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you know, I’m begining to think this whole “readiness” idea is completely arbitrary. The same people who today complain about linux’s supposed difficulty, were just fine using their home micro-computer in the 80’s. If you ask me, the only people who are defining what “ready” means, is Microsoft’s marketing department.
I’ve used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready
On Linux I’d have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn’t user ready
Yeah, Linux was ready long ago
People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks
Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/
By all standards, a completely understandable outcome
Linux is ready, but not the professional software devs. Literally only thing stopping me from fully switching
I don’t think Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, whatever is “ready yet” either. operating systems are always in development. There are things I can do on my linux machine that I can’t do on my windows machine, and vice versa.
Let’s be real. Most people can’t really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.
It like the endless and useless fight between Android and iOS fan boys, it’s much simpler than that, you use what you like/comfortable with, you don’t need to convince anyone how right you are and how wrong they are, never really understood this weird behaviour from supposedly well educated people. You enjoy Linux, good for you , you like windows, kodus, you’re mac person have at it .
The average ‘advanced’ window user: CLI is scary!
Also the average ‘advanced’ windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it’ll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it
99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).
Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they’ll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.
Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won’t make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it’s forced on them… which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.
More user friendly doesn’t mean you won’t have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that’s a real problem…
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can’t tell what they do, that’s a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don’t understand)
Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
It’s not the terminal, it’s the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn’t customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes “oh, but Windows command line is so annoying” is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you’re trying to do something Windows doesn’t want you to do.
The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it’s a feature.
You know whats worse than doing things in windows command line or powershell? The registry
“Nooooo! I cant $sudo nano /etc/some.conf!!!”
Regedit -> HKEY_USERS/microsoft/windows/system/some_setting --> value=FUCK type=DWORD
That’s because you are sending your Fucks to the wrong key. You are missing the /feedback folder under system
This is a common meme but essentially is never needed
The deliberate misrepresentation here is that the Windows registry supports importing keys from a text file, so most of the time you have to mess with it you just download a file and double click on it.
Is that super secure? Nope. But hey, anytime you need to do something on a Linux terminal you’re also copy/pasting random crap you found online, don’t pretend you’re not.
The ultimate point still stands. None of these matter to normies, it’s how often you need to tinker or troubleshoot to begin with. For most users the acceptable number is zero.
You can reinstall a driver without ever touching the command line on windows.
Can you do that with Linux? Idk maybe on some distros but the default would just be to uninstall the package from terminal.
Pretending these are equivalent is not cool and it just drives new users away for not understanding things the community takes for granted. It takes effort to learn the terminal if even tech-savvy windows users may not even use the command line
Not what I’m saying. I’m saying that a) copy pasting into the terminal isn’t the horrifying breakdown of usability Linux advocates seem to believe it is, and b) there are more pressing issues about how often you need to troubleshoot something in the first place.
On both Linux and Windows it’s relatively rare to have to reinstall a driver in the first place because both are able to pick up your hardware, set themselves up and keep themselves updated with minimal user intervention.
The real problem isn’t whether fixing the exceptions to that involves typing. The real problem is how often there are exceptions to that. In Linux it’s way more likely that the natural process of setting something up or customizing something will require some fiddling, while Windows is more likely to make you install some bloatware or not give you much choice, but most likely will get things working for you the way it wants them to work.
That is very much a user-friendly approach, despite its annoyances. The problem isn’t that there is a command line interface, the problem is that it’s littered in the middle of doing relatively frequent, trivial things. On purpose, even.
The linux terminal is really easy to get into & the UNIX file-system is just nicely organized
As a normie (at least in these circles), I think I agree with your last point. Windows being heavily restricted in its customizability is a feature. A bad feature, but a feature nonetheless.
Windows 11 doesn’t even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
Kinda crazy, because W7 didn’t support first gen Ryzen either!
The difference is that if you’re using hardware that’s compatible it just works. My current experience on Linux is that you have 100% hardware that’s supported based on what people are saying, you install one distro and your GPU shits the bed the second there’s load on it and WiFi works when it feels like it. Install another distro and the GPU works but WiFi doesn’t. In the end you spend hours troubleshooting and you’re applying solutions by trusting that people aren’t doing anything malicious when they tell you to input such and such in terminal.
