Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.
if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.
I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are "if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout".
Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn't quite there. This wasn't a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.
I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
Exactly. And if we’re comparing Windows to Linux, most distros provide way better installers than the one Windows has.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but ... I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer "does" is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like CreateWindowEx() in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.
The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we're disqualifying it because "it requires you to install a package", then we also consequently:
Add things like "print stuff", "display graphical applications", and "play audio" to the list of "things Linux can't do"
Disqualifies Windows from "natively executing" any .NET applications (a Microsoft-built first-party framework), since .NET applications require you to install .NET.
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.
I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.
so, due to those gaps, it currently can't do those things.
This argument boils down to "yes it could, if someone bothered to implement it". Well... nobody has, so it can't
I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it's unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
I'm sorry, something went wrong. Here is all the information we can give you about it: ":("
... No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to "just reinstall" beyond laughable.
I think it recovered my PC for me twice, and it took about ~10 minutes each time at most. Good luck reinstalling everything in that time lol.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it's not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that's not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Sure if it fails completely it will, but it doesn’t catch everything. Here’s a related story I have:
At work we had a bunch of Lenovo X1 Carbons running windows that would have the usb-c ports die seemingly randomly on users which was a big problem since that’s also the charging port. There never seemed to be any similar root cause connecting the incidents and Lenovo’s support wasn’t any help. Our entire company is remote but luckily we had onsite support so for a while they would just come by and replace the whole motherboard each time.
Finally one day while scheduling a repair the support guy I was talking to just said, “Oh I’ve seen this before. It’s just a bad update and resetting the CMOS battery by putting a paper clip in this hidden hole fixes it.” We had the user try it out and the ports worked fine again. Apparently they had run some windows updates that failed silently and were causing the hardware issues.
From then on any time a user has had a hardware issue we can’t figure out we just have them try the reset and it has worked every time. This only happens probably 3-4 times a year but we only have less than 40 of these machines so not an insignificant amount.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases
I had to literally give up on a windows install that worked itself into an update hole, run the update, cant log in, undo the update, it tries to update at night. Endless cycle, no possible fix.
I don't want to berate you, but just know with enough practice, you'll be able to fix that linux install. Windows wont let you fix it.
Last time that happened to me was 20 years ago. Am I lucky and this is still common?
Depends on your distro I suppose, I've never ever thought this while using fedora
Happened to me last year. I never fully found the root cause, but suspect nvidia drivers may have been an issue. I actually re-partitioned the hdd and put another ubuntu on it to try to fix things. That one booted, but I couldn't un-fuck my old install.
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
You might be suffering from the opposite of survivorship bias: When you work in IT you end up having to fix the strangest shit that reoccurs on certain categories of hardware.
I know for a fact that RHEL 7 just did not like certain appliances by vendors that used it (back in the day). They would regularly break themselves until the vendor put out an update that switched it to a Debian-based custom thing.
Also, all the (thousands of) appliances that use Windows are utter shit so it's not really a high bar. The vendor just needs to hire people that actually know what they're doing and if they do they won't use Windows on an appliance!
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
I've put more work into getting wsl to work at work than I have my home linux machines. it's just so unreliable for some reason. I ended up just giving up and running a full vm instead, and it's so much nicer since I can just pretend windows doesn't exist
Especially when enabling wsl is incompatible with running a VM. I want to run VM not only for Linux! Yeah just installing a full vm is better.
AutoCAD. The reason i wont change my workstation to linux
Fusion 360 actually works under Linux with Bottles. Some other Autodesk products also have native Linux versions.
fusion 360,
Onshape, with extra advantages like seamless collaboration (like that of Google sheets)
Adobe suite
Darktable - Lightroom replacement, Gimp - Photoshop replacement, kdenlive - premiere replacement, but I get that you will have to relearn all these all over again (worth it tho, as no monthlys ever again)
GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement except for pretty basic stuff. There’s no content aware fill, fewer non-destructive edit options, wonky compatibility with PSD files, etc.
Darktable also isn’t a real replacement for a lot of use cases. Lightroom (the non-Classic version) has pretty great cloud syncing and multi-platform apps, so you can do some work on a desktop and then move to a tablet/smartphone or vice-versa. Darktable doesn’t have that kind of flexibility.
People always talk about how Linux is just as good or better because of the FOSS apps but in the work world it doesn’t matter if my coworkers and partners are using Office to collaborate, etc. (and where it is A LOT better than a standalone free app).
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
This is exactly my problem. I really want to do the switch, but I'm using my computer for work also, and I'll never get by without Office nor Adobe suite.
the browser based office does just work if that helps. I don't have anything for the cc side tho
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton's advancement and the steam deck's popularity, too.
Yeah, and I don't give two shits about the publishers who think they need to seize control of my machine for their idea of fairness.
Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:
Domain integration, e.g. ActiveDirectory
Group policy configuration
You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly
What can you do with active directory that you can't do with user groups in Linux? When I worked l1, active directory's job seemed to be breaking and letting us lock out people who just got fired by one of our clients.
with ActiveDirectory ad group policies you can centrally configure the entire windows installation to the point that it isn't possible for a local user, even with admin to leave the domain. User groups in Linux don't really cover the use cases for installing and uninstalling applications and configuring options within all of those applications. Yes you can do some similar stuff with, e.g. FreeIPA or even binding to AD but fundamentally you have a local system with remote admin added on.
Ok that's fair enough I guess. I'd like to have something I can point at as an alternative but I don't know enough.
Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.
The cad tools is still correct but I've been using mixed DPI multi-monitor for a while now on plasma Wayland without any issues. I have them set to different scaling levels as well
Wayland can do mixed DPI multi-monitor setup, and Onshape is a fantastic CAD system - it runs in browser and works perfectly on Linux. I used exactly that setup profesionally for nearly 2 years.
But everyone's complaining that nothing works under Wayland. Can you guys make up your mind already?
Probably Nvidia users and devs that don't want Wayland. I have yet to encounter anything that doesn't work apart from things I only read about in arguments by devs who adamantly refuse Wayland for Reasons (TM)
This is literally the only current reason I use windows
I started using Google sheets. I know the implications on storing/sharing personal data with Google.
But Google sheets is being used as my mini db to store all kind of data. I automated many stuff with Google app script with telegram bot.
I am 100% sure that now I can live without Excel.
Plus, libre has gotten good these days... Or you could use WPS office
I've tried using Google Sheets but it can't manage simple mailing labels that Excel has been able to do for the past 30 years. In Google sheets, you need to sign up for a monthly subscription plugin to get that feature.
At least they added the mail merge feature for emails, which required me to build a Google App Script to achieve a similar outcome.
I started trying to write labels into Google Sheets as an app script but soon realized I was wasting my time.
It would have been easier to ignore Sheets altogether and write it in as a web page with JavaScript and CSV data.
Instead I installed a 15 year old version of MS Office and had the labels printed in minutes.
Yeah I kinda gave up with Google for label printing, I use the app for my thermal label printer along with a CSV file if I need to print a batch of them..
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
I'm going to go with "be normal".
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.
But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not.
That’s funny because IMO it’s the exact opposite. Every mainstream operating system is a Unix or Unix-like. MacOS, iOS, Android, the BSD’s, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Windows is the only non-Unix OS that has any significant marketshare.
Oddly enough I think that actually adds to the problem. Because there are so many Unix-like OSs and each is slightly to significantly different, the solution to a problem on one may or may not work on another.
I liken it to SQL, having worked with many different sql dialects, I can never recall what functions are supported by one versus another. However, I don't run into that problem with Mongo, cause it's so different.
In my experience, if you have an issue on a Unix-like OS it’s almost always possible to diagnose and fix the problem. There is almost always a log file with extensive information. Unices are built from collections of simple tools so it’s often easy to find what exactly is going on and to isolate the problem for an easy fix.
