I mean, you don’t HAVE to do any of that stuff in Windows, it’s just helps a bit.
I’m sure there are plenty of windows horror stories. But almost every Windows computer I’ve had in the last decade, both custom and OEM, has worked pretty well out of the box. And almost every Ubuntu computer I’ve had over the last decade has had problems that weren’t trivial to fix.
I like Linux, but when people compare these problems like they’re the same just are missing the point.
One time I used the store UI thing in Ubuntu to install a package and it made it so that every subsequent time I opened it it would just freeze. I couldn’t figure out how to uninstall it via the command line because it had some kind of lock on it. After awhile I gave up and reinstalled windows.
ltt is so cringe for all things linux and on reddit they are seen as the messia of linux WTF is even happening
Windows is the much more difficult OS AFAIK. Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn’t work well (pop up dialogs can be painful). I hate windows and managed to mostly avoid it until I switched jobs in 2017.
Even something simple like having keyboard focus follow mouse is a giant pain and doesn’t work well
Ah, I see you have seen the UAC prompt as well.
Plenty of modal dialogs flat out don’t work with keyboard follows mouse. But now that you mention it, its windows dialogs (not from 3rd party apps) that seem to be the most problematic.
I know instantly how to get the packages I need in Linux but I had to do some research to enable the webcam in Windows 10.
The idea that one OS is easier than the other is misattributed familiarity.
The idea that one OS is easier than the other is misattributed familiarity.
Exactly. OP’s meme makes no sense to me. My experience has been that using Linux is a never ending series of file not found and access denied errors.
And you never dug any further to see WHY you’re being denied access or WHY that file is not found.
Simple example, some distros will block regular user access to
/root. That doesn’t mean that you can’t access those files, it just means that YOUR user can’t see them WHILE you’re logged in with that user… which is why bash file/dir completion will not work if you cd to/root/path/to/dir. Log in as root in the terminal and it works just fine. Some even might out right not see the files if you’re logged in as a user, instead of root, regardless if that user in the sudoers file or not (you type in the exact path to a dir/file in the terminal and it won’t open/cd to it). In those cases, even sudo won’t work for some things, you just HAVE TO work with root.To be honest, this is very rare and has happened to me like once or twice (on some distros). In most situations/distros, sudo will work just fine.
How do you know if you don’t already know the package name?
I have to always Google for the package name, which similarly is what I do to find a Windows installer but instead of the name it’s download link.
apt search KEYWORDOr
dnf search KEYWORDOr
pacman -Ss KEYWORD
To enable the webcam on windows you just…open teams and start a call or use one of the apps that use the camera…
It is almost like those Linux users are not really as technologically capable as they claim to be.
Or they are just lying and haven’t used Windows in over a decade.
Even on Linux, to use the webcam you just plug it and open gnome cheese or Google meets…
Unless the vendor decided to lock it down until you manually unlock it with the administrator account. Then even Teams can’t see it.
I discovered yesterday that Windows has a command line package manager in Powershell that can install, uninstall and update basically every software you might ever want to install on a Windows PC.
winget search ""
winget list
winget upgradeThey copied the open source project AppGet and screwed the developer. It’s an interesting read.
They pulled a corporate and rewrote an opensource project to embed it into windows
I had a feeling this tool and its syntax was much too simple and elegant for it to be created by Microsoft.
I actually thought PS was gonna be better than cmd… turns out consistency is a lot better in cmd… can’t make heads or tails in PS. I still use cmd to invoke stuff in PS, but only if there is no other way.
Well, it’s under a permissive license, so there is little he can do legally, except maybe sue them for not mentioning the original project, which I’m sure they will add and that will be that eventually.
That’s true. A little recognition would’ve been nice and I think that’s all he was asking for. Microsoft had a whole team work on it when they could’ve just given him a job to maintain it.
They pulled a corporate and rewrote an opensource project to embed it into windows
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Do you really need to license your comments?
© 2024 [email protected] - All Rights Reserved
(Plz don’t sue me for making a derivative work based your comment and violating the license kthxbai)
I love it when people get pissed off about nothing that even affects them.
Yes sir I’m super pissed off how dare you do something goofy on the internet!
I own my own instance. Your “license” is not accepted. Your instance sharing content with mine is an automatic agreement to my instance’s terms.
1.2 Grant of License: By uploading User Content, you grant Saik0-Lemmy a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, distribute, publicly display, and modify your User Content
See how silly this is? Your license means nothing. It’s just wasted screen space. And nobody is pissed. People are just trying to talk sense to you.
idgaf
To be real with you, I find windows more complicated, the syntax…
Ah, a man of culture I see 😌.
It’s not exactly a fair comparison, the tweaks in the bottom panel aren’t necessary for most users to do, yet a new user to Linux will need to get over a learning curve to do fairly basic tasks.
