I'm gonna be honest, 99% of what I need to do, I do through Discover. Like, why would I bother typing a command out when the update button is right there.
CachyOS now doesn’t even ship with Discover and if you install it there’s a banner warning you not to use it to update base packages as it can mess stuff up.
CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it's fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don't know enough about package management to know for certain.
Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn't really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don't remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.
This exchange was 2 months ago, so it's possible that things have improved since then, but that's not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.
What I'm about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.
A Shelly developer explained to me that it's not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it's more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn't give me the half-baked vibe, I'll happily give it another chance.
I think Flatpaks are the future for general user installed apps. It's way more secure and user friendly for non tech people. I've even had some flatpaks run significantly better, like Brave, despite conventional wisdom saying otherwise for a browser.
this sane comment seems so hard for many Linix users to understand. I use LMDE, i want to click the icon on my toolbar and have zero interest in the OS itself
I actually like both Bazaar and discover. I enjoy using them to just browse for interesting apps. For linux to ever become adoptable for more people, good GUIs are absolute must haves. If you don't like them that is of course fine, but it serves the greater good to have the option of using them.
Why and which did you use? I haven't had an issue with KDE Discover. Pop Shop was ass a few years back but it works well now that it is "Cosmic Store".
The GNOME one that comes with Debian is useless. There's like 3 things on it and of course they're all out of date (Debian thing). It also doesn't work to uninstall applications. The Ubuntu one of course pushes snaps so it's no good. The Mint one likewise pushes flatpaks. In general across all of them there never seems to be much listed on them, so going there to browse isn't useful. I can't think of any other specific issues but just in general over the past 8 years they are always buggy and annoying to use.
The Gnome store on Debian worked pretty okay for me, though it is a bit slow and always like, reloads the page you're on after installing something, which is annoying. It uninstalled apps fine, AFAICT.
It had access to the entire Debian repo for me, so I'm not sure why only 3 things were showing up for you.
The Mint store has flathub enabled by default, but you can flip it off in the preferences. If flathub is enabled, it's show both the flatpak and the native version from the repos, if available, allowing you to choose.
Most packages in Mint you can download from the system repo. You don't have to use flatpacks. I have my LMDE set to show only system packages since i'm not a fan of flatpacks.
Linux software repos can usually be trusted to a far greater degree, and never come with odd malware toolbars or weird 3rd party 'downloaders' like windows install wizards can come with.
Ironically I liked Chocolatey package manager on Windows. Hitting update and everything just updates is great. I hate launching a program and it’s like “here’s an update you need to do before using this and if you kick it down the road you’ll forget about it till next time you launch me”
You can also download and double click executables that have no dependencies (like Pocketbase). The installation process handles resolving dependencies.
The most obvious bait to be was 1 hour install time. Windows 11 took 2 hours to install, CachyOS took like 5 minutes. I imagine Arch is similar, there is simply no way. Lol
Did you say "update and shutdown while also rebooting?"
Coming back to my PC and it being on when I expect it off, along with the notification that I hadn't used notifications in a while, is what pushed me over the edge to running linux for everything.
No it won't be changing until Win11 actually breaks or dassault scraps PDM(actually as much or more of a trashfire as windows). I'll just find a new career eventually.
It took me a bit to figure out, but winapps might work for you. A couple of applications I use at work require me to have a windows VM, which is still way less of a headache than straight windows.
This right here is exclusively why I had a scheduled event on my windows system, where if the computer was still on at 4 in the morning, it would turn itself off.
I never had this issue prior to Windows 10, but update and shutdown felt like an update and maybe shut down because there was a good 20 or 30% chance that when it rebooted to apply the changes, it didn't turn itself back off again.
I must have had rotten luck because whenever I updated Windows, it would never shut down for me. Eventually, I just stopped using 'update and shut down'.
Yeah, I had more issues with Windows deciding to shut down without updating than having it not shut down after updating.
Like that would drive me crazy to have checked for updates, have it say your updates are ready to install, press the reboot now button, and it decides that for whatever reason it didn't want to install the pending updates.
That's apparently fixed now. I have to use windows for work and they finally fixed that stupid issue in one of the last couple of updates. It's still extremely painful to use though.
Sounds like me with my eee-PC going through a good chunk of troubleshooting just to find out the reason why Wi-Fi drivers aren't working is because it's a 32-bit system and the arch project as a whole decommissioned 32-bit.
They have a dedicated 32-bit system branch, but still wifi driver support on it sucks.
I recently figured out that Windows installs can go way faster if you have a slightly better USB stick. I bought an Intenso High Speed Line 64 GB for 10.90€ and it cut down the time by half or even two thirds I would say.
Of course I try to avoid installing Windows in the first place, but I'm not just working on my own machines.
Sure, and Internet speeds probably matter a bit too. The download part was a bit faster than I remember, but then it hung up on the later parts for a while. Lol
No offense, but what are you installing it on? One of the things I oversee at my job is imaging. Installing fresh windows on any of our hardware is between 7 and 15 minutes total. Since windows 10 I also haven't seen any need for additional drivers either unless you have something uncommon or want to replace one. Not trying to defend Windows, I just can't understand how everyone always has the worst problems imaginable with it.
In the case I'm referencing, I was installing Windows 11 for a five year old gaming computer using the Windows 10 upgrade software, no USB or anything like that.
Technically I was going to use a custom USB made with Rufus to remove copilot, but by the time I got there they had already started the upgrade process. It really did take two hours, including the 15 minutes before I got there.
Admitting that works, then you've only got windows. You still have to install all the tools and productivity software. On any distribution, all that stuff gets installed as a matter of fact, and you're basically done after 20 minutes or so.
The vast majority of computer users with those kinds of issues are
probably using windows home
On a big box store computer with a platter drive
an i3 cpu
and 8gb of ram
windows 10 couldn't reliably run it's own bundled software (Mail), by itself, with nothing else open, without that one app going "not responding" every few minutes on a computer with those specs.
Last time i checked, Walmart, best buy, costco, etc were still selling those specs with win11 which is notably bulkier and slower than 10, especially without an ssd, so things have only gotten worse for the average non-power-user.
That's a perfectly servicible spec for basic operations on a mint install, you could probably even watch netflix or youtube on it with linux, but i wouldn't want to run windows newer than xp on it.
It doesn't help that big box retail stores are scam artists.
That was one of the things I hated about Walmart was they would sell these super cheap systems that I kid you not would crash on the demo software.
Like we had an HP flip-style laptop that they sold for $130 a few years back. And it was so bad that we intentionally ran it under a default account instead of a demo account. Because if we installed the demo software on it, Windows would run out of space and blue screen about time windows tried to update it.
Windows 11 took me 7 hours over 3 different days. Had to start and stop multiple times, had to retry multiple times, had to post support requests and wait, and to dive into bios because default settings that worked fine with Linux were making windows kill itself.
Oh yeah, my first try was downloading a Windows ISO and using KDE writer to put it on a USB, BIG mistake because we all know that windows sabotages their ISOs so that you can only burn them with a windows burner program.
Even when it finally worked, it still took a goddamn 2 hours and so many ads, so many "please also buy this!"
Once it was done I had setup windows with steam for my step son and then he didn't use the machine anyway
Lots of options and you'll need to spend some time RTFM. But if you already know how you want to partition your disks, then the basic installation (with a network controller!) takes about two minutes.
Then you can restart into the cli, and the real questions - what else am I going to install? - can begin.
They added a feature to archinstall that times your install and tells you how much it took. My record is 3 minutes, and it wasn't even on a super powerful gaming computer or anything (it was a lenovo ideapad 5 laptop)
I mean if you dont know jack shit about linux or arch and try to follow the guide I'd imagine it could take you quite a while. It took me a while at least.
I did hear Arch is a bit more trouble, yeah. CachyOS was pretty straightforward from desktop environment to automatically detecting hardware and such. Pretty much the same features you see with Windows, just a lot faster.
Nobody’s complaints with setting Linux up are that it runs slowly.
I mean, really depends on the device. I've got a machine running Mint and it kinda chugs along. But it's... I want to say at least 15 years old? Probably due for a RAM swap at the very least. Takes about five minutes to fully boot and if I run more than a few apps it drags.
At some point, there's only so much an OS can do for you.
The bit about incompatible drivers and the mess of third-party installs necessary to get it in a comfortable state also rang true. Plus all the minutea of configuration, so you're not typing in your password every time you sneeze. Windows does tend to come fully loaded out of the box, even if you're using a bunch of their mediocre native apps. And the desktop instance tends to be pre-configured to satisfy your average desktop user.
Of course, Apple takes all of this to the next level. Really straight jacking everything you can do so that it's a unform experience from device to device. And I hate that shit, too, even if my machine boots fast straight out of the box.
I thought Debian was as sluggish as Windows until I was forced to use the LXQt desktop environment instead of the default GNOME on an old Compaq laptop since that's all it could handle. Turns out, GNOME looks nice but it kept my old laptop's mid-2000s i386 CPU churning at 50% 24/7. LXQt? Barely a blip. Sure, it couldn't run Firefox quickly, but at least its fan was silent when idling or when I was simply using the laptop as a dumb SSH client into a much more powerful remote server.
I now use LXQt on my main workstation because I don't need fancy tilíng windows or Wayland.
I now use LXQt on my main workstation because I don’t need fancy tilíng windows or Wayland.
You can have fancy tiling windows and Wayland without Gnome! Wayland is actually pretty great for low-resource devices, I recently did a glmark benchmark on a Raspberry Pi 3B, and on the Wayland session (with the wayland version of glmark) I got about double the score of the Xorg session (with the xorg versioni of glmark). It's just that Raspberry Pi OS's Wayland session doesn't use Gnome, but LabWC.
And I always configure my LXQt desktop with a tiling wm, works great and looks great IMO. Plus, the LXQt devs are working on making it fully Wayland-compatible.
Nobody’s complaints with setting Linux up are that it runs slowly.
Eehh... I put Mint on my old laptop, and it was like being stuck in a tar, even though it ran Windows 10 without problems. In the end I just switched it, to another distro, and now it works fine.
Not true. They complain because of no hardware decoding, defaults lacking GPU acceleration, they complain about KDEs file manager, Gimp, Libre Office, etc. If you had problems with Windows, maybe consider 'skill issue'.
There is exactly one(1) guy posting on that sub, and he's here on .world too.
Also, don't miss out on his hits such as "Linux empowers criminals"(especially the part where he captions a Stallman photo with "Oy vey!") and "Kernel Anti-Cheats are a necessary evil". Dude's either a fed or a chud.