Windows on the other hand is a black box. If something doesn’t work, you’re screwed. Error messages are often cryptic to the point of being little more than a 432 digit number. Most subsystems are monolithic monstrosities and isolating an issue is a PITA. Troubleshooting usually isn’t much more than randomly changing things and see what happens, or googling the error and hope someone else found a fix. Even if you manage to fix it, it’s often unclear what the actual issue was. It kind of reminds me of the magic/more magic switch.
On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won't work on other Unixes.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
That's very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that's no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.
Yeah.... this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
Saying running anything out of the box is "impossible by design" on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven't succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I'd agree but at least you'd have leg to stand on.
Erm I'll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there's almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it's not always clear what you're supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn't geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn't always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It's a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works "out of the box" better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It's pretty solid.
Truth!
In my experience, most package managers should set up dependencies by themselves! Though, I do agree with the lack of explanation of documentation.
I use arch by the way, but what’s your opinion of other “user-friendly” distros like Manjaro or Garuda?
The person is correct in this isn't a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $user
To ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
i hate Linux (users) as much as the next guy but my windows pc wouldnt stay asleep if i gave it an od of ambien
it wakes up randomly throughout the night fairly often
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn't wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn't perfect still but it's way better than windows was.
I think that's a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue
*I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
True, but that's more due to Nvidia's stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
It's not just Nvidia, though... I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn't supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Mullvad has a decent Linux GUI, but you have to install their service. On the positive side, it works with and without systemd.
Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).
Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a 'hope it works' but are most definitely unsupported.
Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.
Wine is 'fun'(?), but it's a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows' tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it's not 'supported.
Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn't have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).
I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work "well enough" to move on from windows but it's just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it'll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it'll be easier to switch.
For now, I'm stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows' direction).
This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
I will try to help him out with it - it's promising, as he does not have the hardware/workflow obstacles that I have, but he's also not as technically minded. I actually really hope becomes workable for him.
Update - it's ultimately a non-starter, I'm afraid. A nightmare in trying to integrate unsupported HW (Line 6, etc - forgot about those ones...)
Frustrating. Naively, I keep trying and bashing my head into that wall...
Ah yes - Native Instruments. It's both HW and SW. I should have been more clear. No joy on Ubuntu - the issue is the HW driver. The HW is simply unsupported. (someone wrote a driver to partially allow midi mode on an older version of the HW, but it's completely hobbled and, I fear, makes my point more loudly than I could if it didn't exist. FWIW, only the older Native Instruments installers will run under wine - the new ones leverage certain features of windows that apparently will never be supported by wine, so I have little confidence in wine-based solutions for anything I need to depend on going forward.
Apple makes great computers, but... I can't stand them. You're in a walled proprietary garden and it drives me bonkers. I also have similar suspicions wrt their privacy practices.
Windows, for me, works well enough (I can get it to do everything I need) but I have grave concerns about privacy and a really, really don't like their AI direction. It's the opposite of what I want in a computer.
I've considered going full Linux as hypervisor with Windows as guest, but it's really not that easy to actually use beyond a theoretical proof of concept once you start managing large sound libraries.
Would like to get back to Linux as daily driver as I did years ago and actually do run it on a few old laptops. (I wish there was a better email client - the only one that seems to successfully support oauth2 is thunderbird, and it's more than a bit unwieldy for large mailboxes (especially with its circa 1997 design aesthetic...)
Anyway - I really, really want to find a way to make a leap to Linux (again) but it's currently not feasible, no matter how hard I bang my head against that particular wall...
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
This is one of the issues that systemd purports to solve, and it gets nothing but flack for it.
Granted, systemd does have its flaws. But the religious war around it is unjustified.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.
We got people pointing out software made by companies that go out of their way to make sure it won't work on Linux as if that's because Linux can't.
Yeah and I'm sure they'd respond "well it doesn't matter WHY, the average person just needs blah blah"
Yeah, ok sort of fair I guess, but imagine how good Linux would get if all the big software and hardware companies standardized on some support for Linux! It's this good now, despite the challenges outside the control of Linux devs. Fuck you, Nvidias all around.
Honestly don't see why all the big software devs wouldn't hugely benefit from leaving behind Microsoft's bullshit. It wouldn't be great short term for adoption time, but afterwards they're good!
Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.
But really it's not Linux's fault. All games could (probably) run on Linux if someone ported them
Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn't have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every "PC" game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.
Ads in my notifications and my lock screen.
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language -- that doesn't make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you're already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you're dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.
You're only partially correct. I did grow up using Windows, but I also dual-booted Ubuntu on every machine that I could. I also used a Macbook exclusively for a few years, and MacOS was way closer to Linux than Windows was back then.
Nowadays, I also use a mix of Powershell and Ubuntu via WSL, depending on what I need. Linux commands usually do less than what I'd like it to, but they work like simple building blocks. Powershell does exactly what I want, but some of these commands are way too freaking long.
However, I'd argue that path variables aren't for power users. Sure, it's not for your grandmother, but a decent chunk of people who wanted to run a Minecraft server for their friends probably looked into path variables, and almost all of them looked at firewall settings and port forwarding. Those people will be confused and scared of GUIs and editing txt or bat files. Without a friend walking them through the process, opening a terminal is infinitely more intimidating. Even if someone is fine with learning terminal commands, there aren't nearly enough checks with Linux commands when doing something potentially destructive compared to Windows. With Windows, you usually get some minor annoyance with hard to find solutions at worst. With Linux, assuming no backups, you'll end up needing to clean install if you're trying to learn how to do something.
In all fairness, I haven't used Linux GUIs often in about 4 years. The most recent time I used one at all was about a year ago when I was trying to set up a remote desktop solution, but didn't know what a desktop manager was, what a display server was etc. I only really use Linux from a terminal nowadays.
EDIT: To add to the PATH thing, you severely overestimate the number of programmers who are also power users. It is crazy how many CS majors don't know how to fix basic issues.
I would argue both have evolved in the opposite way though. Windows has become so unintuitive for me with every version after win 7. Splitting up control panel in many different locations. Multiple methods to remove different applications,... On windows server, it was even worse, and as soon as I moved away from Microsoft's default built-in crap to third party tools, things actually became much easier.
While with Linux, things worked out of the box for me for a long time already and the process of things make sense a lot times, taking into account the requires minimal knowledge is there.
Being intuitive - was true of Windows 95 - XP, but was completely broken in the last couple of releases. Whatever version Windows is on now, it's so much a guessing game what is and is not a button, or how to invoke a given tool within an application. They even took away the "menu > underlines" ffs.
My argument? 2 settings panels for more than a decade now.
That's it
Fair. It's still intuitive as an XP/7/8 user, but not for a new user. That being said, Windows 11 has made good improvements in moving stuff to the "Settings" app.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux.
I knew I made a huge mistake last year installing Linux on my parent's computers when I asked them to copy and paste commands into the terminal over the phone.
I'm not trying to doubt you, I'm just genuinely curious - what are you walking your parents through that they need to use the terminal?
In what world does Windows have an intuitive, consistent UI/UX?
You just got used to the mess that Microsoft calls a "user experience". Gnome and KDE are consistent platforms for their respective apps with Gnome having one of the most flushed out HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) of any desktop interface to make their DE in the most hands off/out of the way experience for you to focus on your tasks (subjective)
"I used Windows all my life and am unwilling to learn anything new"
Oh please, I use Ubuntu and Kali at work. Just because I don’t suck the Linux penguins dick doesn’t mean my statement is any less true. Using Linux is a pain. Even some of the most mundane tasks with application installation, setup, or maintenance take 20x as long and require non stop troubleshooting at every turn when nothing works as expected or you encounter new things you don’t know how to get around. Down vote me to hell i don’t care, I don’t hate Linux but I stand by my statement and everything is more difficult.