On Windows? Install the OS, everything works, so no, there’s no issues with the hardware itself.
And the “small subset” of hardware it supports is anything made after 2017 and it’s only Windows 11 that doesn’t support hardware made before that.
Try to make Linux work without any outside intervention with all the hardware that Windows 11 is just compatible with out of the box, I dare you.
Edit: let’s add getting Dolby Atmos to work on Linux, never managed to make it work with VLC, had do download another program instead and create a file in a superuser only folder with text commands because there’s no UI options to make it work like it should.
That “small subset” is hundreds of millions of devices made in the last 5 years alone.
The problem with Linux (not their fault), is that most of the problems appear in hardware made in the last 3 years.
Huh, odd. I never had these issues, even though I use an Nvidia card with a VRR monitor. All my peripherals (webcam, printer, bluetooth earbuds) work out of the box, too. But maybe I’m just lucky.
Running windows 11 on older hardware is as easy as a checkbox in Rufus. Also the small subset of hardware windows supports is by far the most used hardware (probably because it’s supported by windows).
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Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
*my personal thinkpads wifi board didn’t work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
Even the Nvidia graphics card sentiment is becoming outdated. There have been sizeable improvements in their drivers over the past couple years.
Correct. I’ve been rocking their open source driver on Wayland for about a year now, pretty smooth experience.
Though sleep is still a neverending struggle.
You’ve been rocking it for what? Does it support the DLSS feature set now along with HDR and VRR? I mean, it sure did show me a desktop for the few days I spent trying to get a clean, working install of the proprietary driver, but I wasn’t under the impression that I’d have feature parity without doing that.
VRR works as long as you’re on a recent Wayland version.
HDR isn’t a driver issue.
With X11, it ain’t happening.
Wayland current supports HDR, however there isn’t a protocol for applications to communicate with Wayland to configure themselves correctly. Some applications, like MPV, you can use an environmental variable to get HDR output (but not dynamic HDR, like HDR+ or Dolby Vision) and you can configure the parameters in the config.
Gamescope, the compositor that Valve uses for the Steamdeck, supports HDR for gaming. It works well for some games and completely fails for others.
Luckily, there’s a Wayland color management/HDR protocol that is staging for an upcoming Wayland update so you won’t need to depend on Gamescope to use HDR.
DLSS works in the games I’ve seen.
All of that in fully open source drivers? You sure about that? Is it per card?
Ultimately this is pretty much my point, you wrote a whole paragraph about this and I’m still not sure how accurate it is, which cards have which features supported or whether we’re even talking about the same thing.
Considering the competition’s implementation is “install this one piece of software day one, never think about it again”, that is some ways away from a “pretty smooth experience”, even without accounting for the parts that are buggy.
For the record, I’m aware of the state of affairs for Nvidia support overall (unfortunately, wish I didn’t have to be). I’m gonna say you’re wrong about HDR being a driver issue, though, seeing how it was outright disabled for what, three months? due to a showstopping driver bug. It seems to be back to working now, though.
In any case none of this is normie-friendly and an absolute dealbreaker for anybody on modern Nvidia hardware.
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The proprietary driver? I went distro hopping, ended up trying four or five different ones. Some had the proprietary driver baked in, there were a couple of different processes for the installation for the others. The GPU wasn’t the only hardware compatibility issue I was juggling, so by the time I also had audio going and the right DE setup to support my display features I ended up manually installing them in Manjaro by just finding a guide and blindly following whatever they told me to do.
Yeah, I was having trouble with sleep, and kwin compositing (KDE), so I switched to proprietary drivers and X11, its working pretty well.
I’ve defaulted to enabling the X reset on mine, just because waking from sleep is such shite.
In my group of friends (all Linux gaming), I’m the only one with an NVIDIA card. I don’t have more problems than the other folks, I just have different ones.
The biggest gripe I have, HDR and color management, are getting fixed in Wayland soon. In the meantime I use gamescope to get HDR and apply color correction filters with reshade.