My litmus test for when Linux will be “ready” is can you do everything you need to do without using the terminal. So far I’ve yet to see a distribution that has achieved this.
The closest thing I’ve seen is SteamOS.
What about Mint or PopOS? Also I don’t agree with your definition of “ready”. The stigma around the terminal must go! the current state of linux on ANY popular distro is: everyting can be done via GUI but some things are just easier to do in the terminal and it’s not linux’s faulth that terminal is just so good
There’s no stigma with the terminal, the terminal isn’t bad, I love the terminal.
However, it’s not grandma friendly. It never will be. You need to think less about your preferences and more about a truly novice user. Most people don’t want to tinker with their machines, they just want it to work.
Meanwhile on Windows 11 you need a terminal even for the basic installation and local user setup.
Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).
I use the terminal out of preference, and because it’s where I’m comfortable, but I can’t think of any situation it’s actually needed for general desktop use.
I set up Linux Mint for my parents a few months ago. Never touched the terminal, everything was done in Mint’s UI; the initial installation, Timeshift setup, theme customizing, app installations for Spotify, OnlyOffice, VLC, and Chrome, automatic updates, printer and scanner setup.
Butter smooth so far.
Yeah I honestly rarely use the terminal on my mint install. And that’s even as a developer.
To be fair I initially had to do some odd tweaks at first, namely getting my keyboard function key working how I wanted. But even that was just editing some config files, and a non-power user probably wouldn’t have the kind of mechanical keyboard I have anyway.
SteamOS is the only good linux experience I have had, that’s mostly due to the fact it’s made specifically for the hardware that is running it.
Do you mind mentioning the others you’ve tried and what snags you hit?
I’ve worked with Arch, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and SteamOS, and I would say that while arch and Ubuntu can have a learning curve, Linux Mint is on par with SteamOS in usability.
I went through an episode of trying to swap to Linux about a year ago.
I tried Arch, got it all setup but had issues with smoothness just on the desktop. Tried Wayland and didnt work well with Nvidia, after trawling through random fixes to attempt, gave up.
I tried PopOS, just because it was apparently the best out of the box for games, which setup was easy, but again it was sluggish.
I went back to Arch again, got it setup and thought I would just put up with the laggy dragging of windows, to give the rest a chance. I use a slightly advanced audio setup on Windows with Voicemeeter and could not get a similar setup working on Arch. I couldnt even use apps such as Discord in the same way, along with other little things piling up I just went back to Windows which “just works”.I was running multi-monitor and apparently there’s no simple support for mismatched refresh rates and Nvidia GPUs still have trouble in general.
I run a Pi and Linux is great for that, I like it, but in my opinion Linux is far from becoming a good Desktop OS.
+1 to all these issues.
I tried a similar setup and eventually gave up after the monitor problems. Having 4 displays with different resolutions and refresh types just doesn’t seem to work at all.
Yeah, apparently Linux users mainly use single monitor setups! Multi-monitor is so important and very common, so it was the last thing I expected to have issues with. Oh well.
To be honest, yes, I use a single monitor setup… though I don’t think many Linux users use a single monitor setup, they just use matched monitors (buy 2, 3 of the same kind).
Even with matched refresh rates, the issues persisted.
That is some fair criticisms mixed with some things that are unfortunately not tackleable by linux devs. Arch is more a toy for configuring IMO; you lose alot of productivity up front getting it set up. I can’t really speak for Wayland.
I’ve also been a fan of using Voicemeeter Banana, since it allowed me to output to both my speakers and headphones simultaneously, but only binding the audio control buttons to my headphones. Currently nothing like that functionally exists on linux that I’ve been able to find yet.
Nvidia has historically dragged its feet when providing support for its GPUs, and I definitely noticed alot of issues when running an Nvidia GPU back in the day, though I can’t speak for how much of that is explicitly Nvidia and how much that’s linux Dev lag.
Discord is even worse. It was news to me when switching back this year, but Discord has altogether stopped maintaining audio for game streaming. It’s closed source, though, so there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Overall, a not insignificant blow for gaming on linux.
I still get bad vibes from PopOS and have steered clear of it because of it. I would recommend you try Linux Mint at some point, since I’ve had a good experience with it and I regularly see others who equally recommend it.
Yeah, it’s no surprise that the trillion dollar company’s product is more functional. Linux is good for people who want to tinker and mess around, but we are kidding ourselves if we think it’s ready for general adoption as a desktop OS. It works well for specific usecases like SteamOS because it’s custom built to run with certain hardware.
I was going to try more, but honestly couldn’t be bothered, I have everything I need with Windows without issue and while I was open to fiddle a bit, all the issues left a sour taste, so I will probably wait some time for the distros to mature a bit further,
That will probably never happen.