Power management on certain chips is simply better than anything Linux has to offer (AMD Zen+ mobile for instance)
Modular driver architecture with drivers that aren't complete jank to manage and install. A lot of people see this as a pain point, but in reality it's not such a bad thing, especially nowadays.
This is a given, but as lots of stuff runs on Windows (namely older games), you can only really make stuff for Windows on Windows. So if you need to develop Win32 software, you really have to use Visual Studio for proper development. Mingw cross compile exists, I know, but that's never going to be as good.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
For your third point, it's way easier to cross-compile for a Linux target on Windows than the other way around, as you can just run the compiler in Docker or WSL, which is even easier now that Visual Studio has native Docker and WSL support. WSL is pretty good.
i tried producing music with linux native daw and plugins via yabridge. pain in my stupid ass.
You could check out renoise, bitwig studio, I mean, did Microsoft made daw? It would have been awful
Double click to install a program
you can do that on linux too. just double click the .deb
*on most distros
can windows do that, without a wizard? i guess technically, but ive never seen it done, and i think it would be a security flaw.
I don't want to compile anything. I don't want to "make". I don't want to use command lines. I don't want to download Rust. Or know the difference between python2 and python3 and how you still have to be specific about it. I never wanna read a git manual with lines that mean nothing to me again. I don't care about snap or flatpack or whatever package distribution gives me a year old version of my program on this distro and how that version differs from the one from the webpage.
Sorry Linux, but a big download button, double click, "install to c:/program files", "want a short cut to desktop", done. is the gold standard for 99% of applications.
Run normal games like fortnite and warzone, and run other games not through steam without needing to install proto tricks and get the right dependencies for every damn game
That's like blaming your English teacher for "Don Quixote de la Mancha" being written in Spanish. Linux isn't the reason those things don't run on Linux. Fortnite and Warzone developers are responsible for failing to develop for anything other than Windows, consoles, and sometimes Mac.
Fortnite and Warzone developers are responsible for failing to develop for anything other than Windows, consoles, and sometimes Mac.
The worst part is, they don't even really have to target Linux if they don't want to. The guys working on Wine and Proton have already done the hard work there. All they have to do is not use garbage anti-cheat software, or Linux-compatible anti-cheat software.
The other worst part is that they do use Linux-compatible anti cheat software, which other games like Apex Legends use and work through Wine/Proton in Linux, but they just don't enable it for Fortnite for some reason.
Nowadays I'd say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don't even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.
Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.
I'd also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.
You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it's just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
The granularity and scale of active directory is a major thing that is keeping linux out of offices, etc...I know you can do a lot with certain tools but nothing comes close as far as I have seen.
The granularity of AD doesn't scale though. I work for a huge bank and trying to get something changed in Group Policy is basically impossible. Making it even the tiniest bit bigger (e.g. adding a single new rule) will slow down every goddamned PC and VM in the entire organization. It adds up to real money lost real fast.
Not only that but some changes to GPOs can break things that you didn't foresee so the general wisdom is, "don't ever change it." Rendering that whole "granularity" argument moot. What good is granularity if you can't even use it?
Also, getting AD to scale to the size required the help of Microsoft. They had to change AD for us many times because the way it replicated certain things just does not scale past around 20,000 desktops (if memory serves). They gave us custom DLLs that run on our DCs to keep things operating reasonably smoothly but their lack of support on non-Windows platforms is a perpetual problem.
If literally every single computer in your company is Windows you'll be fine. However, as soon as you start trying to connect your Linux servers to AD everything starts getting really fucking complicated and troublesome real fast.
Microsoft made a lot of mistakes when they were designing AD but the biggest one was making it intentionally proprietary in so many ways. It prevents us from adopting it more. If AD actually worked with everything we'd be paying Microsoft a lot more in licenses every year.
Aside: Their second biggest mistake with AD was allowing groups to be placed in other groups. This made it so that "simple" administration of your policies and access controls goes from a single lookup to a lookup to the power of n groups. It doesn't scale at all and exponentially increases network traffic and load on domain controllers.
LDAP + Kerberos running on Linux servers doesn't have this problem because it doesn't allow it (intentionally, because it's stupid).
Oh man, I'm thinking about it now and AD just makes me so upset, haha. It's such a poorly engineered product. Don't give it more credit than it's due. It works fine for small organizations but that does not mean it's a good product.
Can you elaborate..
I have looked after a few instances of Active Directory and basic user management involved multiple steps through GUI's clearly written at different times (you would go from a Windows 8 to Windows 95 to Windows XP styled windows, etc..)
I much prefer FreeIPA, if I wanted to modify a user account it was two button clicks. Adding a group and bulk applying was the work of moments. You can setup replicas and for a couple hundred users it uses no resources.
The only advantage I could see related to Exchange Integration as it makes it really easy to setup Sharepoint, Skype & Email.
Sharepoint never gets setup properly and you find people switching to alternatives like Confluence, Github/Gitlab Pages or Media Wiki. So that isn't an advantage.
Everybody loathes Skype and your asked to setup an alternative (Mattermost, Slack, Zoom, etc..). I am not sure how integrated Teams is.
Which really only leaves Email and I just can see the one off pain of setting up Dovecot as worth the ongoing usability pain of AD's user control.
The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect.
Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.
Flatpak and Snap are Linux packaging formats that have sandboxing implemented and it’s pretty solid. There’s also Firejail for running sketchy applications in a stronger sandbox
People really dislike it when you point this out, But the security model on Linux is lacking. Yes, we have things like apparmor and SELinux, but compare it to sandboxd on macOS. The windows sandbox isn’t perfect, but it’s really user-friendly, and it works in most cases. Linux doesn’t have a direct equivalent. We’ve made great strides with making immutable distros through things like flatpack, and snap, but something that they failed to do is implement a least privilege model that is as robust as sandboxd on macOS.
From what I see, windows sandbox is literally a template VM.
Reall great article. Thanks for sharing. But I dont know where you get the "literally a template" idea from. The article is explaining pretty well how its made and there isn't one thing that leads to the assumption that this was just a template that gets booted up.
And equally importantly: not run the software you don't want
Literally the only thing keeping me from switching:
Act as a host in Parsec. If hosting ever becomes available for the Linux release, I'll switch.
Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
Windows saves me prescious time to do other things.
I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does.
I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go
I have had pretty good luck with this actually. You can get e.g. Matlab for Linux no problem, and even weird company-specific tools I want I usually find to be available. But then I guess most of the commercial software I want to use is software for people like me. I don't bother trying to use e.g. MS Office even on platforms it runs on, I don't do professional CAD, I don't do professional graphic design.
Full screen "please wait while we get your system ready for you" narrated by Cortana, and if you disable Cortana you still have to wait the amount of time it takes for the audio to complete. Like an invoiced video game narrator with unskippable lines.
Multiple screen RDP support. It is the only thing keeping me on Windows for my personal desktop. I RDP into my work laptop from my desktop so I can have all 4 of my monitors, but keep my systems separate.
Running the desktop version of turbo tax. I will try again with wine or some other things. I did toy with the though of a vm on Linux that's running windows ten, but not sure.
ITT: Many legitimate use-cases, and people shitting all over them.
This highlights one thing that Windows undoubtedly does better, and that's community support. With Windows and OSX things tend to just work, or to have limitations that people just accept. Linux becomes a lifestyle, when some people just want a tool that does a thing.
Validate Epic James's greediness Run Fortnite or Valorant.
Have the Year of the Windows Desktop.
Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works.
Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn't valid.
Edit: to clarify, i'm exclusively using linux since 2008 and i'm not 'afraid of editing config files', downvoting me doesn't fix the problem. I'm also not fond of fixing your header files for them to compile.
i could see this comment maybe a decade ago. things like Mint have made most of these complaints just echos of a different era.
These things exist for windows as well but they are not accessible. Linux is a car without the plastic hood over the motor. Its not dumbed down.
Does that make it hard to see the three things a noob should touch? Yes.
But there are linux distros that take care of this so this comment isn’t correct.
SUSE is weird but their YaST was compelling enough to make them an option. Cockpit in RHEL doesn’t compare. I think that having admins edit text files is bad. The capability should be there, but it should not be mandatory. Editing files manually instead of a GUI increases the odds of a mistype trashing the system.
Take hours to update every 2nd Tuesday. Run like squat on old/low end hardware. Require an add blocker to stay safe.
Oh please. If I let it, Linux would install updates every day or two. Windows has many flaws, but its updates are not among them. Not that it is better than Linux at updates, just that it is fine at them.
The big one for me is running mobile apps as an integrated experience
Waydroid simply doesn't work well yet.
Streamdeck support too.
VMware install isnt as seamless as it should be
Windows tiling in gnome, but, magnet for Macos is far better than both
Windows has a better initial setup. Often, when installing a new distro I gotta spend a couple of hours installing, troubleshooting and customizing what I need on Linux (even on beginner distros) while on Windows, you just install it, download a couple of apps from the web and restart to catch up on updates.
roblox
literally the only thing that took a minute.. i think i might have it now with vinegar. so i guess even thats kinda off the list
Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.
if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.
I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.
One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are "if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout".
Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn't quite there. This wasn't a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.
I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.
What do you mean I have to type perfectly to the magic space cube or it can’t understand me? How the fuck is ‘sudo apt-get update’ English?
Just type the following into the Terminal:
It will fix everything.
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
Exactly. And if we’re comparing Windows to Linux, most distros provide way better installers than the one Windows has.
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.
I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.
I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary
ppl who know how to use MacOS or Windows should have no issue using those
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Linux also has Howdy for facial recognition/“Windows Hello”
Biometrics authentication seems to me to be entirely useless. It's less secure and more easily spoofed than passwords, and if you need more security 2FA or a physical key (digital or otherwise) provide it. It would be nice to have the support I guess, but the tech itself just seems like a waste of money.
Natively run Windows software. Do I win?
that why i like windows 11. you can really taste the nativity
Wait, 11 tastes like goat barn and frankincense?
its mostly goat barn
Wine’s not an emulator…
That is correct, but a compatibility layer is also not native execution of a binary.
I beg you forgive my pedantic interjection, but ... I posit that the original commenter is incorrect. it is absolutely native execution.
The CPU is fetching and executing the instructions directly from memory, without any (additional) interpretation of code or emulation of missing instructions - Which is, by definition, native execution.
What the compatibility layer "does" is provide a mapping of Windows system calls into the appropriate Linux system calls. Or, in other words, makes it so that calls to functions like
CreateWindowEx()in the Win32 API have a (still native) execution path.The native execution requires you to install WINE, yes, but if we're disqualifying it because "it requires you to install a package", then we also consequently:
You windows
Windows does what Nintendon't? Wait, that's not it...
Spy on users
Ubuntu and DNF chuckles
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
There needs to be an entire Lemmy community for all the testimonial posts.
At this point, that's kinda the wrong question.
I think Linux is just as if not more capable than Windows is, but the software library has some notable gaps in it. "It can't run Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft" That's not Linux's fault, that's Adobe/Autodesk/Ubisoft's fault. I don't think there's a technical reason why they couldn't release AutoCAD for Linux, for example.
so, due to those gaps, it currently can't do those things.
This argument boils down to "yes it could, if someone bothered to implement it". Well... nobody has, so it can't
I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it's unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.
Selling copies for 200$
Linux can do that too. ╰(▔∀▔)╯
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
As another commenter noted, I guess you haven't met red hat
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
I'm sorry, something went wrong. Here is all the information we can give you about it: ":("
... No you just use Windows built-in rollback feature. Which I think even auto-recovers these days of it detects a failure to boot after an update.
Hah! Can someone here chime in and tell me when the slow AF (as in, it can take hours) rollback feature actually worked‽
Who TF is that patient‽ You can reinstall Windows and all your apps in half the time required.
As someone who has hundreds of installed programs with tweaks on top of tweaks and hundreds of thousands of files, I always find the suggestion to "just reinstall" beyond laughable.
I think it recovered my PC for me twice, and it took about ~10 minutes each time at most. Good luck reinstalling everything in that time lol.
Windows recovery fails in plenty of circumstances, it's not a magic bullet. Snapshots are like you can do with btrfs, but that's not exactly how Windows recovery works.
Sure if it fails completely it will, but it doesn’t catch everything. Here’s a related story I have:
At work we had a bunch of Lenovo X1 Carbons running windows that would have the usb-c ports die seemingly randomly on users which was a big problem since that’s also the charging port. There never seemed to be any similar root cause connecting the incidents and Lenovo’s support wasn’t any help. Our entire company is remote but luckily we had onsite support so for a while they would just come by and replace the whole motherboard each time.
Finally one day while scheduling a repair the support guy I was talking to just said, “Oh I’ve seen this before. It’s just a bad update and resetting the CMOS battery by putting a paper clip in this hidden hole fixes it.” We had the user try it out and the ports worked fine again. Apparently they had run some windows updates that failed silently and were causing the hardware issues.
From then on any time a user has had a hardware issue we can’t figure out we just have them try the reset and it has worked every time. This only happens probably 3-4 times a year but we only have less than 40 of these machines so not an insignificant amount.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t do stable releases
I had to literally give up on a windows install that worked itself into an update hole, run the update, cant log in, undo the update, it tries to update at night. Endless cycle, no possible fix.
I don't want to berate you, but just know with enough practice, you'll be able to fix that linux install. Windows wont let you fix it.
Last time that happened to me was 20 years ago. Am I lucky and this is still common?
Depends on your distro I suppose, I've never ever thought this while using fedora
Happened to me last year. I never fully found the root cause, but suspect nvidia drivers may have been an issue. I actually re-partitioned the hdd and put another ubuntu on it to try to fix things. That one booted, but I couldn't un-fuck my old install.
Even in the most stable distros I’ve had this issue. We had a RHEL 9 server acting as a graphana kiosk and it failed after an update. Something dbus related. I’d love to know why, as it’s been the only failure we ever had but nonetheless it shakes confidence. Windows 11 updates trashed three servers, one to the point we had a to fly an engineer out. My hope is that immutable distros fix this.
You might be suffering from the opposite of survivorship bias: When you work in IT you end up having to fix the strangest shit that reoccurs on certain categories of hardware.
I know for a fact that RHEL 7 just did not like certain appliances by vendors that used it (back in the day). They would regularly break themselves until the vendor put out an update that switched it to a Debian-based custom thing.
Also, all the (thousands of) appliances that use Windows are utter shit so it's not really a high bar. The vendor just needs to hire people that actually know what they're doing and if they do they won't use Windows on an appliance!
Timeshift
That's why I make a btrfs snapshot of my system before every upgrade. Rolling back from a rescue image takes only a minute.
Edit: automatically via the upgrade script
Amen Brother, my experience the last 20+ years
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
I've put more work into getting wsl to work at work than I have my home linux machines. it's just so unreliable for some reason. I ended up just giving up and running a full vm instead, and it's so much nicer since I can just pretend windows doesn't exist
Especially when enabling wsl is incompatible with running a VM. I want to run VM not only for Linux! Yeah just installing a full vm is better.