In the last twenty years, I’ve pretty much only had nVidia hardware for graphics with very few issues.
Of course that wasn’t in laptops. Having a GPU in a laptop is asking for trouble anyway in my opinion.
“Unless you have a computer in the 90% of users” is a hell of a dismissal.
In fairness, thin-and-light media and web use laptops are a different story, but for desktop use? That’s a big stretch.
My man, you think 90% of pcs have a graphics card at all? I live in a poor country, so does the majority of the worlds population, and almost no one has a graphics card here.
No, I think 90% of the ones that do have a dedicated GPU have a Nvidia one. That’s not an opinion, it’s data that’s widely available.
It’s also, incidentally, just an example of one of the more egregious issues with the current state of Linux. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
In any case, that’s not typically the space being discussed here. The advice generally is “get an AMD GPU”, not “we are assuming you’re on integrated graphics”.
All AMD hardware, Bazzite was killing my GPU as soon as there was load on it and WiFi that worked intermittently, Mint had non working WiFi on a USB antenna that is supposed to be 100% Linux compatible.
So yeah, I would love it if Linux fanatics stopped pretending that Linux is just as plug n play as Windows, it isn’t and solutions rely on trusting random people on the Internet.
I don’t pretend anything, I commented my personal experiences. So I guess we both shouldn’t expect our experience to be the norm…
And tbh, statistically you have the upper hand, most people do use windows after all. (76% or something like that?)
Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
Disable IPv6.
Windows and some printers just choke on IPv6 for some reason. I was having sporadic issues with network printers and windows until I disabled IPv6 for other reasons and noticed a noticeable decrease in printer error metrics.
It’ll also affect SMB shares
I wish I could do that, but CGNAT makes ipv6 the much preferred option for a lot of things.
But it’s good to know that this might be the cause…
On the other hand printers always work out of the box on Linux without even installing any drivers, whilst getting them go work on Windows can often be a nightmare
Sure AMD’s drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
Frankly you are comically biased.
Yeah, I run Linux as my main OS and am able to say that it’s not ready to go mainstream, biased as fuck
It’s telling you are not even going to defend your points.
Windows being mainstream is not due to being easier to use or setup/configure (which the mainstream does not do) nor due to it being more robust or easier to fix (which it isn’t, plenty of guys make their living fixing windows issues, usually by wiping and reinstalling because documentation for most things in windows is very shallow).
It’s because the mainstream buys PCs and they are sold with windows
The difference is that the average user won’t face those problems in the first place on Windows while they’ll have them from the first boot on Linux because driver development for Linux isn’t a priority for manufacturers.
Then the user has to figure out the solution that applies to their version of Linux (when the average person can’t tell what OS they’re using in the first place) and the solution doesn’t come from the manufacturer but from a random GitHub project or people on a Linux forum that they just need to trust even though basic computer security starts with “don’t just trust random people”.
The “What about the registry? And people have to use the terminal on Windows as well!” argument falls apart when you realize that it’s not something that will be required for the average user while it is for the average user if they use Linux. Unless you’re trying to make Windows do power user stuff you don’t even need to know that it has a terminal.
There, happy?
You can’t bullshit me man. I ‘ve been using solving peoples’ issues with Windows before I ever downloaded a Linux distro.
Most of the problems average users won’t see with windows is because they buy it preinstalled while they have to install linux themselves. So they 'll be spared being unable to install AMD gpu drivers on a fresh Win 10 install if they made the mistake of not installing them before connecting the machine to the internet and Win Update fucking things up.
However windows update will get them later. Windows start menu refused to work after an update on a friends’ pc. Or it will be fail to apply an update and failing with no troubleshootable information only to fail again on next reboot and again and again. Or explorer crashing hundreds times a second causing users to have a black screen after login.
You are technically right in that the average user will not use the terminal (or registry, or booting to safe mode), they will pay someone else to do that or cope with it.
Sounds like the problem is between the keyboard and the chair because I’ve never had issues installing AMD drivers on Windows 10, never had Windows update issues and so on.
Maybe you would be better off getting a iPad.