It still had a pretty low requirement for ram... like 500Mb or so. I solved it switching, first to xfce4, which i loved and later on with i3wm whoch i believe asks like <4Mb. I may be wrong
That's crazy. Nowadays I mainly use sway (tiling wm requiring loads of configuration, definitely not for everyone), which I thought was lightweight as well. But I just checked and it's using a whole 500MB, wonder what it needs that for.
Then why do people pretend that being 'downvoted to hell' means anything here? Why would they point and say 'echo chamber' hypocritically?
The truth is that Reddit is shady AF with their shadow bans, control of information, inconsistent rule following, etc. I'm actually trying to get more users here.
I tried on Gab. -What happens when I correct someone on Gab about Linux? -They upvote and thank me for it! A community there for "Linux sucks" served no purpose.
edit: I'm also against religion (worse cult) and didn't want to support the owner's evangelism. -But the site is ran pretty decent, and it's not bad when curated (another shady thing about Reddit is the limitation on blocking users).
I've seen a few of your posts on [email protected]. I can appreciate a minority view and you don't strike me as hostile with other users, but many of the points you made frankly make little sense to me. Some even stike me as deranged or at least misinformed. I hope you are doing this out of passion or get some other form of genuine joy out of it. I'd hate for Linux to make you anyone feel miserable.
If you point out any where I'm wrong, I will correct it.
So far, none of the LiGNUxers are.
AFAICS they work for Microsoft.
It's like when I was into conspiracy theories and wondered why Alex Jones wasn't easily recognized for the controlled opposition, he is.
Imagine correcting me on anything. Everyone criticizing the community has the opportunity and NEVER does.
Maybe because I'm right and not deceiving people and turning them into hardened Microsoft fans.
It's precisely the reason why many other licenses exists, and that are used for those who want to offer OSS as a service. It is still open, but the service is sold as a guarantee.
But never mind that. Because when you look at stuff like Microslop, Apple, and pretty much any other commercial proprietary software developer. They do so the same way. Games are not sold, they are licensed, with no guarantees of functionality either, just to put one example. It's a mar of software as an industry, not exclusive to FOSS and definitely not created by the ideological underpinnings of FOSS.
Like, MS offers guarantees of quality and offer liability on their ToS for corporate contracts, but not for the version people can acquire for their home PC. Even then, the liabilities are very limited and cautiously defined. Essentially, unless MS is doing IT directly for your company, you are on your fucking own. And then, support channels for corporate service are very limited on what they do and do not offer. The average Joe buying a Mac or any other PC with Windows essentially get the same “software is provided 'as is' and we don't care if it doesn't work." It's not associated to FOSS exclusively.
How about I despise communism and how it only works when workers are forced to work at gunpoint. Or, I haven't seen any legit gripes against Microsoft.
Politically, I'm centrist, because both pure extremes fail. -China isn't 100% communist.
Linux takes the position of 'competition' for Windows while being an eternal loser. They squash other great projects by taking their ideas and making them work with then objectively shitty (for desktop) kernel.
Linux is a 'best case scenario' for Windows. (Yeah, you're actually helping Microsoft by being an evangelist).
Communism literally never had a chance to evolve as a system because USA systematically fucked it over and fought it at every step, in the process committing horrific crimes against humanity along the way. Would you like some historical examples of what capitalism has done to humanity and democracy worldwide for centuries or are you just more of a "see the thing with communism is... It just doesn't work!" kind of guy?
I rarely ever feel the need to comment, but going down the rabbit hole of reading your comments, posts, and history of the /c/ you moderate, I must say, you are either one of the most dedicated trolls on the internet or one of the most mentally ill person on the internet.
The level of vitriol you spew in your absolutely deranged, completely misinformed, straight up false posts is astonishing, like if I didn't think you were mentally ill, I could have suggested that you should teach a rage baiting class, but for now, I suggest you seek help for your mental health. From a licensed professional, not the Windows trouble shooting tool.
I'm sceptical this is genuine... it sounds like cope to me, but it's interesting... Anyway, I appreciate my experience isn't universal. So what Linux alternatives do you mean, like BSD and stuff?
I try to keep an open mind about people preferring the Microsoft stack, but from the first time I used a terminal on Linux I was sold. I could never go back.
I still do support for people who use Windows PCs, so I've got to see how it's changed over the years. Personally I don't know how anyone puts up with it.
It seems like Windows keeps getting worse as Linux keeps getting better... like... do you enjoy using Windows 11? Does it feel good to you?
Man even I miss XP. But yeah I guess anything is better than 10 lol.
Went to an old school LAN party recently where one of the machines was running XP (and a CRT 🤤) and I forgot what a tight shell that was. Played Quake 2, Star Craft, Total Annihilation — no problems.
I still prefer the a la carte approach of linux, but I have a much higher tolerance for tinkering than my windows buds. I love having my fingers in every part of the machine.
You just have to have a good rage bait title and can write literally anything under it and the discussion will be about fantasies manifested in peoples heads based on the title.
I'm sitting here reading these comments as the low-end Dell laptop I just picked up for software testing is booting up and updating Windows. For logistic reasons, had to pick one up today, so had the pleasure of dealing with Best Buy sales staff 🙄
From powering it up, it's been 1.5 hours with updates and multiple restarts. Half of it was spent showing a progress indicator with a carousel slideshow of all the great AI tools I have no interest in using. Then it insisted on signing in with a Microsoft cloud account.
It's been eons since I actually ran a fresh copy of Windows. Amazed people still put up with all this nonsense.
Seriously, dealing with Windows OOBE is like walking through a used car lot.
"Decline offer"
"Decline offer"
"Not right now"
<hey, we need to update! See you in 30 minutes!>
"Remind me in three days"
"Turn off cloud backup"
"Yes, I'm really sure"
"Decline offer"
"Share minimum telemetry" (oh, you thought you could turn that off? Lol. Lmao, even)
I don't know how anyone finds that mess easier than linux.
It's not easier than Windows, it's the devil you know.
Sure it's slow, but you know how slow. It does updates at the wrong time, but you know it will turn on again eventually. It sends all your data to Microsoft, but no-one has come to your door to harass you because what's in your data.
Linux is some obscure thing that would take time and effort to learn, and you're tired from work and just want to use a computer without thinking about it.
Things might be different if Windows wasn't the default/only option when buying a new laptop.
You made it sound easy. The "share minimum telemetry" step requires you to click 6 different toggles and then an accept button. It's even worse in win10, where you have to select the correct 6 checkboxes out of 12, and some of them are half hidden because they don't fit in the screen at VGA resolution. The Windows OOBE comes straight from hell, as a punishment to humanity for making sand think.
The best buy sales staff are interesting because they practically make you beg for the thing you already had your mind made up about when you walked in the store.
Not for a newbie who wants to learn. Arch is actually not difficult at all, just time consuming. If you do a manual install, you have to read about every step and make choices.
Thats how you learn your system. After install, you know exactly what files you modified and where they are if you want to make further changes.
I think it's a beautiful system. Its not for people who just want a windows replacement though. It's for people who wants to know their system.
People don't realize the power that comes from actually knowing how your system works. It's the same as learning any skill. It gives a feeling of confidence and comfort.
Yes it's worth it many times over. I learned Linux on arch like 15 years ago. :) Its been paying off enormously during my career and private hobby life. Last windows I ran at home was windows 7.
I just bought a laptop with windows 11 on it and I'm currently working my way through installing arch. I've been using Bazzite for a while on my desktop now but I still don't really understand a lot of the systems so I'm wanting to really dig in to it and understand why things are installed and where they are and stuff.
No I didn't mean it that way. Ok, I'll put it in other words. Certain people have an interest in specific things. I am interested in how Linux works, but I dont care how my car works, or how politics works. It's just a personal instinct what we like.
And I meant that for people with my interest, arch is great. Its absolutely wrong for more than 99% of humans. But some likes it.
Humanity actually needs an easy to use open operating system.
Humanity already has Linux, and it's taken over pretty much every computing sector.
Does it have to be "easy"? I think that's a matter for the desktop interfaces and whoever is choosing to support them, not Linux itself.
An OS is serious business and requires a certain level of savvy from its contributors. And conversely people who are not contributors should not shape its development.
Besides, people who aren't computer-savvy aren't going to turn savvy just because of an easy installer. If you cater to the lowest common denominator you'd just be dragging the whole thing down.
If you don't care about desktop adoption and the synergy effect on the overall desktop software, then no, it doesn't have to be easy lol. All right then, keep your secrets.
I do think certain "elitist" attitudes bleed into the technical decision making. Programmers tend to see the beauty in the system architecture and it becomes it's own value.
Be that as it may, FOSS tends to be a meritocracy and it takes some skill to contribute to it. Contributors are driven by seeking solutions to their own problems. There's no incentive to cater to any particular user demographic. There's a big gap between those programmers in their ivory towers and any practical application.
That gap is filled by commercial interests. And in this particular market, the PC desktop, there's a company called Microsoft with huge resources and a vested interest in not allowing any competition. For 20 years now nobody has managed to break their stranglehold on the PC desktop. Companies like Apple and Google managed to bypass the problem by creating completely new, alternative platforms.
The elitism of a handful of nerds is the least of the issues preventing Linux on the desktop.
Depends on the newbie, if the person has some terminal experience it's ok. If it's an ipad kid, it's going to be tough, there's a lot of new abstraction to understand at every step.
It's not just ipad kids. Those who just want to work and not mess with the system are better off with Mint or Zorin. If you have to google how to install VLC then an OS has already lost for productivity.
And ironically, AI fixes almost all these problems. Just pull up Deep Seek, drop in whatever the console throws at you and you can get back the answer free of charge. These days the hardest part of bash is remembering that Ctrl+V should be Shift+Ctrl+V.
Installing Mint on my laptop actually fixed a longstanding issue with the speakers. They were working fine for ages on Wibdows, then some reason they just stopped working. Windows could not detect any speakers. It was to a point that I assumed hardware failure, and opened the laptop and traced the audio output to identify a blown sm cap or something, then gave up. It wasn't until I installed Mint and it made a startup noise that I was like "wtf" because I thought it would never speak again. Turns out windows was just borked.
Installing Zorin on an old thinkcentre desktop just worked perfectly, despite my deep suspicion. I got it set up to meet my workflow perfectly in less time than I would have spent reinstalling windows and getting it dialed in just the way I like.
Is Arch "better"? Maybe, to some people. Could I make it work? It's possible? Instead of tweaking arch to meet my requirements, could I rather spend my free time gardening or patting the cat? Absolutely.
Nah. Arch is not noob friendly per se but with CachyOS installing and getting most of what you need to run is very easy. Experience with Steam and Proton is painless. Things can get harder when you are starting to dig deeper.
Depends what kind of newbie. To the right kind of nerd a well-organized technical installer is not a deterrent, on the contrary.