AutoCAD. The reason i wont change my workstation to linux
Fusion 360 actually works under Linux with Bottles. Some other Autodesk products also have native Linux versions.
Onshape, with extra advantages like seamless collaboration (like that of Google sheets)
Darktable - Lightroom replacement, Gimp - Photoshop replacement, kdenlive - premiere replacement, but I get that you will have to relearn all these all over again (worth it tho, as no monthlys ever again)
GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement except for pretty basic stuff. There’s no content aware fill, fewer non-destructive edit options, wonky compatibility with PSD files, etc.
Darktable also isn’t a real replacement for a lot of use cases. Lightroom (the non-Classic version) has pretty great cloud syncing and multi-platform apps, so you can do some work on a desktop and then move to a tablet/smartphone or vice-versa. Darktable doesn’t have that kind of flexibility.
People always talk about how Linux is just as good or better because of the FOSS apps but in the work world it doesn’t matter if my coworkers and partners are using Office to collaborate, etc. (and where it is A LOT better than a standalone free app).
None of these are legitimate, professional replacements.
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
This is exactly my problem. I really want to do the switch, but I'm using my computer for work also, and I'll never get by without Office nor Adobe suite.
the browser based office does just work if that helps. I don't have anything for the cc side tho
That's not so much a Linux problem as a Corporate greed problem.
Remember a big part in Windows mobile dying was its lack of Google support and not it itself lacking in any way
Add autodesk to that, and 99% of software used in aec or civil engineering or machine stuff (can't remember name, foreigner drunk ugh)
Play lots of AAA games
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton's advancement and the steam deck's popularity, too.
Yeah, and I don't give two shits about the publishers who think they need to seize control of my machine for their idea of fairness.
Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:
You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly
What can you do with active directory that you can't do with user groups in Linux? When I worked l1, active directory's job seemed to be breaking and letting us lock out people who just got fired by one of our clients.
with ActiveDirectory ad group policies you can centrally configure the entire windows installation to the point that it isn't possible for a local user, even with admin to leave the domain. User groups in Linux don't really cover the use cases for installing and uninstalling applications and configuring options within all of those applications. Yes you can do some similar stuff with, e.g. FreeIPA or even binding to AD but fundamentally you have a local system with remote admin added on.
Ok that's fair enough I guess. I'd like to have something I can point at as an alternative but I don't know enough.
FreeIPA and OpenLDAP are PITA compared to AD.
I hate windows but AD works pretty well and integrates with a lot of SSO functionality easily.
Modern IAM tools should fix any of the locked out / just fired users issues you speak of... by using AD.
Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.
The cad tools is still correct but I've been using mixed DPI multi-monitor for a while now on plasma Wayland without any issues. I have them set to different scaling levels as well
Wayland can do mixed DPI multi-monitor setup, and Onshape is a fantastic CAD system - it runs in browser and works perfectly on Linux. I used exactly that setup profesionally for nearly 2 years.
But everyone's complaining that nothing works under Wayland. Can you guys make up your mind already?
Probably Nvidia users and devs that don't want Wayland. I have yet to encounter anything that doesn't work apart from things I only read about in arguments by devs who adamantly refuse Wayland for Reasons (TM)
OnShape UI is worse than FreeCAD, it's a bloody abomination.
Run Microsoft Excel
This is literally the only current reason I use windows
I started using Google sheets. I know the implications on storing/sharing personal data with Google.
But Google sheets is being used as my mini db to store all kind of data. I automated many stuff with Google app script with telegram bot.
I am 100% sure that now I can live without Excel.
Plus, libre has gotten good these days... Or you could use WPS office
I've tried using Google Sheets but it can't manage simple mailing labels that Excel has been able to do for the past 30 years. In Google sheets, you need to sign up for a monthly subscription plugin to get that feature.
At least they added the mail merge feature for emails, which required me to build a Google App Script to achieve a similar outcome.
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/06/google-sheets-now-integrated-with-gmail.html
I started trying to write labels into Google Sheets as an app script but soon realized I was wasting my time.
It would have been easier to ignore Sheets altogether and write it in as a web page with JavaScript and CSV data.
Instead I installed a 15 year old version of MS Office and had the labels printed in minutes.
Yeah I kinda gave up with Google for label printing, I use the app for my thermal label printer along with a CSV file if I need to print a batch of them..
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
I'm going to go with "be normal".
Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn't. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.
Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a
.cand a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.But that's kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it's often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.
That’s funny because IMO it’s the exact opposite. Every mainstream operating system is a Unix or Unix-like. MacOS, iOS, Android, the BSD’s, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, etc. etc.
Windows is the only non-Unix OS that has any significant marketshare.
Oddly enough I think that actually adds to the problem. Because there are so many Unix-like OSs and each is slightly to significantly different, the solution to a problem on one may or may not work on another.
I liken it to SQL, having worked with many different sql dialects, I can never recall what functions are supported by one versus another. However, I don't run into that problem with Mongo, cause it's so different.
In my experience, if you have an issue on a Unix-like OS it’s almost always possible to diagnose and fix the problem. There is almost always a log file with extensive information. Unices are built from collections of simple tools so it’s often easy to find what exactly is going on and to isolate the problem for an easy fix.
Windows on the other hand is a black box. If something doesn’t work, you’re screwed. Error messages are often cryptic to the point of being little more than a 432 digit number. Most subsystems are monolithic monstrosities and isolating an issue is a PITA. Troubleshooting usually isn’t much more than randomly changing things and see what happens, or googling the error and hope someone else found a fix. Even if you manage to fix it, it’s often unclear what the actual issue was. It kind of reminds me of the magic/more magic switch.
On phones Android is pretty typical, and on desktop Unix is also pretty typical because MacOS is it. But non-Mac Unix on the desktop is pretty unusual, and stuff built for Mac specifically often won't work on other Unixes.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
That's very weird as with docker on windows you technically run your containers in a linux vm, and besides that, in my experience windows is not nearly stable enough to be useful for running services.
All while I have been deploying selfhosted services for myself without problems on Linux for years. My only problem has been the constantly overloaded system, but that's no surprise when you run heavy services on the 10+ year old portable hard drive system disk. Windows would only perform worse in that environment.
Yeah.... this feels like a very bad example. I am honestly curious as to specifics here, because Ubuntu setup is pretty dead simple with the graphical installer. And like you said docker is native linux.
Saying running anything out of the box is "impossible by design" on Ubuntu is objectively wrong frankly. Maybe you could argue they haven't succeeded in their goal of being super out of the box friendly, not sure I'd agree but at least you'd have leg to stand on.
Erm I'll politely disagree there. Linux is just built for it. No extra layer like Windows. Docker and Linux are besties
Don't get me wrong - I know that they are, and I know that Linux is superior for running docker containers. The thing is that Windows handles all the permissions for you. An average Joe can get a docker container up and running on Windows. You need significantly more Linux-specific knowledge to get a container running on Linux, and the advice given by the community is often cryptic for beginners.
I feel your pain, ugh. Setting up certain types of software can be a pain in the ass because there's almost always dependencies that need to be set up first; in addition, it's not always clear what you're supposed to install or how to do it the right way. A lot of Linux-related documentation out there isn't geared towards beginners and leaves out a lot of important explanatory and contextual information, which just makes it more frustrating. Unnecessarily, in my opinion.
However, I gotta mention that Ubuntu - though widely used - is sorta notorious for being user unfriendly and isn't always the most appropriate choice for a beginner Linux user. If anyone reading this is thinking about trying Linux for the first time, I would consider Linux Mint. It's a Linux distro that is actually based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), but it works "out of the box" better than most and should be a positive experience for most users. It's pretty solid.
Truth!