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
- Hardware compatibility issues.
- Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
- Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
- Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
- Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
- Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
Add binary compatibility issues to that list: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The moment you need software that is not packaged by your distro you either need to be lucky that whomever compiled it accounted for your setup, or compile it from scratch yourself (if open source and publicly available). Especially with closed source software (like most games) the latter isn’t even an option.
fanzyzones
Thanks!! This is just what I need. Pop_os has an equivalent in their DE and because work I have windows and I really miss it.
If you don’t have admin rights on your work pc, you can install fancyzone by installing powertoys from the microsoft store.
They want ReactOS.
But they don’t want to pay it to develop it fully
They also want the developers to dedicate their entire lives, 20 hours a day, for no pay, just became they’re entitled to a FOSS Windows clone.
Honestly I think potentially a bigger factor is that there are very few manufacturers who sell machines with linux preinstalled. Very few people have ever installed an OS before or have any desire to do so.
Also there is plenty of software with no real linux alternative even today unfortunately.
That is exactly why Chromebooks were (are?) so popular. You got a cheap laptop with an easy-to-use OS without having to do any install. And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
And let’s be real here, most people don’t need anything more than a web browser.
You would think. Surprisingly, i only know of one non techy person in my life for whom this was the case, and even they ended up needing to use some statistics software for school after switching to linux. Luckily, they were able to get it through a school-provided VM.
People have all kinds of needs and those needs can change over time. For people who are deaf in one ear, there is no easy way to set the audio output to mono. That’s just one way that accessibility features are lacking. I know people who rely on apps like notability syncing their mac laptop to their ipad, which no app on linux can do. I know people who have specialized software for work such as VPN apps that simply do not exist on linux. I know people who do creative work for whom it would be a major learning curve at the very least to switch. It only takes one app or crucial feature to lock you out. Even I have to dual boot from time to time for firmware updates or to play games my friends want to play that aren’t on Linux.
But you better believe I’m tracking all of these issues so I can switch people over as soon as they’re implemented ;)
This is a big point that not many people acknowledge. The reason SteamOS works as well as it does has less to do with SteamOS itself (it’s ultimately as finicky as any Linux distro) and more with it being laser focused on making a specific piece of hardware do a specific thing.
Problem is, it’s a bit of a loop. It’s not particularly profitable to launch Linux-only devices, let alone to put the work to ensure they will work reliably for their entire lifetime without user intervention. That makes it harder to grow the ecosystem, given that the default implementation is way jankier than most people will allow, which in turn keeps the business less profitable.
You say it like it’s a bad thing but yes, I want my stuff to just work and my apps to just run after I download them… I don’t want to spend hours every other day or week during my limited free time troubleshooting why something doesn’t work. I already spend all day doing that in my work’s linux servers and my home server.
This is an issue with FOSS. If something doesn’t work then you are on your own. Yes, I can fix it, or work around it, or whatever but it will take hours that I could be spending in windows 11 just playing a game or actually learn something more relevant instead of troubleshooting random shit. On other apps as well, I’ve paid for a lot of software to be able to ask the owners to help and for them to not tell me to fuck off.
Here’s an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they’ll mysteriously “forget” and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don’t have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
(A previous version of this comment involved the word “lube”. I’m sure you can imagine the rest.)
That is a terrible analogy. In your weird alternate reality I just wouldn’t keep a garden. Also, I’d be pretty concerned with suing the patently illegal practices of this weirdly overbearing landscaping business, if I cared enough about gardening, which I don’t.
More to the point, that’s not how people present this to themselves and normies. At least not until they get some pushback. The pitch is always “it works now” or “it’s actually better and faster” or “everybody is going to switch any day now because of some random event or another, I’ve decided”.
It’s never “hey guys, maybe you can trade a whole bunch of convenience and a much higher minimum level of technical skill for the benefit of not being as impacted by enshittified services of the late online era”. Because in that scenario most people will take enshittified services. If not out of conviction, necessity or laziness, definitely out of not being able to clear that technical bar in the first place.