I don't think people realise that most Linux distros had arcane install processes not unlike Arch until around 2000, when a few of them started introducing simplified graphical installers (Corel, Caldera and Red Hat's Anaconda I think were most popular). Debian for instance only switched to graphical in 2006 with Etch beta 3 (although tbf they did have a text-mode UI before that).
No, the windows updater usually grabs them just fine.
But if you do a clean install using the image from microsoft, then it's very likely it won't have a working wifi driver until you run updates. Which you know... it needs the internet to do.
not the case for most new hardware, especially laptops. Sure you get a cheap laptop and its probably gonna be fine but an enterprise laptop with the latest and greatest.... totally a coin flip
I have had to deal with it on so many models in recent years its not even funny. (IT system admin who never uses the default install of Windows)
That pissed me so off, when i had to reinstall a bunch of notebooks at work... they didn't even have an ethernet port, so i had to dig out some docking station from the trash pile in the server room.
There are some cheap wifi cards that have sketchy drivers that aren't automatically installed, and my gigabyte motherboard only came with drivers for Windows 11 for its on-board WiFi, so while windows usually gets the drivers fine there are not-even-that-obscure situations where it just absolutely does not.
It gets worse. For some reason InTune managed machines I deploy at work don't even work HARDWIRED. It only works if you use a USB C to Ethernet adapter. No, it is not missing an Ethernet port. It just doesn't work for absolutely no reason. I just did a remote InTune training, and had to download drivers from Dell's website, extract the exe (lol), put it on a flash drive, and install it manually before I could even log into Windows.
When I tried to migrate to W11 a number of years ago, the wireless drivers weren't installed automatically (plus major issues with my GPU and lots of other quirks). They've probably gotten better since then, but I wouldn't know (after about three hours of trying to get basic things working, I tried loading Mint on a thumbdrive and everything worked out of the box, including things like function keys and adjustable keyboard backlighting--I never went back).
When I tried to install Windows 10 2 years ago on my mini PC it tried to install wifi drivers but failed. Wifi only worked after manually downloading and installing the driver. Various Linux distros were plug and play and wifi worked out of the box.
You're trusting unsigned, reverse engineered, and amateur developed drivers in ring 0
Up until 2025 most of the software for controlling your periphery like mice and RGB controllers used a driver called WinRing0 which had been discontinued for years. Its author even actively discouraged people from using it, but due to convenience and cost cutting it was bundled with software left and right.
I rather trust a Linux kernel developer developing a WiFi driver than some shady manufacturer selling cheap mice and bundling it with closed-source software that never gets an update.
If you don't have an Ethernet connection, fairly regularly
It's at least better than the Vista days where it didn't even have an Ethernet driver consistently, and you had to download your Ethernet driver from another computer 🤷♂️
Not in 11 that i've seen but drivers used to be ridiculous on windows. The funny thing is it was even worse on linux for a hot minute. I remember borking my nic multiple times on slackware 3 and having to hoof it to my friend's house to download a driver way back in olden times. I learned a fuckload about linux and networking during those years breaking things.
Oh, what was that thing called, ndiswrapper or similar, where you downloaded the windows versions of the drivers and then wrapped them up and hoped they worked, and good luck with power saving or resume from sleep.
Don't get me wrong; amazing that it worked even as well as it did, but glad we've got native drivers now. A small step forward every day and soon you'll have gone a long way.
I love this copypasta, I love my linux, I hate my windows. But let's be honest with ourselves for a second and completely ignore the punchline of this meme.
Those ARE valid criticisms of linux distros. Arch is not for casuals so you should be aware what you're getting into before stepping in, however your everyday-consumer-facing distros like Mint are still far from providing a fully comfortable day to day experience.
Again, I love my Mint, I'm never going back to windows, I'm a technical person and I had to use AI to help me run my nonograms game without it injecting cocaine into my CPU.
I'd wager it's due to the user's catalogue of knowledge being effectively reset, even the deepest of users of windows has years of working around the (many) issues. Swap to a new OS, the knowledge doesn't always transfer.
OP's joke sadly isn't completely wrong. Some of these are actual pain points on Linux:
Theming is a mess on Linux the moment you mix QT and GTK (and that is pretty common as not everything exists for each toolkit).
File explorers are notoriously shit compared to the Windows Explorer which works well and intuitively for most users (including me). I use PCManFM-Qt now. But I tried a lot before finding this rough gem. And it still does crash once per quarter and often switches to the root folder collapsing the tree when sub folder content changes.
The freedom of choice is indeed bought with the burden of choice on Linux. There are usually multiple choices when searching for a new application. Usually most of them are crap. Some are barely usable. And one or two are actually somewhat production ready. When you're new to the ecosystem, it's impossible to know what to look for. Inexperienced users better describe their use case to AI and have it generate a nice overview of options with pros and cons because traditional web search is pretty dead by now.
I can use most any operating system. I can even enjoy most of them. Understand the “why” of it and even Apple has amazing answers to “we solved X by doing Y.”
Then there’s windows. It does things differently than everyone else, which does have merit in theory. But if you have had decades to prove your point and still haven’t….maybe you’re just fucking wrong.
I just rebased my install of Aurora to Kinonite, which I had rebased from Kinonite this morning. Simply because I had nothing better to do while waiting for my first cup of tea, and it seemed like a fun idea.
I agree with 1,2 and 3 but I don't really understand the remaining 2,
I've never across the 6 systems I've had, had windows brick an install to the point it no longer can restore/recover itself without me doing something really wrong (usually something stupid on the Linux partition). it's way of handling updates and upgrades is actually something I miss on my current system, with windows if it failed the update it rolled itself back, on Debian I gotta roll a snapshot,which isn't hard but takes longer and is manual.
I've also never had an issue with the UI not looking uniform, or at least anything worse than anything not Apple.
Every time I've come across this it's because windows restore points have been disabled for some reason, or the only restore point happens to be from when it was first installed.
Other times it's been when there are 2 hard drives installed and it somehow shits the bed and installs the bootloader to one and the os to the other, or upgrades to one disk but leaves a half valid install on the other, then boots the old install. Generally getting confused about multiple disks
I had this issue when migrating to a new larger NVME a few years back, where there was technically 2 EFI partitions and it would fight which one was correct. I eventually just had to randomly nuke an EFI cause I wasn't sure which one it was using.
Then my most recent was with the secure boot key update, windows would fail to update. By that I mean it would install updates, and then fail to update and rollback. So it never became unbootable, it just would stupidly keep trying the same update. So I investigated into it.
I found that when I did work about a year ago I expanded my EFI partition. Since EFI's can't be expanded that involved backing the partition up, nuking it then making a larger partition.
I apparently never marked the partition as an "EFI" ID when I did this, so it was marked EFI by type, but not via type id.
I never caught the issue because grub didn't care that it lacked the proper typing, it knew where windows was, the EFI was "proper" in concept that it contained the right files to boot, and windows while didn't accept it as an EFI, also didn't care it didn't actually have an EFI so it would just silently fail on any update events to it. It wasn't until the update was pushed that forced the master key to change that it actually started to show signs of failing.
I was amazed that there was no warnings at all that the currently booted system has no valid EFI partition. It was insane it was even able to boot in the first place.
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one...
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it's awful. They've fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That's why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it's been like that for a decade.
They're just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven't got feature parity to the old systems.
That sucks, yea I've broken windows by changes I've made as well, never to the extent that I've had to reinstall though, but I've definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it's own partition, so I'm surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that's impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don't feel that's a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I've noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn't look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
As much as people hate on Windows, Microsoft very clearly put their software in front of people to learn where the pain points are and fix them. Maybe Linux desktops should do likewise because some of them are a usability joke and it hurts uptake. I was playing around with Ubuntu 26.x with KDE last night and there is so much noise and grit in the UI I wonder what is going on with it.
Microsoft put their software in front of people who want to use it to do stuff. They ask them to copy a file, launch a program, select something and copy/paste etc. and they observe their reactions, how long it takes them to find & do the thing. Then they focus on where the people had issues and try to simplify the flow, rinse and repeat.
I would never say Microsoft puts in as much effort to UX as Apple, they still put a fuck tonne more in than any Linux dist. Even GNOME. And the KDE desktop is a dog's dinner despite basically copying Windows and trying to play the same tune without understanding the notes.
The best I can say about KDE is they're not as bad as they once were. But even today the KDE human interface guidelines essentially say "do not hide options or move them to advanced dialogs". It's no wonder that KDE Plasma is dogshit from a usability standpoint even when it mimics Windows. There is nobody at the wheel controlling it and it shows.
A: Oh, I have no problem, have you tried reinstalling?
Q: How do I solve this problem in Linux?
A: I use Linux, why not use that?
My Ubuntu mini PC still doesn't play videos with hardware acceleration from Firefox. Absolutely given up with it. Probably something to do with Snaps which can go and fuck themselves.
I just got banned from a community called Linux sucks this morning 😂 what a weird community! Like if you don't like Linux just don't use it? People are so strange
That was my thought exactly like just an entire community of Microsoft and Apple shills? The content is complete as too 😂 like super topical Austin Powers memes and shit...
Had the same experience when installing Win 11 from USB boot medium. Wifi and ethernet didn't work. About 8 drivers missing. Never had that with any Linux distro. The difference is that normally MS users get their systems preinstalled.
They don't even know about the MS driver issues. And the admins installing It are saying no big difference in general, depends on hardware chosen.
If you want Linux you first have to learn how to install an OS like an admin and how to get rid of the damn MS Anti-Linux boot prevention, which is always hidden in different menus on every fucking mainboard.
Sorry, Linux used to be so easy to install a few years ago. You still can be quite lucky if you buy a PC without any OS installed, than the UEFI settings are most of the time quite friendly.
Or buy a preinstalled Linux machine like most MS fanboys do. Or what about an install party at the local Linux User Group?
Interesting question. Dell and Lenovo are shipping to many Countries.
I don't know about Framework, System 76, Tuxedo, Purism, Nova. Yes could be an issue, would be interesting to research some statistics about this, but I have no time.
Then the users really would have to learn installing and changing UEFI settings by themselves. Organizing in local Linux User Groups is I think the best
idea. Or why not MS User Groups but I don't plan to join these.
Haha, definitely had me. I'm still new to linux and so far bazzite kde has been great. Very few issues, small learning curve. Hard to mess anything up too bad.
i just started using it and choose Fedora, and it is indeed a little confusing at first but when you move to linux you should be prepared to study a bit, watch videos, even use your text app to keep stuff and organize commands, its not a move in with full furniture kind of deal and i think thats part of the fun
It's obviously RB but there's some truth in there. I remember back in like 2008 when I was first introduced to Linux, kinda felt like magic that there was another OS besides windows and Mac. I had an old powerPC iBook collecting dust that I installed Ubuntu on. Honestly I was just toying around with it for a few weeks. I remember being confused by a lot of things kinda like this post and honestly not even knowing where to look for information, what terms to put into the search. I just clicked around and essentially broke shit and reinstalled.