In my experience, most package managers should set up dependencies by themselves! Though, I do agree with the lack of explanation of documentation.
I use arch by the way, but what’s your opinion of other “user-friendly” distros like Manjaro or Garuda?
The person is correct in this isn't a Linux problem, but relates to your experience.
Windows worked by giving everyone full permissions and opening every port. While Microsoft has tried to roll that back the administration effort goes into restricting access.
Linux works on the opposite principle, you have to learn how to grant access to users and expose ports.
You would have to learn this mental switch no matter what Linux task your trying to learn
Dockers guide to setting up a headless docker is copy/paste. You can install Docker Desktop on Linux and the effort is identical to windows. The only missing step is
sudo usermod -aG docker $userTo ensure your user can access the docker host as a local user.
Seamless sleep on close and wake up on open. Macs still does it best, but Linux it's an adventure each time.
On Windows?!? Talk about an anecdotal experience
The wake on LAN option is an absolute joke too.
Leave computer for a while > goes to sleep
Come back in the morning > computer is on and room is warm
No magic packet was sent, it just decided it was going to wake up and then ignore the "sleep after X minutes" setting and just remain on.
Get your shit together Microsoft...
i hate Linux (users) as much as the next guy but my windows pc wouldnt stay asleep if i gave it an od of ambien
it wakes up randomly throughout the night fairly often
On my Microsoft Surface laptop I had a horrible experience with sleep and wake on close and open with windows. More than half the time it wouldn't wake up on its own and I would have to either have an external keyboard or just turn it off. Currently that same laptop is running opensuse tumbleweed and wake and sleep on close and open works about 85 percent of the time. It isn't perfect still but it's way better than windows was.
I think that's a per installation thing, cause mine has always had issues with sleep mode - ironically no problem with hibernation though haha
Play all my laptop's speakers
Same, or use the fingerprint reader.
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
True, but that's more due to Nvidia's stubborn lack of interest than anything else.
It's not just Nvidia, though... I tried running a popular vpn recently on Linux and was shocked to see it wasn't supported outside command line. This same vpn provider has an app for everything, even android TV and Roku of all things.
Mullvad has a decent Linux GUI, but you have to install their service. On the positive side, it works with and without systemd.
True, I really do think Linus was right when he said "fuck Nvidia" but sadly it's still a point against Linux :(
Adobe lightroom (with its multi-device editing and catalogue management - even when only using its cloud for smart previews).
Hardware support for music. NI Maschine is a non-starter. Most other devices are, at best, a 'hope it works' but are most definitely unsupported.
Music software. You can hack your way into getting a lot of your paid modules to work, but it is certainly not supported.
Wine is 'fun'(?), but it's a game of whack-a-mole chasing windows' tail and will never allow everything to run. Either way it's not 'supported.
Businesses any any size tend to eschew SW/HW that doesn't have formal support. (things like RHEL are most definitely supported as servers and orgs certainly leverage it).
I keep installing Linux hoping I can get a sufficient amount stuff to work "well enough" to move on from windows but it's just not to be (yet). Hope it changes, but it'll require buy-in from commercial product developers. I hope as Linux continues to grow a foothold in desktop installs, a critical mass will be reached, commercial devs take notice and it'll be easier to switch.
For now, I'm stuck with Windows and WSL. (But I am not happy with Windows' direction).
This commenter used "NI Maschine" as though everbody'd know what "NI" stood for...
iirc, it stands for Native Instruments, and iirc, the "Maschine" is either hardware or hardware+software.
The ONLY Linux distro which may do what theyre wanting, is UbuntuStudio.
I happen to agree that it is a damn "whack-a-mole" "game" for us in Linux, and I"ve been experiencing that since 1996 ( when only Slackware mostly-worked ),
but .. if ever the spyware in MS's products gets made illegal, then .. Linux'd be the only lifeboat left?
( don't tell me that Apple isn't every-bit as much into privacy-molestation as the other Big Tech corpos are: they aren't a real alternative )
_ /\ _
Interestingly, a friend of mine just sent me this https://www.musicradar.com/news/linux-studio.
I will try to help him out with it - it's promising, as he does not have the hardware/workflow obstacles that I have, but he's also not as technically minded. I actually really hope becomes workable for him.
Update - it's ultimately a non-starter, I'm afraid. A nightmare in trying to integrate unsupported HW (Line 6, etc - forgot about those ones...)
Frustrating. Naively, I keep trying and bashing my head into that wall...
Ah yes - Native Instruments. It's both HW and SW. I should have been more clear. No joy on Ubuntu - the issue is the HW driver. The HW is simply unsupported. (someone wrote a driver to partially allow midi mode on an older version of the HW, but it's completely hobbled and, I fear, makes my point more loudly than I could if it didn't exist. FWIW, only the older Native Instruments installers will run under wine - the new ones leverage certain features of windows that apparently will never be supported by wine, so I have little confidence in wine-based solutions for anything I need to depend on going forward.
Apple makes great computers, but... I can't stand them. You're in a walled proprietary garden and it drives me bonkers. I also have similar suspicions wrt their privacy practices.
Windows, for me, works well enough (I can get it to do everything I need) but I have grave concerns about privacy and a really, really don't like their AI direction. It's the opposite of what I want in a computer.
I've considered going full Linux as hypervisor with Windows as guest, but it's really not that easy to actually use beyond a theoretical proof of concept once you start managing large sound libraries.
Would like to get back to Linux as daily driver as I did years ago and actually do run it on a few old laptops. (I wish there was a better email client - the only one that seems to successfully support oauth2 is thunderbird, and it's more than a bit unwieldy for large mailboxes (especially with its circa 1997 design aesthetic...)
Anyway - I really, really want to find a way to make a leap to Linux (again) but it's currently not feasible, no matter how hard I bang my head against that particular wall...
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
This is one of the issues that systemd purports to solve, and it gets nothing but flack for it.
Granted, systemd does have its flaws. But the religious war around it is unjustified.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.
We got people pointing out software made by companies that go out of their way to make sure it won't work on Linux as if that's because Linux can't.
Yeah and I'm sure they'd respond "well it doesn't matter WHY, the average person just needs blah blah"
Yeah, ok sort of fair I guess, but imagine how good Linux would get if all the big software and hardware companies standardized on some support for Linux! It's this good now, despite the challenges outside the control of Linux devs. Fuck you, Nvidias all around.
Honestly don't see why all the big software devs wouldn't hugely benefit from leaving behind Microsoft's bullshit. It wouldn't be great short term for adoption time, but afterwards they're good!
Can Linux mess with my default browser preferences every other time it applies updates? I'm pretty sure it can't.
Restore the screen resolution when an old game crashes
Change your audio device seemingly at random.
I feel like any time I get a Teams call, my Windows audio goblin rolls a d20 to determine which combination of devices will be used.
Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.
How do you know?
Blue screen. Embed advertising and spyware in everything.
canonical has had it's run with the latter two, at least briefly. it's not out of the picture at least
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
Play virtually any video game with ease. I'm happy to see Linux makes huge strides here, but it's definitely not there yet.
But really it's not Linux's fault. All games could (probably) run on Linux if someone ported them
Yeah, this is more of a Microsoft using its monopoly for years to push game development towards a more Windows locked in direction. Had games been built on open standards MS would have lost its PC game market ages ago, and the Xbox wouldn't have had its impact on gaming the same either early on. Making every "PC" game run on DirectX and making calls to Windows DLLs made those early Windows to Xbox ports easier and helped MS leverage the monopoly into another market more easily. Wine and now Proton have come a long way, but needing to reverse engineer things all the way through is a lot more work than just implementing a standard would have been.
Ads in my notifications and my lock screen.
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language -- that doesn't make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you're already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you're dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.
