from Aliexpress or some Chinese brand, oh well, you get what you payed for.
Sure buddy, I'll take your unsourced claim as an equivalent to my sourced one! /s
Do you know what anecdotal evidence is?
This is some weird tribal emotional stuff.
I run both on the same machine in VMs, had this fedora install since 2019 and kept up with the version upgrades every year. Its just worked without issue during that whole period. I use office in the web app. Windows is there to run cad/cam software. It feels more gross with all the candy crush etc that you have to remove, but it works fine to run the software I need it for.
What's with all the hyperbole above? Did someone hurt you?
And now you suddenly have to manage two operating systems with all their quirks. Nice!
Going full Linux desktop kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays.
Why not just give in an manage A SINGLE yet productive OS that is widely supported by every vender and tool you might need? To Microsoft's credit they made WSL and Windows Terminal very well and it's way easier to run the 1 or 2 Linux-only applications on those than the other way around.
Err OK. I passthrough a card to each, switch with KVM. Its like having 2 native machines. According to you I have loads of issues, I guess I just haven't found them yet? What should I be giving in to?
This is really weird,
ps, I sometimes game on either system, still can't tell any performance difference from when it was bare metal. I guess I could be super lucky considering all those issues I should be having. Or maybe things aren't quite as dramatic as you've portrayed them
How are you getting your video back into the main system? Some kind of remote desktop protocol? That adds delay. Unless your VM is attached to e dedicated screen you'll have issues there.
The host is headless, no video output. The 2 VMs have a GPU passed directly through vfio, so there is no additional delay. Both GPUs connect to the same 2 monitors and USB by a KVM, so its one button press to flip between systems. Though I often run the cad software over RDP, as a little extra latency when using that doesn't bother me.
This highly dependent on what you do, do you do graphics or video editing then you are right, do you do non-Windows specific coding? Its the exact opposite.
Not just that, same for every advanced MS Office product, any other enterprise desktop MS application, architecture, a lot of engineers...
Jetbrains is available for all platforms and runs equally good on all of them.
Ahaha while you aren't wrong, you're a bit off as well. I know lots of developers doing their jobs under Windows and they'll be really annoyed if forced to deal with Linux for their jobs. Not everything is lower level shenanigans and to be fair almost nothing is low shenanigans nowadays. Your run-of-the-mill average developer is doing stuff in web related technologies and can get just fine under Windows. After all there's always WSL and Docker and Microsoft did a nice job with Windows Terminal.
You may find it hard to believe but Microsoft positioned themselves very well to take a large chunk of the current and future developer ecosystem, be it via WSL, nice tools, IDEs or whatever.
Nah, Wine runs most XP-times software better, Windows 10+ sometimes not at all. Some people do hacks like running wine in WSL because of this.
There goes your compatibility. Not to mention that Windows is probably the most incompatible OS (to the rest) in wide use (filesystem, non-POSIX, drivers, etc.)
You're full of shit. Wine still fails at basic Win32 API calls available since Windows 95 and most thing that fail under modern Windows versions are usually GPU related tasks like games and the fact that you don't have specific DirectX or DirectPlay features available on your modern OS and/or GPU and those cases there's dgVoodoo2.
Do you really want to talk about compatibility? Just try to install MS Office 2003 and Photoshop 6 under Windows 11 - you'll fine that both will work just fine without hacks.
They have app specific "hacks" in place for old popular software. Like Winamp and the ones you mentioned.
I won't consider using dozens of random debloating scripts made by reverse engineering Windows binary files a stable experience.
Also the second part is clearly frustration of running Windows-only software on Linux. Like, just look at installing Linux vs Windows experience. On Windows there is no live ISO, super outdated look, terrible user unfriendly partitioning section and after that they don't even show you a nice welcoming overview of the system like Gnome or KDE now have.
The thing is that this isn't correct.
Windows' bloat/spyware can be disabled via group policy and it works really well because it was designed to allow it. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable the "spyware" otherwise they couldn't use it.
Microsoft provides very detailed documentation into the bloat that you can follow to disable what you don't want. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services. Those "dozens of random debloating scripts" are usually just following that guide, not much else.
I'm not saying Windows is good, I'm just saying it delivers and for the hassle that it takes to run Windows-only software (that most people require) under Linux, most people might be better off by spending a quarter of that time debloating Windows.