I forgot about Linux for a while until my Intel Mac mini fell out of support so I installed Ubuntu around and 2010 full time on my main machine. The good megaupload and Netflix as a DVD service days.
I ended up distro hopping to nearly everything. Ended up getting that old PPC laptop up and running again with a version of puppy Linux. I got really into light weight distros and minimal UI's with all my own cli scripts for everything, mps-yt for YouTube, made my own script for 8tracks, for web scraping and so on. Lots of pipe menus for everything, weather, calendar events and so on. Although these days I just run Fedora, have been thinking of switching to an immutable base with a container for everything I need to install besides flatpaks. Vanilla OS looked like a cool project but it's not mature yet, same with pop cosmic.
A mature cosmic UI on something like vanilla OS with an Ubuntu and an arch container for software that isn't available as a flatpak or otherwise doesn't work well as a flatpak I think would be my ultimate if and when they become mature.
One thing where Windows has an advantage over KDE for non IT people, is applications can directly access network shares. Most KDE applications don't even show the network in the file browse selector. So for sync or backup apps it only works with mounted shares. Which isn't necessary in Windows. To mount a share in KDE it's convoluted and a hack that is no good non IT users. If they expect good usability.
Non IT people need to back up too you know? And there are many more Windows users backing up compared to the number of IT pros.
Buy an off the shelf NAS for backups. Plug it in to your home router, and you are ready to back up. Unlike a USB drive, a NAS, such as a WD mycloud, is ready to use any time. Smart people like a convenient option. It's often recommended.
Make it hard to manage, and sure, they'll need to rely on someone else for help. But as we see on Windows, backing up to a share is easy.
I am lookimg at the comments and laughing. I have a low end pc, with nvidia and intel. Ya all behave as if linux was some peak of programming...and heck, maybe it is, dunno.
But installing Windows 10 vs CachyOS/Mint/Nobara took similiar time. Speed is the same, explorers too. On Cachy and Mint, compatibility was also the same (Nobara did not like my hardware). All in all, both Linux and Windows were fast and reliable (except Nobara, again, hardware issues).
Yet ya all grab edge cases and try to make it appear as it's normal xD And this applies to both linux and windows folk, altho I do admit there a lot more linux folk here. But both sides grasp at edge case problems and pretend it's norm lol xD
From noob PoV, Cachy = Mint = Windows 10 usability wise. I'd switch to Cachy if not for the fact only Windows can squeeze last drops of my hardware juice T-T (I love Plasma desktop, even if wallet pisses me off)
Ngl file explorers on Linux suck some massive ass unless you use like Krusader or ranger or terminal based stuff. Dolphin, Caja, nemo, Thunar, Nautilus, all of them are so fucking convoluted that it feels like they are consciously designed to do the things you least expect and in the most roundabout way at all times.
Dolphin is genuinely good though. It has tabs, it has splitscreen, it has inbuilt console. It's not Norton Commander, but it's a good file manager if you're into graphic ones.
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The built in "app stores" that come on Linux distros are also complete jokes, the ones I've tried to use anyways.
Not a fan of KDE Discover. Bazaar looks promising.
Snap store can get the hell outta here.
Discover is ok... If you limit it to only managing Flatpaks.
I'm not sure I'd ever trust a GUI to manage pacman/apt/dnf
I'm gonna be honest, 99% of what I need to do, I do through Discover. Like, why would I bother typing a command out when the update button is right there.
CachyOS now doesn’t even ship with Discover and if you install it there’s a banner warning you not to use it to update base packages as it can mess stuff up.
CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it's fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don't know enough about package management to know for certain.
Oh wild. I still just hit Cachy Update, because I don’t like Octopi, but I should try that out.
Tho I was considering giving NixOS a try
I was wondering about Shelly when I was reading the release notes for Cachy. What do you feel is flawed?
If you're in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934
Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.
More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.
Basically, I tried to install
openrgb-next-gitfrom AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn't really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don't remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.This exchange was 2 months ago, so it's possible that things have improved since then, but that's not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.
What I'm about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.
A Shelly developer explained to me that it's not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it's more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn't give me the half-baked vibe, I'll happily give it another chance.
Synaptic is decent, but it doesn't exactly feel like an "App Store".
I think Flatpaks are the future for general user installed apps. It's way more secure and user friendly for non tech people. I've even had some flatpaks run significantly better, like Brave, despite conventional wisdom saying otherwise for a browser.
this sane comment seems so hard for many Linix users to understand. I use LMDE, i want to click the icon on my toolbar and have zero interest in the OS itself
updates, sure. let discover or gnome software do 'em.
my debian won't break the system.
to install, though? i'd rather see exactly what's going on. i don't always want to bring in every tom, dick and recommend. i use aptitude.
My discover casually uses 1gb of ram when i open it and after closing it stays at 500mb until i sigterm it
I actually like both Bazaar and discover. I enjoy using them to just browse for interesting apps. For linux to ever become adoptable for more people, good GUIs are absolute must haves. If you don't like them that is of course fine, but it serves the greater good to have the option of using them.
Bazaar is the best app store for normies on Linux hands down.
Oh good. I fucking hate the snap store and thought it was my incompetence making it terrible, but here's at least one other
I've been using Baazar and like it very much! I find most things that I'm looking for.
You don't compile everything from code yourself? Amateur. /s
I don't know about you but I start an entirely new FOSS project every time I need some functionality that doesn't come with the base OS.
Truth. Fortunately updating and installing via command line is so easy and quick that I rarely feel the need to use Discover.
Why and which did you use? I haven't had an issue with KDE Discover. Pop Shop was ass a few years back but it works well now that it is "Cosmic Store".
The GNOME one that comes with Debian is useless. There's like 3 things on it and of course they're all out of date (Debian thing). It also doesn't work to uninstall applications. The Ubuntu one of course pushes snaps so it's no good. The Mint one likewise pushes flatpaks. In general across all of them there never seems to be much listed on them, so going there to browse isn't useful. I can't think of any other specific issues but just in general over the past 8 years they are always buggy and annoying to use.
I haven't used KDE's store before.
I prefer flatpaks so Mint's is OK by me, but admittedly I have yet to actually daily drive Mint. Fair enough on the rest.
The Gnome store on Debian worked pretty okay for me, though it is a bit slow and always like, reloads the page you're on after installing something, which is annoying. It uninstalled apps fine, AFAICT.
It had access to the entire Debian repo for me, so I'm not sure why only 3 things were showing up for you.
The Mint store has flathub enabled by default, but you can flip it off in the preferences. If flathub is enabled, it's show both the flatpak and the native version from the repos, if available, allowing you to choose.
Debian (GNOME) has a flatpak plugin that allows the app store to use flatpaks. They got a lot of stuff there.
Most packages in Mint you can download from the system repo. You don't have to use flatpacks. I have my LMDE set to show only system packages since i'm not a fan of flatpacks.
The Linux Mint store has been the best IMO. Perhaps one day Cosmic's store will out do it.
The Internet is my app store.
The mint one takes like 2 minutes to start...
I gave you installed 1 soft with it, absolutely not simpler in any way.
But, I bet it will only (albeit slowly) be getting better, not worse!
Who needs app stores anyway
Software is files, idgaf where they come from
Linux software repos can usually be trusted to a far greater degree, and never come with odd malware toolbars or weird 3rd party 'downloaders' like windows install wizards can come with.
Yea and I never accidentally installed mcaffe when running apt install...
Yeah that's my only real complaint about Linux. I miss the ease of just downloading an exe and double clicking it
Ironically I liked Chocolatey package manager on Windows. Hitting update and everything just updates is great. I hate launching a program and it’s like “here’s an update you need to do before using this and if you kick it down the road you’ll forget about it till next time you launch me”
You can technically do that but app images have their own issues.
You can also download and double click executables that have no dependencies (like Pocketbase). The installation process handles resolving dependencies.
Oh that's pretty cool I didn't realize that.
The most obvious bait to be was 1 hour install time. Windows 11 took 2 hours to install, CachyOS took like 5 minutes. I imagine Arch is similar, there is simply no way. Lol
The biggest fucking lie
Updating. Do not turn of computer.
100% complete
Also: "Update and shut down"
Did you say "update and shutdown while also rebooting?"
Coming back to my PC and it being on when I expect it off, along with the notification that I hadn't used notifications in a while, is what pushed me over the edge to running linux for everything.
Solidworks/PDM at work. 🙄
No it won't be changing until Win11 actually breaks or dassault scraps PDM(actually as much or more of a trashfire as windows). I'll just find a new career eventually.
It took me a bit to figure out, but winapps might work for you. A couple of applications I use at work require me to have a windows VM, which is still way less of a headache than straight windows.
Thanks for looking out but sadly it's a company owned laptop administered by IT.
On my work laptop I boot to Aurora Linux from an USBC caddy with an M2 SSD inside. The laptop's internal drive is still factory fresh.
Ask your IT guy, he might be cool with that. The laptop itself is unchanged. Windows OEM license untouched.
I believe they have fixed it but it was way too many times I had to click Update and shutdown and it would update and restart. Both home and work.
This right here is exclusively why I had a scheduled event on my windows system, where if the computer was still on at 4 in the morning, it would turn itself off.
I never had this issue prior to Windows 10, but update and shutdown felt like an update and maybe shut down because there was a good 20 or 30% chance that when it rebooted to apply the changes, it didn't turn itself back off again.
I must have had rotten luck because whenever I updated Windows, it would never shut down for me. Eventually, I just stopped using 'update and shut down'.
Yeah, I had more issues with Windows deciding to shut down without updating than having it not shut down after updating.
Like that would drive me crazy to have checked for updates, have it say your updates are ready to install, press the reboot now button, and it decides that for whatever reason it didn't want to install the pending updates.
That's apparently fixed now. I have to use windows for work and they finally fixed that stupid issue in one of the last couple of updates. It's still extremely painful to use though.
Everytime I setup a fresh install for whatever reason, I am reminded about how terrible the experience is😂
I use win only at work anymore, no choice. Update and shut down is the biggest fucking lie. I press it every time, it never did shut down.
Every. Time.
"...in geological terms."
I remember installing Arch on an ancient MacBook I've got. Set the installer going then put it to one side knowing it was going to take a while.
It took about 7 minutes.
Of course, I then spent two hours trying to get the fucking Broadcom drivers to work, but that's by the by.
Sounds like me with my eee-PC going through a good chunk of troubleshooting just to find out the reason why Wi-Fi drivers aren't working is because it's a 32-bit system and the arch project as a whole decommissioned 32-bit.