You're only partially correct. I did grow up using Windows, but I also dual-booted Ubuntu on every machine that I could. I also used a Macbook exclusively for a few years, and MacOS was way closer to Linux than Windows was back then.
Nowadays, I also use a mix of Powershell and Ubuntu via WSL, depending on what I need. Linux commands usually do less than what I'd like it to, but they work like simple building blocks. Powershell does exactly what I want, but some of these commands are way too freaking long.
However, I'd argue that path variables aren't for power users. Sure, it's not for your grandmother, but a decent chunk of people who wanted to run a Minecraft server for their friends probably looked into path variables, and almost all of them looked at firewall settings and port forwarding. Those people will be confused and scared of GUIs and editing txt or bat files. Without a friend walking them through the process, opening a terminal is infinitely more intimidating. Even if someone is fine with learning terminal commands, there aren't nearly enough checks with Linux commands when doing something potentially destructive compared to Windows. With Windows, you usually get some minor annoyance with hard to find solutions at worst. With Linux, assuming no backups, you'll end up needing to clean install if you're trying to learn how to do something.
In all fairness, I haven't used Linux GUIs often in about 4 years. The most recent time I used one at all was about a year ago when I was trying to set up a remote desktop solution, but didn't know what a desktop manager was, what a display server was etc. I only really use Linux from a terminal nowadays.
EDIT: To add to the PATH thing, you severely overestimate the number of programmers who are also power users. It is crazy how many CS majors don't know how to fix basic issues.
I would argue both have evolved in the opposite way though. Windows has become so unintuitive for me with every version after win 7. Splitting up control panel in many different locations. Multiple methods to remove different applications,... On windows server, it was even worse, and as soon as I moved away from Microsoft's default built-in crap to third party tools, things actually became much easier.
While with Linux, things worked out of the box for me for a long time already and the process of things make sense a lot times, taking into account the requires minimal knowledge is there.
Being intuitive - was true of Windows 95 - XP, but was completely broken in the last couple of releases. Whatever version Windows is on now, it's so much a guessing game what is and is not a button, or how to invoke a given tool within an application. They even took away the "menu > underlines" ffs.
I can agree Linux is not intuitive.
I won't agree Windows is intuitive. Its just not.
My argument? 2 settings panels for more than a decade now.
That's it
Fair. It's still intuitive as an XP/7/8 user, but not for a new user. That being said, Windows 11 has made good improvements in moving stuff to the "Settings" app.
I knew I made a huge mistake last year installing Linux on my parent's computers when I asked them to copy and paste commands into the terminal over the phone.
I'm not trying to doubt you, I'm just genuinely curious - what are you walking your parents through that they need to use the terminal?
In what world does Windows have an intuitive, consistent UI/UX?
You just got used to the mess that Microsoft calls a "user experience". Gnome and KDE are consistent platforms for their respective apps with Gnome having one of the most flushed out HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) of any desktop interface to make their DE in the most hands off/out of the way experience for you to focus on your tasks (subjective)
Literally everything easily with much less effort
seriously
"I used Windows all my life and am unwilling to learn anything new"
Oh please, I use Ubuntu and Kali at work. Just because I don’t suck the Linux penguins dick doesn’t mean my statement is any less true. Using Linux is a pain. Even some of the most mundane tasks with application installation, setup, or maintenance take 20x as long and require non stop troubleshooting at every turn when nothing works as expected or you encounter new things you don’t know how to get around. Down vote me to hell i don’t care, I don’t hate Linux but I stand by my statement and everything is more difficult.
Reinstall Candy Crush.
Play games on GeForce NOW at a higher resolution than 1080p. :-/
Play Netflix, etc at 4K.
Yes, and that is netflix's limitation. Nothing to do with Linux in itself.
It's a drawback of open source systems. Without the copy protection in place, rightsholders are unwilling to let you have their best stuff.
Which means ironically the only way to watch at good quality is to torrent it...
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
For your third point, it's way easier to cross-compile for a Linux target on Windows than the other way around, as you can just run the compiler in Docker or WSL, which is even easier now that Visual Studio has native Docker and WSL support. WSL is pretty good.
i tried producing music with linux native daw and plugins via yabridge. pain in my stupid ass.
You could check out renoise, bitwig studio, I mean, did Microsoft made daw? It would have been awful
Double click to install a program
you can do that on linux too. just double click the .deb
*on most distros
can windows do that, without a wizard? i guess technically, but ive never seen it done, and i think it would be a security flaw.
linux does have gui package managers, you know
https://www.silentinstall.org/msiexec
I don't want to compile anything. I don't want to "make". I don't want to use command lines. I don't want to download Rust. Or know the difference between python2 and python3 and how you still have to be specific about it. I never wanna read a git manual with lines that mean nothing to me again. I don't care about snap or flatpack or whatever package distribution gives me a year old version of my program on this distro and how that version differs from the one from the webpage.
Sorry Linux, but a big download button, double click, "install to c:/program files", "want a short cut to desktop", done. is the gold standard for 99% of applications.
I know there are reasons. But still, it sucks.
Spy it's users
Linux can totally do that. Even if your distro doesn't package it, you can always install spyware from source.
Run normal games like fortnite and warzone, and run other games not through steam without needing to install proto tricks and get the right dependencies for every damn game
That's like blaming your English teacher for "Don Quixote de la Mancha" being written in Spanish. Linux isn't the reason those things don't run on Linux. Fortnite and Warzone developers are responsible for failing to develop for anything other than Windows, consoles, and sometimes Mac.
The worst part is, they don't even really have to target Linux if they don't want to. The guys working on Wine and Proton have already done the hard work there. All they have to do is not use garbage anti-cheat software, or Linux-compatible anti-cheat software.
The other worst part is that they do use Linux-compatible anti cheat software, which other games like Apex Legends use and work through Wine/Proton in Linux, but they just don't enable it for Fortnite for some reason.
Nowadays I'd say driver discovery for virtually any modern hardware you might plug into your computer. You don't even need to visit websites to download installers anymore. Literally plug it in and it will grab whatever is needed for it to work properly. Yes even Nvidia display driver. Even VR headset.
Never had any issues with multi-monitor setups out of the box either. It just works.
I'd also mention disposable Sandbox and virtualization in general. WSL also runs at native speeds.
You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
I honestly doubt that WSL runs at native speeds. WSL2 literally runs in a VM, and IO performance is known to be worse even compared to WSL1. Maybe it's just not directly noticable. Do you run a graphical environment in it? If not, that could help a lot too in not noticing it.
Photoshop and Lightroom.
You can run both, but especially Lightroom is a bit slow especially when using RAW files. LR is slow even on Windows :'(
Use the map editor for C&C Generals
Oh look, another command & conquer comment from me. How surprising.
I totally forgot about that game.
The granularity and scale of active directory is a major thing that is keeping linux out of offices, etc...I know you can do a lot with certain tools but nothing comes close as far as I have seen.
The granularity of AD doesn't scale though. I work for a huge bank and trying to get something changed in Group Policy is basically impossible. Making it even the tiniest bit bigger (e.g. adding a single new rule) will slow down every goddamned PC and VM in the entire organization. It adds up to real money lost real fast.
Not only that but some changes to GPOs can break things that you didn't foresee so the general wisdom is, "don't ever change it." Rendering that whole "granularity" argument moot. What good is granularity if you can't even use it?
Also, getting AD to scale to the size required the help of Microsoft. They had to change AD for us many times because the way it replicated certain things just does not scale past around 20,000 desktops (if memory serves). They gave us custom DLLs that run on our DCs to keep things operating reasonably smoothly but their lack of support on non-Windows platforms is a perpetual problem.