You have to understand that, one, Linux and the devs that do work on FOSS software, do so in their free time. Two, the devs that develop anything FOSS related usually develop things to fix/overcome personal problems they might be having in their own setup or workflow. If someone else happens to like using that, great, if not, hey, I just put it out there 🤷. Three, there is no guarantee that a particular piece of software that you like and is something niche, will be supported in the future. There are hundreds of examples like this in Linux and FOSS history in general. There isn’t enough interest for it, the main dev drops development, so the project dies 🤷. Another project might take it’s place, it might get forker, but if it’s niche enough, you probably won’t see that happen. So, the only other alternative you have is to get your hands dirty and keep patching the software to work on your particular setup, or in case of closed source software, patch your setup to make it work with that piece of software for the foreseeable future, until another piece of similar software pops up on the radar and then you can switch.
I’m sorry, it’s just how things are. Linux and any other non-commercial OS project is basically a community effort thing. If everyone in the world knew how to code or patch, or at least 80% of people, then these projects would thrive, no doubt there, cuz the workload would be balanced between the users. That is not the case, so 10% of the people that use FOSS software are basically the maintainers of what is out there. That is just not enough 🤷.
You cannot say that definitely. There’s every chance my problems are fixed, the more people who adopt linux the more similar problems people will have.
I agree that Linux desktop will probably never take off due to the nature of its development, but we dont know that for sure. If companies like Valve want to keep investing into it, there’s always a chance.
Me: Can you please just not change the UI?
Microsoft: now you need to expand the right click menu to access your most used actions.
Me: what? Microsoft: and replaced all the cpl and msc files, so now you can’t use the old settings interfaces.
Me: wait!
Microsoft: and ALL the new settings uses edge webviewer, so if you manage to remove edge you’ve fucked your install up
Me: sounds terrible, surely I can just reinstall edge
Microsoft: you can try but all links to edge on our website are just links that launches edge, because you can’t remove it - so why provide an uninstaller?
Me: do you expect me to die?
Microsoft: no Mr User, we expect you to cry! MuwhahahahaLinux: You can mostly stick to the GUI to install software, touch the terminal for obscure/command line applications and install GPU drivers and you have a functioning system
Windows: Forced to go into regedit and services.msc to fix high resource usage on a fresh install, debloat scripts to remove bloat on Windows and need to update system, scower the internet for drivers and all the software you need
I can see why I got fed up very fast trying to use Windows 11 in QEMU tbh…never trying that shitshow again…
Edit the only packages I had to install through Bash are: Neofetch, Htop, OpenSeeFace, Brave Browser, Wine, Nvidia drivers and ProtonVPN. Linux is very user friendly imo
Scour
And keeping your software up to date is a giant pain.
Use Winget or Chocolatey. If you use an app that’s not packaged yet, it’s easy to package it yourself.
7 packages from the command line isn’t that many, but you’re failing to account for the fact that to most Windows users, the amount they’ll realistically install is 0, both because they don’t know how to use the command line and because they don’t know what to install. See also: https://xkcd.com/2501/
“Windows Reserved Bandwidth” is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time. You can turn it off I guess, if quality of service isn’t your vibe.
It’s always funny seeing users doing their cargo cult dances when troubleshooting stuff
Shocked Pikachu face when other stuff starts breaking because you ‘optimised’ 500 settings
Windows Reserved Bandwidth” is just a QoS Packet Scheduler. The Linux Kernel has this too. Equally difficult to disable on any system, because its assumed you will want to be able to download a file and surf the web at the same time.
Do we know for a fact that the Windows marketing telemetry does not use any of this reserved bandwidth? Or are we just taking the vendor’s word for that?
I asked because ‘reserving’ is different than ‘prioritizing’. Generally speaking, a QoS prioritizes, where what’s being described by the title is reserving.
Microsoft: [implements a common OS feature]
You: But can you prove it’s not malware?
That’s just tinfoil hat paranoia.
Based on what they did with Win10 and 11, not paranoia at all.
because it’s* assumed
I think both Windows and Linux are scary when you want to exactly fits you need.
In using linux I started to know what is a DE, kernel, kernel argument, GRUB, systemd, selinux, etc. and I am the person that want to avoid learning ANYTHING about my OS, they just unfortunately pops up during troubleshooting.
So is Windows. But I would say, if you don’t care about bloat and ads, and are willing to make stupid compromises, like copy a email to a notepad, so you can see it while drafting a email. Windows might breaks slightly less often than linux depending on your hardware. But that doesn’t mean Windows don’t break, in fact Windows broke just in the first linux challenge video.
For Linus’s experiment, it is not really fair. No one is going to learn a OS in a month, and expect to have the ability to not harm themselves, not on Windows not on Linux not on macOS.