They have a dedicated 32-bit system branch, but still wifi driver support on it sucks.
I recently figured out that Windows installs can go way faster if you have a slightly better USB stick. I bought an Intenso High Speed Line 64 GB for 10.90€ and it cut down the time by half or even two thirds I would say.
Of course I try to avoid installing Windows in the first place, but I'm not just working on my own machines.
Sure, and Internet speeds probably matter a bit too. The download part was a bit faster than I remember, but then it hung up on the later parts for a while. Lol
No offense, but what are you installing it on? One of the things I oversee at my job is imaging. Installing fresh windows on any of our hardware is between 7 and 15 minutes total. Since windows 10 I also haven't seen any need for additional drivers either unless you have something uncommon or want to replace one. Not trying to defend Windows, I just can't understand how everyone always has the worst problems imaginable with it.
In the case I'm referencing, I was installing Windows 11 for a five year old gaming computer using the Windows 10 upgrade software, no USB or anything like that.
Technically I was going to use a custom USB made with Rufus to remove copilot, but by the time I got there they had already started the upgrade process. It really did take two hours, including the 15 minutes before I got there.
Admitting that works, then you've only got windows. You still have to install all the tools and productivity software. On any distribution, all that stuff gets installed as a matter of fact, and you're basically done after 20 minutes or so.
The vast majority of computer users with those kinds of issues are
windows 10 couldn't reliably run it's own bundled software (Mail), by itself, with nothing else open, without that one app going "not responding" every few minutes on a computer with those specs.
Last time i checked, Walmart, best buy, costco, etc were still selling those specs with win11 which is notably bulkier and slower than 10, especially without an ssd, so things have only gotten worse for the average non-power-user.
That's a perfectly servicible spec for basic operations on a mint install, you could probably even watch netflix or youtube on it with linux, but i wouldn't want to run windows newer than xp on it.
It doesn't help that big box retail stores are scam artists.
That was one of the things I hated about Walmart was they would sell these super cheap systems that I kid you not would crash on the demo software.
Like we had an HP flip-style laptop that they sold for $130 a few years back. And it was so bad that we intentionally ran it under a default account instead of a demo account. Because if we installed the demo software on it, Windows would run out of space and blue screen about time windows tried to update it.
Windows 11 took me 7 hours over 3 different days. Had to start and stop multiple times, had to retry multiple times, had to post support requests and wait, and to dive into bios because default settings that worked fine with Linux were making windows kill itself.
Oh yeah, my first try was downloading a Windows ISO and using KDE writer to put it on a USB, BIG mistake because we all know that windows sabotages their ISOs so that you can only burn them with a windows burner program.
Even when it finally worked, it still took a goddamn 2 hours and so many ads, so many "please also buy this!"
Once it was done I had setup windows with steam for my step son and then he didn't use the machine anyway
Arch install time is mostly user dependent Id say
Lots of options and you'll need to spend some time RTFM. But if you already know how you want to partition your disks, then the basic installation (with a network controller!) takes about two minutes.
Then you can restart into the cli, and the real questions - what else am I going to install? - can begin.
That was exactly where I was like, “huh”? Cause Cachy took hardly any time to install and windows is notoriously slow.
They added a feature to archinstall that times your install and tells you how much it took. My record is 3 minutes, and it wasn't even on a super powerful gaming computer or anything (it was a lenovo ideapad 5 laptop)
I mean if you dont know jack shit about linux or arch and try to follow the guide I'd imagine it could take you quite a while. It took me a while at least.
I did hear Arch is a bit more trouble, yeah. CachyOS was pretty straightforward from desktop environment to automatically detecting hardware and such. Pretty much the same features you see with Windows, just a lot faster.
The performance comments were a dead giveaway.
Nobody's complaints with setting Linux up are that it runs slowly.
It may not run much of anything until you sort out your drivers properly, but it will do everything incorrectly LIGHTNING fast, compared to Windows.
I mean, really depends on the device. I've got a machine running Mint and it kinda chugs along. But it's... I want to say at least 15 years old? Probably due for a RAM swap at the very least. Takes about five minutes to fully boot and if I run more than a few apps it drags.
At some point, there's only so much an OS can do for you.
The bit about incompatible drivers and the mess of third-party installs necessary to get it in a comfortable state also rang true. Plus all the minutea of configuration, so you're not typing in your password every time you sneeze. Windows does tend to come fully loaded out of the box, even if you're using a bunch of their mediocre native apps. And the desktop instance tends to be pre-configured to satisfy your average desktop user.
Of course, Apple takes all of this to the next level. Really straight jacking everything you can do so that it's a unform experience from device to device. And I hate that shit, too, even if my machine boots fast straight out of the box.
Yeah, your 15- year-old device is slow, but let's see how slow it is with windows 11 installed
I thought Debian was as sluggish as Windows until I was forced to use the LXQt desktop environment instead of the default GNOME on an old Compaq laptop since that's all it could handle. Turns out, GNOME looks nice but it kept my old laptop's mid-2000s i386 CPU churning at 50% 24/7. LXQt? Barely a blip. Sure, it couldn't run Firefox quickly, but at least its fan was silent when idling or when I was simply using the laptop as a dumb SSH client into a much more powerful remote server.
I now use LXQt on my main workstation because I don't need fancy tilíng windows or Wayland.
You can have fancy tiling windows and Wayland without Gnome! Wayland is actually pretty great for low-resource devices, I recently did a glmark benchmark on a Raspberry Pi 3B, and on the Wayland session (with the wayland version of glmark) I got about double the score of the Xorg session (with the xorg versioni of glmark). It's just that Raspberry Pi OS's Wayland session doesn't use Gnome, but LabWC.
And I always configure my LXQt desktop with a tiling wm, works great and looks great IMO. Plus, the LXQt devs are working on making it fully Wayland-compatible.
Eehh... I put Mint on my old laptop, and it was like being stuck in a tar, even though it ran Windows 10 without problems. In the end I just switched it, to another distro, and now it works fine.
Not true. They complain because of no hardware decoding, defaults lacking GPU acceleration, they complain about KDEs file manager, Gimp, Libre Office, etc. If you had problems with Windows, maybe consider 'skill issue'.
I feel like he's gonna get banned for posting this on that subreddit lmao
He 100% going to be banned, I was banned with doing nothing wrong there. The mods there are bit crazy
There is exactly one(1) guy posting on that sub, and he's here on .world too.
Also, don't miss out on his hits such as "Linux empowers criminals"(especially the part where he captions a Stallman photo with "Oy vey!") and "Kernel Anti-Cheats are a necessary evil". Dude's either a fed or a chud.
EDIT: By his own admission:
Wait, the owner of that subreddit is the same guy here on Lemmy? You’re kidding me.
Oh, I didn't saw it was Linuxsucks on Lemmy, I thought it was on Reddit
it's on both
I'm glad I got banned from r/linuxsucks101 before I got perma-banned from reddit
#2 gave it away because you'd have to royally screw something up in Arch to get KDE to lag like that lol.
It might be minimalist but it's not unperformant out of box.
The only time i had issues with KDE when i was using a PC with 384 MB RAM (plasma 4)
I wouldnt blame that on kde
And KDE Plasma isn't even one of the lightweight desktop environments. It's honestly impressive how sluggish Microsoft made Windows feel.
It still had a pretty low requirement for ram... like 500Mb or so. I solved it switching, first to xfce4, which i loved and later on with i3wm whoch i believe asks like <4Mb. I may be wrong
That's crazy. Nowadays I mainly use sway (tiling wm requiring loads of configuration, definitely not for everyone), which I thought was lightweight as well. But I just checked and it's using a whole 500MB, wonder what it needs that for.
Man that subreddit is a trip. Really funny to actively hate FOSS on ideological grounds because you just love corporations and markets so much.
There’s one here on Lemmy too. I got banned this morning for sharing this post lol.
Here’s a post from it defending Telemetry of all things.
Yeah I was just about to edit my comment to mention that. Like bro why are you here it's built on the same ethos you hate in linux.
Then why do people pretend that being 'downvoted to hell' means anything here? Why would they point and say 'echo chamber' hypocritically?
The truth is that Reddit is shady AF with their shadow bans, control of information, inconsistent rule following, etc. I'm actually trying to get more users here.
I tried on Gab. -What happens when I correct someone on Gab about Linux? -They upvote and thank me for it! A community there for "Linux sucks" served no purpose.
edit: I'm also against religion (worse cult) and didn't want to support the owner's evangelism. -But the site is ran pretty decent, and it's not bad when curated (another shady thing about Reddit is the limitation on blocking users).
So do you like make all these linux hate memes yourself, or are you sourcing them from various linux hate communities?
I've seen a few of your posts on [email protected]. I can appreciate a minority view and you don't strike me as hostile with other users, but many of the points you made frankly make little sense to me. Some even stike me as deranged or at least misinformed. I hope you are doing this out of passion or get some other form of genuine joy out of it. I'd hate for Linux to make
youanyone feel miserable.Replace reddit with Microsoft and you might get why people think you're crazy.
Man that madthumbs guy is really trying to make that a thing and it's kind of sad and lonely that he's off by himself pretending he has a community...
The posts sound like chatgpt
Please please please don't brigade/harass that community!
I love it! It's like watching flat earthers. I NEED this popcorn.
I'm not quite sure it's a "community" as such - it looks like just one guy having a bit of a nervous breakdown on his own.
It's been going on for a year or two now. Is it still considered a breakdown if it shows no signs of slowing?
That's a very good point. That's a long time for someone to be that upset/ angry about something.
Is there an origin story?
I wish I knew haha. You can only assume they failed to install Arch or something back in the day.
🍿
Lol the guy talks about linux like it's his job or special interest.
Lol it's an LLM post too
You got banned for breaking the rules. Integrity isn't common among evangelists.
There he is! Evangelism, sure. Idk man you got some weird shit going on, but you do you. 👍
If you point out any where I'm wrong, I will correct it. So far, none of the LiGNUxers are. AFAICS they work for Microsoft. It's like when I was into conspiracy theories and wondered why Alex Jones wasn't easily recognized for the controlled opposition, he is.
Oh my god not the rules!
Imagine correcting me on anything. Everyone criticizing the community has the opportunity and NEVER does. Maybe because I'm right and not deceiving people and turning them into hardened Microsoft fans.
That's a lie. The community and every post on it was locked for several months.
If you continue wasting your opportunity here, I'll just block you here too. I'm not into wasting time.
Oh no, don't threaten him with a good time.
It makes more sense if you see capitalism as a game and these folks as gamer fanbois.