If literally every single computer in your company is Windows you'll be fine. However, as soon as you start trying to connect your Linux servers to AD everything starts getting really fucking complicated and troublesome real fast.
Microsoft made a lot of mistakes when they were designing AD but the biggest one was making it intentionally proprietary in so many ways. It prevents us from adopting it more. If AD actually worked with everything we'd be paying Microsoft a lot more in licenses every year.
Aside: Their second biggest mistake with AD was allowing groups to be placed in other groups. This made it so that "simple" administration of your policies and access controls goes from a single lookup to a lookup to the power of n groups. It doesn't scale at all and exponentially increases network traffic and load on domain controllers.
LDAP + Kerberos running on Linux servers doesn't have this problem because it doesn't allow it (intentionally, because it's stupid).
Oh man, I'm thinking about it now and AD just makes me so upset, haha. It's such a poorly engineered product. Don't give it more credit than it's due. It works fine for small organizations but that does not mean it's a good product.
Can you elaborate..
I have looked after a few instances of Active Directory and basic user management involved multiple steps through GUI's clearly written at different times (you would go from a Windows 8 to Windows 95 to Windows XP styled windows, etc..)
I much prefer FreeIPA, if I wanted to modify a user account it was two button clicks. Adding a group and bulk applying was the work of moments. You can setup replicas and for a couple hundred users it uses no resources.
The only advantage I could see related to Exchange Integration as it makes it really easy to setup Sharepoint, Skype & Email.
Sharepoint never gets setup properly and you find people switching to alternatives like Confluence, Github/Gitlab Pages or Media Wiki. So that isn't an advantage.
Everybody loathes Skype and your asked to setup an alternative (Mattermost, Slack, Zoom, etc..). I am not sure how integrated Teams is.
Which really only leaves Email and I just can see the one off pain of setting up Dovecot as worth the ongoing usability pain of AD's user control.
VBA support is non existant on Linux
Don't worry, Microsoft is dropping support for it soon too
Vba isn't being dropped. They stopped allowing macros to run automatically without warning the user. That was for security.
MS isn't Google/Apple. They keep backwards compatibility in Office for forever.
upgrade my jabra headset firmware
The secured Sandbox maybe? The windows sandbox is pretty awesome for day to day use imo. And no a template VM or container isnt really the same thing. The sandbox has the task of making sure that there is nothing that can break out. Afaik the sanbox has done a pretty good job so far in that aspect. Does linux bring a comparable option to the table? Would love to find out, changig as many aspects of my life to linux is the best thing to do.
Flatpak and Snap are Linux packaging formats that have sandboxing implemented and it’s pretty solid. There’s also Firejail for running sketchy applications in a stronger sandbox
People really dislike it when you point this out, But the security model on Linux is lacking. Yes, we have things like apparmor and SELinux, but compare it to sandboxd on macOS. The windows sandbox isn’t perfect, but it’s really user-friendly, and it works in most cases. Linux doesn’t have a direct equivalent. We’ve made great strides with making immutable distros through things like flatpack, and snap, but something that they failed to do is implement a least privilege model that is as robust as sandboxd on macOS.
From what I see, windows sandbox is literally a template VM.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/windows-sandbox/ba-p/301849
Reall great article. Thanks for sharing. But I dont know where you get the "literally a template" idea from. The article is explaining pretty well how its made and there isn't one thing that leads to the assumption that this was just a template that gets booted up.
HDR support looks to be a ways off.
Unfortunately the HDR implementation in Windows also isn't flawless and has some big issues.
Run the software I want
And equally importantly: not run the software you don't want
Literally the only thing keeping me from switching:
Act as a host in Parsec. If hosting ever becomes available for the Linux release, I'll switch.
Did you try Sunshine and Moonlight? A little rough around the edges but the most reliable solution that I ever used. Also has the lowest latency out of the ones I tested.
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine https://moonlight-stream.org/
Windows saves me prescious time to do other things. I went through the Dos, Win 3.1, Windows XP era thoroughly enjoying my time spending hours and hours learning about how to get my new sound card, network card , printer, game , software, mouse, newfangled USB device or whatever working, then my priorities evolved and the time pressures of family and career mean I just want my PC to work and for my use case it does. I'm heading for retirement soon so maybe I'll have more time to give Linux a go
Run fusion 360... Easily.
Flash a code plug to one of my Motorola radios.
Play call of duty, for the better or the worse.
Commerical and enterprise software client side.
I have had pretty good luck with this actually. You can get e.g. Matlab for Linux no problem, and even weird company-specific tools I want I usually find to be available. But then I guess most of the commercial software I want to use is software for people like me. I don't bother trying to use e.g. MS Office even on platforms it runs on, I don't do professional CAD, I don't do professional graphic design.
Full screen "please wait while we get your system ready for you" narrated by Cortana, and if you disable Cortana you still have to wait the amount of time it takes for the audio to complete. Like an invoiced video game narrator with unskippable lines.
Multiple screen RDP support. It is the only thing keeping me on Windows for my personal desktop. I RDP into my work laptop from my desktop so I can have all 4 of my monitors, but keep my systems separate.
Running the desktop version of turbo tax. I will try again with wine or some other things. I did toy with the though of a vm on Linux that's running windows ten, but not sure.
Who needs TurboTax when gnucash exists? :)
ITT: Many legitimate use-cases, and people shitting all over them.
This highlights one thing that Windows undoubtedly does better, and that's community support. With Windows and OSX things tend to just work, or to have limitations that people just accept. Linux becomes a lifestyle, when some people just want a tool that does a thing.
Validate Epic James's greedinessRun Fortnite or Valorant.Have the Year of the Windows Desktop.
Linux lacks GUI configuration tools for many things, you have to edit text files often using guidance for obsolete versions of software and hope it works. Every single config file can have thousands of lines and if you wrote something wrong it will crash or start acting weirdly, very fragile design. GUI config tools mostly allow valid inputs like checkbox true/false and complain if the path isn't valid.
Edit: to clarify, i'm exclusively using linux since 2008 and i'm not 'afraid of editing config files', downvoting me doesn't fix the problem. I'm also not fond of fixing your header files for them to compile.
i could see this comment maybe a decade ago. things like Mint have made most of these complaints just echos of a different era.
These things exist for windows as well but they are not accessible. Linux is a car without the plastic hood over the motor. Its not dumbed down.
Does that make it hard to see the three things a noob should touch? Yes.
But there are linux distros that take care of this so this comment isn’t correct.
SUSE is weird but their YaST was compelling enough to make them an option. Cockpit in RHEL doesn’t compare. I think that having admins edit text files is bad. The capability should be there, but it should not be mandatory. Editing files manually instead of a GUI increases the odds of a mistype trashing the system.
Take hours to update every 2nd Tuesday. Run like squat on old/low end hardware. Require an add blocker to stay safe.
Oh please. If I let it, Linux would install updates every day or two. Windows has many flaws, but its updates are not among them. Not that it is better than Linux at updates, just that it is fine at them.
The big one for me is running mobile apps as an integrated experience
Waydroid simply doesn't work well yet.
Streamdeck support too.
VMware install isnt as seamless as it should be
Windows tiling in gnome, but, magnet for Macos is far better than both
Windows has a better initial setup. Often, when installing a new distro I gotta spend a couple of hours installing, troubleshooting and customizing what I need on Linux (even on beginner distros) while on Windows, you just install it, download a couple of apps from the web and restart to catch up on updates.
roblox
literally the only thing that took a minute.. i think i might have it now with vinegar. so i guess even thats kinda off the list
Manage app startup and profile settings
winamp smoothly.
Run MS mail servers
Linux, browsers, and hardware accelerated videos on the web don't go along well out of the box. Which is a total shame.
When was the last time you drove Linux?