Bringing “no garden” back out of the analogy equates to no computer at all. The fountain is all the crapware and spyware shovelled into Windows these days. The billboard is the ads they want inject into everything.
The alternative is Apple. They don’t want to install a billboard just yet, and there’s no obvious fountain, but there’s a nightmare HOA who tell you how you have to live and if you don’t live their way you have to move.
No, that’s not the equivalent at all because I’m not a gardener but I do use a computer to work.
Look, analogies can be useful to explain things to people who don’t understand the paramenters in question, but we all know what an OS is. You don’t need to talk down to anybody here.
Turns out the question isn’t about gardening (or lube), it’s between a FOSS OS that remains finicky and not perfectly supported and a few commercial alternatives with different quirks and approaches to monetizing the crap out of you but that generally have decent usability for mainstream non-technical users with general applications.
You don’t need an analogy for that unless you’re talking to a time traveller from the 1800s.
Personally I believe that unless you’re able to do a slackware or gentoo installation, you’re not ready for Linux.
/s but only kinda
Linux users need to have a higher level of technical literacy than windows users. It just can’t be avoided unless you’re okay with potentially reinstalling your os at some point. The bar has been lowered a lot, but because other companies refuse to play nice with Linux, it’ll always be there.
If you’re okay with that tradeoff, then yeah Linux is great. But a lot of people aren’t even aware of it and it causes a lot of pain
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
I was thinking not only about the finicky drivers, but also the different audio backends, like ALSA and OSS, Pulse would have just come out at the time, so it was definitely getting better, but it was fresh off the presses back then, so it wasn’t good enough yet either. Nowadays, Pulse works pretty well, pipewire works pretty well, things more or less just work, Bluetooth can be a little weird, but usually you just need to change the settings on pulse/pipewire to your preference.
I’ve genuinely had problems with multi-speaker configs this year on multiple distros and very little guidance on how to troubleshoot it. But you’re not wrong.
Fair enough, sorry for the misunderstanding.
I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows audio though. It’s always been weird for me, randomly switching outputs for no reason, and I stopped even trying to connect wireless headphones because it would always seem to prioritize those, even when they’re turned off. Every 5 to 6 months I’d have to dig deep in the audio settings to fiddle with the gain on my mic so I’d stop blowing out my friends’ ears on discord.
I think we all need to start differentiating the usability quirks and general jank that all OS have in different areas from the blockers.
Yes, the way Windows handles sources and prioritization sucks, while different Linux DEs have dumb problems with UI scaling or their own audio quirks or MacOS has weird multimonitor support or whathaveyou. If that was it I’d be all for prioritizing the free alternative, no questions asked.
The issue is the blocking issues. Entire features not working, or working at noticeably sub-par performance. Hardware with straight-up nonexistent support you need to replace to make the jump, or that is so finicky to set up that it may as well not work for all the average user is concerned. Those are showstoppers.
The problem is you could have a LOT fewer of the quirks, but a single dealbreaker is enough to block somebody making the jump, or reporting that they tried and failed. I’m as annoyed with how inconsistently videoconferencing picks up the right audio output as anybody. I complain about it every time I have a work call. But I still wouldn’t suggest to any of my friends to try to set up their high end Nvidia GPU on Linux as a main gaming daily driver. Those two things are on completely different tiers.
Especially if you had a soft-modem.
And printing. Oh dear, I might have a headache if I think too much about it.
Oh, man, I had entirely blocked the concept of “soft-modems” from my memory. I’m having flashbacks.
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs greatHaving recently spent the equivalent to five work days trying to get an Nvidia setup working on Linux I’m going to say the experience isn’t necessarily much better, depending on what you are trying to do and how.
Installing Windows machines 10+ years ago wasn’t much more fun either… (I’m not sure it’s any more fun these days, but I haven’t done it in ages, so I’ve no idea).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
But it’s not ready because insert niche use case that only applies to me and no, I will not seek out open source alternatives to insert closed source software
The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.
I’ve been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.
You don’t see how terrible Windows is until you’ve switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.
The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.
It really feels like your PC isn’t yours.