Yeah, especially when there are so many legitimate ideological grounds you could use to hate on FOSS, like: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116851056980506739
It's precisely the reason why many other licenses exists, and that are used for those who want to offer OSS as a service. It is still open, but the service is sold as a guarantee.
But never mind that. Because when you look at stuff like Microslop, Apple, and pretty much any other commercial proprietary software developer. They do so the same way. Games are not sold, they are licensed, with no guarantees of functionality either, just to put one example. It's a mar of software as an industry, not exclusive to FOSS and definitely not created by the ideological underpinnings of FOSS.
Like, MS offers guarantees of quality and offer liability on their ToS for corporate contracts, but not for the version people can acquire for their home PC. Even then, the liabilities are very limited and cautiously defined. Essentially, unless MS is doing IT directly for your company, you are on your fucking own. And then, support channels for corporate service are very limited on what they do and do not offer. The average Joe buying a Mac or any other PC with Windows essentially get the same “software is provided 'as is' and we don't care if it doesn't work." It's not associated to FOSS exclusively.
How about I despise communism and how it only works when workers are forced to work at gunpoint. Or, I haven't seen any legit gripes against Microsoft.
Politically, I'm centrist, because both pure extremes fail. -China isn't 100% communist.
Linux takes the position of 'competition' for Windows while being an eternal loser. They squash other great projects by taking their ideas and making them work with then objectively shitty (for desktop) kernel.
Linux is a 'best case scenario' for Windows. (Yeah, you're actually helping Microsoft by being an evangelist).
Communism literally never had a chance to evolve as a system because USA systematically fucked it over and fought it at every step, in the process committing horrific crimes against humanity along the way. Would you like some historical examples of what capitalism has done to humanity and democracy worldwide for centuries or are you just more of a "see the thing with communism is... It just doesn't work!" kind of guy?
Please read what I wrote again. I'm not about arguing with someone who glazes.
I rarely ever feel the need to comment, but going down the rabbit hole of reading your comments, posts, and history of the /c/ you moderate, I must say, you are either one of the most dedicated trolls on the internet or one of the most mentally ill person on the internet.
The level of vitriol you spew in your absolutely deranged, completely misinformed, straight up false posts is astonishing, like if I didn't think you were mentally ill, I could have suggested that you should teach a rage baiting class, but for now, I suggest you seek help for your mental health. From a licensed professional, not the Windows trouble shooting tool.
I'm sceptical this is genuine... it sounds like cope to me, but it's interesting... Anyway, I appreciate my experience isn't universal. So what Linux alternatives do you mean, like BSD and stuff?
I try to keep an open mind about people preferring the Microsoft stack, but from the first time I used a terminal on Linux I was sold. I could never go back.
I still do support for people who use Windows PCs, so I've got to see how it's changed over the years. Personally I don't know how anyone puts up with it.
It seems like Windows keeps getting worse as Linux keeps getting better... like... do you enjoy using Windows 11? Does it feel good to you?
11 is fine. I don't miss XP, 7,or 10 at all. 11 is an upgrade.
Now it's pretty obvious that you're either a true madman or trolling so hard you forgot you're doing it in the first place.
Win 11 is objectively so much worse than literally any alternative, and I'm saying that while running it myself for ..reasons.
Skill issue
How is it a skill issue? I'm not the one breaking it with patch after patch of utter insanity. It's not like I'm running HE or some shit either.
It's just bad, and it grates me that I have to use it on even one of my machines.
Man even I miss XP. But yeah I guess anything is better than 10 lol.
Went to an old school LAN party recently where one of the machines was running XP (and a CRT 🤤) and I forgot what a tight shell that was. Played Quake 2, Star Craft, Total Annihilation — no problems.
I still prefer the a la carte approach of linux, but I have a much higher tolerance for tinkering than my windows buds. I love having my fingers in every part of the machine.
Did none of the commenters read the sixth point?
That's why negative news sells so well.
You just have to have a good rage bait title and can write literally anything under it and the discussion will be about fantasies manifested in peoples heads based on the title.
Really looks like that haha
Most probably just read the title, saw the list and thought that’s too much reading
Sooo many commenters missed the last line apparently. It’s wild.
How is that possible? Is that a fake post, never posted to r/linuxsucks101 or has the mod there not read to paint 6 either?
They had us in the first 83%.
I'm sitting here reading these comments as the low-end Dell laptop I just picked up for software testing is booting up and updating Windows. For logistic reasons, had to pick one up today, so had the pleasure of dealing with Best Buy sales staff 🙄
From powering it up, it's been 1.5 hours with updates and multiple restarts. Half of it was spent showing a progress indicator with a carousel slideshow of all the great AI tools I have no interest in using. Then it insisted on signing in with a Microsoft cloud account.
It's been eons since I actually ran a fresh copy of Windows. Amazed people still put up with all this nonsense.
Seriously, dealing with Windows OOBE is like walking through a used car lot.
"Decline offer" "Decline offer" "Not right now" <hey, we need to update! See you in 30 minutes!> "Remind me in three days" "Turn off cloud backup" "Yes, I'm really sure" "Decline offer" "Share minimum telemetry" (oh, you thought you could turn that off? Lol. Lmao, even)
I don't know how anyone finds that mess easier than linux.
It's not easier than Windows, it's the devil you know.
Sure it's slow, but you know how slow. It does updates at the wrong time, but you know it will turn on again eventually. It sends all your data to Microsoft, but no-one has come to your door to harass you because what's in your data.
Linux is some obscure thing that would take time and effort to learn, and you're tired from work and just want to use a computer without thinking about it.
Things might be different if Windows wasn't the default/only option when buying a new laptop.
You made it sound easy. The "share minimum telemetry" step requires you to click 6 different toggles and then an accept button. It's even worse in win10, where you have to select the correct 6 checkboxes out of 12, and some of them are half hidden because they don't fit in the screen at VGA resolution. The Windows OOBE comes straight from hell, as a punishment to humanity for making sand think.
The best buy sales staff are interesting because they practically make you beg for the thing you already had your mind made up about when you walked in the store.
The second issue was too blatant, I knew I was getting the old 4chan bait and switch
Wait, windows ships with Dolphin these days?
🤷♂️ OP’s bait isn’t perfect. But apparently you can download Dolphin for Windows
Back in the KDE 4 days, you used to be able to run the whole DE on Windows.
Amazing!
Well, I learned something new today :)
and it is a slog to start up. op ain't lying there. but if its files remain in windows' cache after that, it's fast.
You can. I wouldn't. I saw no clear advantages and had stability issues and couldn't get it to play nice with a gdrive I needed for work
Useful if you have to use SolidWorks/PDM or another broken file explorer integration.
I know this is satire but Arch is like the worst distro for a newbie...
Not for a newbie who wants to learn. Arch is actually not difficult at all, just time consuming. If you do a manual install, you have to read about every step and make choices.
Thats how you learn your system. After install, you know exactly what files you modified and where they are if you want to make further changes.
I think it's a beautiful system. Its not for people who just want a windows replacement though. It's for people who wants to know their system.
People don't realize the power that comes from actually knowing how your system works. It's the same as learning any skill. It gives a feeling of confidence and comfort.
It depends.
in-VM test drive? By all means, yes. Have fun
as main OS? Detecting multiple leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?
Yes it's worth it many times over. I learned Linux on arch like 15 years ago. :) Its been paying off enormously during my career and private hobby life. Last windows I ran at home was windows 7.
Glad to know. Still, it's not something I'd recommend to someone who hasn't tried Linux before.
No I agree, unless they are interested in learning.
Literally 1984 (sorry, had to)
I've gotten this comment 10 times over the last year or so. :)
I just bought a laptop with windows 11 on it and I'm currently working my way through installing arch. I've been using Bazzite for a while on my desktop now but I still don't really understand a lot of the systems so I'm wanting to really dig in to it and understand why things are installed and where they are and stuff.
It's so much fun. Arch wiki is amazing.
Yeah but that is an issue. It's perfectly legitimate to want stuff to just work and get to what I want to do.
You kinda implying I have a character defect for "not wanting to learn" lol. Humanity actually needs an easy to use open operating system.
Also I assume most of the reasons for why an OS does the things they way it does is tech debt lol.
No I didn't mean it that way. Ok, I'll put it in other words. Certain people have an interest in specific things. I am interested in how Linux works, but I dont care how my car works, or how politics works. It's just a personal instinct what we like.
And I meant that for people with my interest, arch is great. Its absolutely wrong for more than 99% of humans. But some likes it.
Humanity already has Linux, and it's taken over pretty much every computing sector.
Does it have to be "easy"? I think that's a matter for the desktop interfaces and whoever is choosing to support them, not Linux itself.
An OS is serious business and requires a certain level of savvy from its contributors. And conversely people who are not contributors should not shape its development.
Besides, people who aren't computer-savvy aren't going to turn savvy just because of an easy installer. If you cater to the lowest common denominator you'd just be dragging the whole thing down.
If you don't care about desktop adoption and the synergy effect on the overall desktop software, then no, it doesn't have to be easy lol. All right then, keep your secrets.
I do think certain "elitist" attitudes bleed into the technical decision making. Programmers tend to see the beauty in the system architecture and it becomes it's own value.
Yes and architects tends to see beauty in buildings, gardeners in gardens, chefs in cooking.
Be that as it may, FOSS tends to be a meritocracy and it takes some skill to contribute to it. Contributors are driven by seeking solutions to their own problems. There's no incentive to cater to any particular user demographic. There's a big gap between those programmers in their ivory towers and any practical application.
That gap is filled by commercial interests. And in this particular market, the PC desktop, there's a company called Microsoft with huge resources and a vested interest in not allowing any competition. For 20 years now nobody has managed to break their stranglehold on the PC desktop. Companies like Apple and Google managed to bypass the problem by creating completely new, alternative platforms.
The elitism of a handful of nerds is the least of the issues preventing Linux on the desktop.
Depends on the newbie, if the person has some terminal experience it's ok. If it's an ipad kid, it's going to be tough, there's a lot of new abstraction to understand at every step.
It's not just ipad kids. Those who just want to work and not mess with the system are better off with Mint or Zorin. If you have to google how to install VLC then an OS has already lost for productivity.
But that's how you learn though, and the ability to know how to type shit in a box is a good skill to have if you have a computer.
And ironically, AI fixes almost all these problems. Just pull up Deep Seek, drop in whatever the console throws at you and you can get back the answer free of charge. These days the hardest part of bash is remembering that Ctrl+V should be Shift+Ctrl+V.
Don't, under any circumstances, do that. This is an anti-advice.
Mint and Zorin have been flawless for me.