However, both flatpak and popOS installer for steam break at the same time is a legitimately rare event, and it happens to the most popular tech youtuber is even more rare…
Not true , Show me on Linux except may be one or two flavours how to add program in start-up, a windows 98 and windows 11 has same place and is all known. Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux , unlike plug and use in windows
Just stop saying Ng Linux is better , it’s not for regular use . I know you dudebros will get hurt and downvote me . Linux is not easy, does not have MANY MANY Utilities which are present for windows and it’s just not usable for users .
You’re just more familiar with windows. You likely grew up with it and depending on your age were taught it in school. You’re biggest gripe seems to be having to touch the terminal to install things, but to me, I think it’s weird to use a browser to install things. This is where that esoteric knowledge comes in… you know which download button is the real one that won’t download a virus.
Ok Linus
I would agree a few years ago, but saying that it’s generally not usable for users is (in my opinion) wrong. If you’re only going to use a browser, and watch some videos, Linux is fine. If you’re a gamer and only use Steam, Linux is fine. Linux was also fine for me when installing Lutris to run other Windows games like Trackmania. For both those cases, I didn’t even have to touch the command line. If you’re a programmer, Linux is probably fine, because you have more knowledge on how command lines work anyways.
If you have any kind of advanced use case that doesn’t have a well established solution, and you have to research (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), that’s probably not fine for a normal user. But more and more tools do have established solutions that work out of the box, so I’d say it’s getting more fine.
Whether Windows, Mac or Linux is better is a question of use case and other factors in my opinion. You only used Windows your whole life and don’t want to get used to a new thing? Then don’t. You love the Apple ecosystem and want to pay the premium? Do so. But I feel like outright saying Linux isn’t for regular use has become false in the recent years, as there are quite a few use cases by now that can use Linux without problems.
I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the “IT guy” I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about “being in the same place for 25 years”. This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let’s not start about systemd now, I don’t care), but one new “skill” to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I’ve learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.
Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux
Hum, all of them I’ve been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it’s been a feature for a long time. I don’t like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it’s target then name or the other way around).
The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn’t use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it’s not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.
I’ve seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I’ve never used KDE, it’s a long story, but I guess the same would apply).
For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).
The reality is, for 98% plus of windows users, NONE of that matters. MS could give a shit about tech. nerds that want to de-bloat, reduce resources, install crazy niche thingyawidget…
Pretty much everyone in this community is not their target.
Car analogy! You are car guys running custom block modified street racers shitting on electric cars…
I think a Corolla is a more appropriate analogy. You should see some of the Tesla swapped modded cars
Considering many electric cars also spy on their users and have anti-features, it’s probably a good analogy :)
Good old transportation analogies, we can make up anything with them.
Fedora/Mint is a free (electric) bike. Arch is free system to order bike parts and instruction how to assembly whole one yourself for free. Gentoo is an automatic parts molding machine. Linux From Scratch is a book about bikes. Windows is a Segway.
“Bikes are only free if you don’t value you time” “Segway 10 is much easier to use, buttons are more intuitive than manual steering and if you know this Konami code you can ride without an account too!”
Winaero Tweaker makes it as simple as a checkbox.
The only real issue I’ve had with Linux is trying to get my old Drobo 5C to work. (it’s a self-managed dynamically adjustable/resizable raid array that just presents itself as a single 70tb usb hard disk. The company that made them dissolved a few years ago)
It’s formatted in ntfs and loaded with 25tb+ of data from when I ran windows primarily.
It’ll mount and work temporarily, but quickly stops responding, with anything that tries to access it frozen. Particularly docker containers.
Then it’ll drop into some internal data recovery routine (it’s a ‘black box’ with very little user control, definitely wouldn’t be my choice again, but here we are), refusing to interact with the attached system for half an hour or so. When it finally comes back, linux refuses to mount it. ‘dirty filesystem’, but ntfsfix won’t touch it either. Off to windows and chkdsk, then rinse and repeat.
I gave up when one of those attempts resulted in corrupt data (a bunch of mkvs that wouldn’t play from the beginning, but would play if you skipped past the first second or two). I can’t backup this data, (no alternative storage or funds to acquire it) so that was enough tempting fate.
I ended up attaching it to an old windows laptop that’s now dedicated to serving it via samba :(
Really looking forward to setting up a proper raid array eventually, but till then I’m stuck with 11mbps. I’d love to rent storage temporarily so I can move the data and try a different fs on the drobo…
You could probably get a Gbit LAN USB card added to that so you could at least get 30MB out of the thing 🤷.
I’d need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn’t upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop…
I’ve got a second desktop that’s got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that’d probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.
Idk, still thinking on it.
Ah, if the thing has USB 3.0, then the NIC in the laptop is probably 100Mbit (lower end models had 100Mbit even if they were newer), that’s your main issue, not SMB. SMB is a TCP/IP protocol, has nothing to do with hardware implementation and has no speed limits (at least none that I’m aware of). It goes as fast as the slowest part in the chain.