Before I bought a Steam Deck I had never used Linux but now I really like it, honestly I’m tempted to install SteamOS on my PC as it’s only ever used for gaming anyway
I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.
When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.
I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.
Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.
I’ve been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don’t know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
The misery I have trying to get a newer(or sometimes older) version of a package I want is sometimes immeasurable. Yet somehow usually the right version is extremely accessible on choco.
In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There’s a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn’t break everything.
Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn’t want, etc.
Rose tinted glasses.
I think you guys have hit the nail on the head. So much of the Linux argument has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with what people already know.
Everyone forgets the bugs and crashes they’ve always had to deal with even exist, because they become background noise. Then they change to a new OS and might run into completely new “roadblocks” and cry about how broken and useless the OS is even though their new problems are just as minor (or more so) than the problems they left behind.
In reality, any OS is a complicated piece of kit. The more you do with it, the more likely you are going to run into something that does something you don’t expect - and the more tech literate you believe yourself to be, the more likely you think the OS doing something you don’t expect means it is broken.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate “normal” person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that’s for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It’s based on arch btw
The fact that there is a “correct” distro only adds to the unreadyness for mainstream.
I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it’s not really an app store, because it’s not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I’ll agree with you that Linux isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I’m tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn’t been fixed. I’m also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there’s another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven’t had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are “chicken and egg” things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn’t fixed quickly because there aren’t enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it’s hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don’t switch because it’s glitchy, it’s glitchy because there aren’t enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won’t switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn’t sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers… but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it’s not that things don’t break in Windows, it’s just that it’s a bigger emergency when they do break.
I’m not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I’m having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you’re trying to change doesn’t show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that’s not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the “DOS prompt” but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the “power” shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn’t quite there for the end-user, it’s getting closer and closer. Really, all that’s needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That’s an easy one.
Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
If Steam OS getting a wider release happens around the same time as Windows 10 hitting end-of-life, that could be a game-changer.
I know what you mean about it being frustrating when flatpak apps don’t work right though. I had an app that would just start to open and die, no error message, no feedback, just it started to open then closed. Because I was new to Flatpak I didn’t know how to poke at it. But, then I discovered how you can run flatpak apps from the commandline, and when you do that you get access to flags and you get error messages you can read. But, if you’re just some dude/dudette who wants to sit down and run an app and it doesn’t work, that kind of behaviour is ultra frustrating.
The problem is that there’s still a lot of flux when it comes to packaging and running Linux apps. There’s the old way – debs and rpms. There’s flatpaks, there’s the snap store, there’s homebrew, there’s mise and of course there are manual installs and/or building from source. Each one’s a bit different and has its own benefits and drawbacks. And, standard things like showing an error message that helps you sort out the problem when things break isn’t universally handled in a clean way.
I would probably not recommend newcomers an esoteric linux distro tbh. People hate canonical but if people in academia can daily drive Ubuntu, anyone can
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could’ve gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
Choosing a distro based on what it says it does is not on you. Recommending it to your wife without even having tried it is. When I put Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, I know what to expect because I’ve installed on just abuse every pc I’ve ever used in the past 10 years.
This is exactly what keeps me from switching. I don’t have the time or pull to do knuckle down on an important PC. Maybe when I have a backup one, I’ll do it. Who knows.
You’re not wrong. This is an argument for sticking with Windows. It will suck. But, you know exactly how much it will suck and in what ways. Switching to Linux will suck in new and expected ways.
This.
I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.
It’s not my favorite distro, the maintainer of Proton-GE created NobaraOS
Yeah that’ll happen if you run Bazzite. It’s extremely hardware dependent. It “just works” if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it’s a shitshow
Linux will never be “ready”, in a large part because it’s made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and most of those people just don’t understand how an end user thinks.
I got annoyed when my new Windows machine immediately had to install a bunch of updates, which only required me to click next every fifteen minutes or so, and I had to uninstall Onedrive and disable the news feed on the lock screen.
I’d have taken it back if I had to spend that much time actually researching, I’ve got far better things to do with my time.
The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn’t there yet, because I can’t use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as “no big deal”, you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won’t work. Well yeah, that’s a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?
Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don’t game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.