Installing Mint on my laptop actually fixed a longstanding issue with the speakers. They were working fine for ages on Wibdows, then some reason they just stopped working. Windows could not detect any speakers. It was to a point that I assumed hardware failure, and opened the laptop and traced the audio output to identify a blown sm cap or something, then gave up. It wasn't until I installed Mint and it made a startup noise that I was like "wtf" because I thought it would never speak again. Turns out windows was just borked.
Installing Zorin on an old thinkcentre desktop just worked perfectly, despite my deep suspicion. I got it set up to meet my workflow perfectly in less time than I would have spent reinstalling windows and getting it dialed in just the way I like.
Is Arch "better"? Maybe, to some people. Could I make it work? It's possible? Instead of tweaking arch to meet my requirements, could I rather spend my free time gardening or patting the cat? Absolutely.
Worse than NixOS?
Nah. Arch is not noob friendly per se but with CachyOS installing and getting most of what you need to run is very easy. Experience with Steam and Proton is painless. Things can get harder when you are starting to dig deeper.
My experience with Nixos was 90% editing config files, 10% trying to play any game and failing.
Depends what kind of newbie. To the right kind of nerd a well-organized technical installer is not a deterrent, on the contrary.
I don't think people realise that most Linux distros had arcane install processes not unlike Arch until around 2000, when a few of them started introducing simplified graphical installers (Corel, Caldera and Red Hat's Anaconda I think were most popular). Debian for instance only switched to graphical in 2006 with Etch beta 3 (although tbf they did have a text-mode UI before that).
Haven't used Windows in a hot minute, do you actually have to install WLAN drivers manually there?
No, the windows updater usually grabs them just fine.
But if you do a clean install using the image from microsoft, then it's very likely it won't have a working wifi driver until you run updates. Which you know... it needs the internet to do.
most network and wifi chips made before the spin of windows are supported by built-in drivers.
not the case for most new hardware, especially laptops. Sure you get a cheap laptop and its probably gonna be fine but an enterprise laptop with the latest and greatest.... totally a coin flip
I have had to deal with it on so many models in recent years its not even funny. (IT system admin who never uses the default install of Windows)
Isn’t this more of a “to cheap to make the device fall back to a low performance emulating-generic” type of issue?
That pissed me so off, when i had to reinstall a bunch of notebooks at work... they didn't even have an ethernet port, so i had to dig out some docking station from the trash pile in the server room.
There are some cheap wifi cards that have sketchy drivers that aren't automatically installed, and my gigabyte motherboard only came with drivers for Windows 11 for its on-board WiFi, so while windows usually gets the drivers fine there are not-even-that-obscure situations where it just absolutely does not.
It gets worse. For some reason InTune managed machines I deploy at work don't even work HARDWIRED. It only works if you use a USB C to Ethernet adapter. No, it is not missing an Ethernet port. It just doesn't work for absolutely no reason. I just did a remote InTune training, and had to download drivers from Dell's website, extract the exe (lol), put it on a flash drive, and install it manually before I could even log into Windows.
When I tried to migrate to W11 a number of years ago, the wireless drivers weren't installed automatically (plus major issues with my GPU and lots of other quirks). They've probably gotten better since then, but I wouldn't know (after about three hours of trying to get basic things working, I tried loading Mint on a thumbdrive and everything worked out of the box, including things like function keys and adjustable keyboard backlighting--I never went back).
When I tried to install Windows 10 2 years ago on my mini PC it tried to install wifi drivers but failed. Wifi only worked after manually downloading and installing the driver. Various Linux distros were plug and play and wifi worked out of the box.
'works on my machine' -one of the most ignorant arguments.
The same model Motherboards can have different sound, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth chips.
You're trusting unsigned, reverse engineered, and amateur developed drivers in ring 0 which can possibly damage your hardware and firmware.
It's not something to casually recommend people do.
Up until 2025 most of the software for controlling your periphery like mice and RGB controllers used a driver called WinRing0 which had been discontinued for years. Its author even actively discouraged people from using it, but due to convenience and cost cutting it was bundled with software left and right.
I rather trust a Linux kernel developer developing a WiFi driver than some shady manufacturer selling cheap mice and bundling it with closed-source software that never gets an update.
If you don't have an Ethernet connection, fairly regularly
It's at least better than the Vista days where it didn't even have an Ethernet driver consistently, and you had to download your Ethernet driver from another computer 🤷♂️
Had the issue, so yes.
The easiest way to solve it was to not dual-boot. :-)
Not in 11 that i've seen but drivers used to be ridiculous on windows. The funny thing is it was even worse on linux for a hot minute. I remember borking my nic multiple times on slackware 3 and having to hoof it to my friend's house to download a driver way back in olden times. I learned a fuckload about linux and networking during those years breaking things.
I definitely remember the times when wlan was a PITA on Linux : )
Oh, what was that thing called, ndiswrapper or similar, where you downloaded the windows versions of the drivers and then wrapped them up and hoped they worked, and good luck with power saving or resume from sleep.
Don't get me wrong; amazing that it worked even as well as it did, but glad we've got native drivers now. A small step forward every day and soon you'll have gone a long way.
Might just be tired but the twist at the end 100% got me lmao
I love the obligatory inclusiom of "I use Arch btw."
I love this copypasta, I love my linux, I hate my windows. But let's be honest with ourselves for a second and completely ignore the punchline of this meme.
Those ARE valid criticisms of linux distros. Arch is not for casuals so you should be aware what you're getting into before stepping in, however your everyday-consumer-facing distros like Mint are still far from providing a fully comfortable day to day experience.
Again, I love my Mint, I'm never going back to windows, I'm a technical person and I had to use AI to help me run my nonograms game without it injecting cocaine into my CPU.
Mint was providing a comfy day to day experience 15 years ago. I never can figure out why everyone says it's so hard.
Hardcore users are already on linux. Casual users are only left on windows.
I'd wager it's due to the user's catalogue of knowledge being effectively reset, even the deepest of users of windows has years of working around the (many) issues. Swap to a new OS, the knowledge doesn't always transfer.
It's not hard, it's just different.
Maybe I just forgot how it is. It probably doesn't compare though since Ubuntu was still non user friendly when i started.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
i remember windows not having drivers for wireless and wired networking and requiring an internet connection to install.
had to find a usb ethernet adapter to install. absolute insanity…
OP's joke sadly isn't completely wrong. Some of these are actual pain points on Linux:
Theming is a mess on Linux the moment you mix QT and GTK (and that is pretty common as not everything exists for each toolkit).
File explorers are notoriously shit compared to the Windows Explorer which works well and intuitively for most users (including me). I use PCManFM-Qt now. But I tried a lot before finding this rough gem. And it still does crash once per quarter and often switches to the root folder collapsing the tree when sub folder content changes.
The freedom of choice is indeed bought with the burden of choice on Linux. There are usually multiple choices when searching for a new application. Usually most of them are crap. Some are barely usable. And one or two are actually somewhat production ready. When you're new to the ecosystem, it's impossible to know what to look for. Inexperienced users better describe their use case to AI and have it generate a nice overview of options with pros and cons because traditional web search is pretty dead by now.
I play on Gentoo btw.
I can use most any operating system. I can even enjoy most of them. Understand the “why” of it and even Apple has amazing answers to “we solved X by doing Y.”
Then there’s windows. It does things differently than everyone else, which does have merit in theory. But if you have had decades to prove your point and still haven’t….maybe you’re just fucking wrong.
" Here sweetie. Play with this nice green round toy and don't worry anymore. "
To be fair I have done all of those to Linux PCs. Who here has never blown up a Linux install? Ubuntu is not even immune to tinkering.
I just rebased my install of Aurora to Kinonite, which I had rebased from Kinonite this morning. Simply because I had nothing better to do while waiting for my first cup of tea, and it seemed like a fun idea.
So, suck it Linux! I do want I want!
I agree with 1,2 and 3 but I don't really understand the remaining 2,
I've never across the 6 systems I've had, had windows brick an install to the point it no longer can restore/recover itself without me doing something really wrong (usually something stupid on the Linux partition). it's way of handling updates and upgrades is actually something I miss on my current system, with windows if it failed the update it rolled itself back, on Debian I gotta roll a snapshot,which isn't hard but takes longer and is manual.
I've also never had an issue with the UI not looking uniform, or at least anything worse than anything not Apple.
Every time I've come across this it's because windows restore points have been disabled for some reason, or the only restore point happens to be from when it was first installed. Other times it's been when there are 2 hard drives installed and it somehow shits the bed and installs the bootloader to one and the os to the other, or upgrades to one disk but leaves a half valid install on the other, then boots the old install. Generally getting confused about multiple disks
I had this issue when migrating to a new larger NVME a few years back, where there was technically 2 EFI partitions and it would fight which one was correct. I eventually just had to randomly nuke an EFI cause I wasn't sure which one it was using.
Then my most recent was with the secure boot key update, windows would fail to update. By that I mean it would install updates, and then fail to update and rollback. So it never became unbootable, it just would stupidly keep trying the same update. So I investigated into it.
I found that when I did work about a year ago I expanded my EFI partition. Since EFI's can't be expanded that involved backing the partition up, nuking it then making a larger partition.
I apparently never marked the partition as an "EFI" ID when I did this, so it was marked EFI by type, but not via type id.
I never caught the issue because grub didn't care that it lacked the proper typing, it knew where windows was, the EFI was "proper" in concept that it contained the right files to boot, and windows while didn't accept it as an EFI, also didn't care it didn't actually have an EFI so it would just silently fail on any update events to it. It wasn't until the update was pushed that forced the master key to change that it actually started to show signs of failing.
I was amazed that there was no warnings at all that the currently booted system has no valid EFI partition. It was insane it was even able to boot in the first place.
I once accidentally bricked a windows install by replacing the system font with another font, while calling it the same. The system crashed on boot, and apparently the recovery menu also uses the same file, because it instantly crashed too. Had to do a complete reinstall of that one...
On the UI not being uniform, you may not have noticed, but it's awful. They've fixed some stuff, but there was a point with win11 when 40% of the apps were light theme when you had dark theme. Even to this day, you have a complete mix of icons from different generations of windows in different menus (hell, there are still win95 icons in some places, and you can still set them up as folder icons). Some apps, despite rendering with the modern w11 style, clearly have the structure from decades ago (in fact, to this day, you can find menus from windows 3.11 in windows 11, and it also comes with the dialer app hidden in System32). Context menus are also another incredibly inconsistent thing, and for the longest time, win11 had 3 types of context menu styles that were used seemingly at random (some of the context menus also rendered in light mode even when the system-wide dark mode was enabled)
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That's why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it's been like that for a decade.
They're just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I once found a dialog that default searched for a:/ in a windows 98 style popup. Pretty sure it was early windows 10
I agree with this. they start a major overhaul and then never finish. the half baked integrated settings using the unified settings system was a perfect example, where they still haven't got feature parity to the old systems.
That sucks, yea I've broken windows by changes I've made as well, never to the extent that I've had to reinstall though, but I've definitely broke the boot system making changes or have had to uninstall updates for some changes. That being said, the recovery menu uses a whole separate image, usually on it's own partition, so I'm surprised changing the font on your System was even able to break recovery, that's impressive.
as for UI, I give a pass to anything that is marked as deprecated as those are decommissioned, but yea if you include the windows 7 interfaces that were never upgraded to the new unified UI design, I agree with you. That or if you include third party software, but I don't feel that's a fair comparison.
UX wise? I havent noticed any of that. The most I've noticed are that context menus are basically useless now as they remove or moved the pieces that I always used, so moreorless I just use keyboard shortcuts for everything when on windows. A common complaint I have on the new unified settings area is how much it doesn't look like the older stuff. The menus lack features present in the old system, and if the settings do exist, they are in a different area. With control panel I used to be able to access my settings all in one spot. Now I can look for a specific setting and have to look in three different places for it.
had us in the first half ngl
/r/linuxsucks101
This is the most deranged Linux sub in existence. I got banned there for trying to straighten up misinformation.
It's the worst of the worst
You get banned for not posting hate posts there. Pretty fascinating hate echo chamber.
it’s all systemD fault!
As much as people hate on Windows, Microsoft very clearly put their software in front of people to learn where the pain points are and fix them. Maybe Linux desktops should do likewise because some of them are a usability joke and it hurts uptake. I was playing around with Ubuntu 26.x with KDE last night and there is so much noise and grit in the UI I wonder what is going on with it.
They put it in front of kids in schools to get them used to it so they could sell more copies of windows. Don’t act like it’s some sort of altruism.
Microsoft put their software in front of people who want to use it to do stuff. They ask them to copy a file, launch a program, select something and copy/paste etc. and they observe their reactions, how long it takes them to find & do the thing. Then they focus on where the people had issues and try to simplify the flow, rinse and repeat.
I would never say Microsoft puts in as much effort to UX as Apple, they still put a fuck tonne more in than any Linux dist. Even GNOME. And the KDE desktop is a dog's dinner despite basically copying Windows and trying to play the same tune without understanding the notes.
Unpopular opinion but KDE is a usability nightmare. Mate, Cinnamon or XFCE are much better in this regard.
The best I can say about KDE is they're not as bad as they once were. But even today the KDE human interface guidelines essentially say "do not hide options or move them to advanced dialogs". It's no wonder that KDE Plasma is dogshit from a usability standpoint even when it mimics Windows. There is nobody at the wheel controlling it and it shows.
Windows' "app store" is a joke but that's a good thing.
Winget and scoop are adequate, but those are probably catering to 1% of Windows users.
Only 1% of users should be using something else.
(Add chocolatey to your list)
Made me chuckle. My journey started as Windows to Ubuntu and liked it. Tried Arch, fled back to Ubuntu. Hid there a long time.
Tldr I use Arch btw
Between what?
Valid or not, we have three options: 1) Put up with the current situation. 2) Fix the problem. 3) Pay someone else to fix the problem.
Q: How do I solve this problem in Windows?
A: Oh, I have no problem, have you tried reinstalling?
Q: How do I solve this problem in Linux?
A: I use Linux, why not use that?
My Ubuntu mini PC still doesn't play videos with hardware acceleration from Firefox. Absolutely given up with it. Probably something to do with Snaps which can go and fuck themselves.
Don't use ubuntu. That said - on debian it'd probably be a non-free codecs package? VLC also comes with a good set of additional codecs IIRC.
Debian is much more friendly today
Nice troll XD
Maybe don't start with the diy distro then?
Look at the whole meme lmao
I think we should also have a community with name bigtechsuck
To be fair, I've 100% had issues with #1,#3, and #4 with Linux as well.
To be fair. I had similar experience installing arch probably 15 years ago.
Well the software installation was never bad in Linux.
The worst you could find, was that the software you want does not exist for Linux and wine doesn't work for this Software.
Arch burned me way too hard. I am using Nixos now BTW
Yeah AI helps me with nixos too.
However I know now the few places where all the information is you need.
The wiki (the official one should be preferred, but sometimes it is not up to date with the in official one.
search.nixos.org
Discourse for nixos
And the official manual. Nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable
With that you could do everything without an AI. But finding stuff is difficult.
However Posting your findings into the wiki is appropriated
I don't get it, how do they use explorer without the risk of it freezing or crashing on every directory load.
Very, very carefully.
The only reason I open explorer is for the visual of my remaining drive space and it's still a pain in the ass.
I just got banned from a community called Linux sucks this morning 😂 what a weird community! Like if you don't like Linux just don't use it? People are so strange
It's a smear campaign to discourage new users and sustain Microslop.
That was my thought exactly like just an entire community of Microsoft and Apple shills? The content is complete as too 😂 like super topical Austin Powers memes and shit...
Yeah I clocked the twist halfway through, Linux isn't perfect but most are simply not Linux issues.
but... if you are new why.. arch? jsut use idk mint?
Some people like to make it hard on themselves. Or someone recommended it and they don’t know any better
Had the same experience when installing Win 11 from USB boot medium. Wifi and ethernet didn't work. About 8 drivers missing. Never had that with any Linux distro. The difference is that normally MS users get their systems preinstalled.
They don't even know about the MS driver issues. And the admins installing It are saying no big difference in general, depends on hardware chosen.
If you want Linux you first have to learn how to install an OS like an admin and how to get rid of the damn MS Anti-Linux boot prevention, which is always hidden in different menus on every fucking mainboard.
Sorry, Linux used to be so easy to install a few years ago. You still can be quite lucky if you buy a PC without any OS installed, than the UEFI settings are most of the time quite friendly.
Or buy a preinstalled Linux machine like most MS fanboys do. Or what about an install party at the local Linux User Group?
I use Debian, Cachy and Parabola BTW
I'm pretty sure laptops without an OS or with Linux pre-installed aren't available in most countries
Interesting question. Dell and Lenovo are shipping to many Countries.
I don't know about Framework, System 76, Tuxedo, Purism, Nova. Yes could be an issue, would be interesting to research some statistics about this, but I have no time.
Then the users really would have to learn installing and changing UEFI settings by themselves. Organizing in local Linux User Groups is I think the best idea. Or why not MS User Groups but I don't plan to join these.
Haha, definitely had me. I'm still new to linux and so far bazzite kde has been great. Very few issues, small learning curve. Hard to mess anything up too bad.
Linux got seamless. It's not bad now.
i just started using it and choose Fedora, and it is indeed a little confusing at first but when you move to linux you should be prepared to study a bit, watch videos, even use your text app to keep stuff and organize commands, its not a move in with full furniture kind of deal and i think thats part of the fun
Wow, so much coping with half-truths and whole lies.
You didn't read the last line. They were talking about windows
The only reason windows file explorer opens in sub 3 seconds is because it's bundled with the desktop and taskbar.
If I had know this before...
It's obviously RB but there's some truth in there. I remember back in like 2008 when I was first introduced to Linux, kinda felt like magic that there was another OS besides windows and Mac. I had an old powerPC iBook collecting dust that I installed Ubuntu on. Honestly I was just toying around with it for a few weeks. I remember being confused by a lot of things kinda like this post and honestly not even knowing where to look for information, what terms to put into the search. I just clicked around and essentially broke shit and reinstalled.
I forgot about Linux for a while until my Intel Mac mini fell out of support so I installed Ubuntu around and 2010 full time on my main machine. The good megaupload and Netflix as a DVD service days.
I ended up distro hopping to nearly everything. Ended up getting that old PPC laptop up and running again with a version of puppy Linux. I got really into light weight distros and minimal UI's with all my own cli scripts for everything, mps-yt for YouTube, made my own script for 8tracks, for web scraping and so on. Lots of pipe menus for everything, weather, calendar events and so on. Although these days I just run Fedora, have been thinking of switching to an immutable base with a container for everything I need to install besides flatpaks. Vanilla OS looked like a cool project but it's not mature yet, same with pop cosmic.
A mature cosmic UI on something like vanilla OS with an Ubuntu and an arch container for software that isn't available as a flatpak or otherwise doesn't work well as a flatpak I think would be my ultimate if and when they become mature.
One thing where Windows has an advantage over KDE for non IT people, is applications can directly access network shares. Most KDE applications don't even show the network in the file browse selector. So for sync or backup apps it only works with mounted shares. Which isn't necessary in Windows. To mount a share in KDE it's convoluted and a hack that is no good non IT users. If they expect good usability.
How often do non-IT users have a network share? And if they do, how often do they manage it themselves?
Non IT people need to back up too you know? And there are many more Windows users backing up compared to the number of IT pros.
Buy an off the shelf NAS for backups. Plug it in to your home router, and you are ready to back up. Unlike a USB drive, a NAS, such as a WD mycloud, is ready to use any time. Smart people like a convenient option. It's often recommended.
Make it hard to manage, and sure, they'll need to rely on someone else for help. But as we see on Windows, backing up to a share is easy.
Why ever defend bad usability?
I am lookimg at the comments and laughing. I have a low end pc, with nvidia and intel. Ya all behave as if linux was some peak of programming...and heck, maybe it is, dunno.
But installing Windows 10 vs CachyOS/Mint/Nobara took similiar time. Speed is the same, explorers too. On Cachy and Mint, compatibility was also the same (Nobara did not like my hardware). All in all, both Linux and Windows were fast and reliable (except Nobara, again, hardware issues).
Yet ya all grab edge cases and try to make it appear as it's normal xD And this applies to both linux and windows folk, altho I do admit there a lot more linux folk here. But both sides grasp at edge case problems and pretend it's norm lol xD
From noob PoV, Cachy = Mint = Windows 10 usability wise. I'd switch to Cachy if not for the fact only Windows can squeeze last drops of my hardware juice T-T (I love Plasma desktop, even if wallet pisses me off)
Skill issues at play here lol
Had me in the first five sixths, not gonna lie.
Ngl file explorers on Linux suck some massive ass unless you use like Krusader or ranger or terminal based stuff. Dolphin, Caja, nemo, Thunar, Nautilus, all of them are so fucking convoluted that it feels like they are consciously designed to do the things you least expect and in the most roundabout way at all times.
Dolphin is genuinely good though. It has tabs, it has splitscreen, it has inbuilt console. It's not Norton Commander, but it's a good file manager if you're into graphic ones.
Someone didn't read the wiki
Someone didn't read the post
you mean Linux is not like aol.com then drive by okay
Going Arch for a first distro. Must have gotten advice from a Redditor lol
Having an opinion based exclusively on the title. Must be a redditor lol
Except that was a joke, not an opinion, and Arch is in the text body not the title...