Most people just want a thing to work though. One member of my family has issues with her iPhone at the moment where the signal is just all over the place. Sometimes not able to receive calls, sometimes not able to make them, sometimes inaudible when the call is made. She’s googled and gone to apple tech support who have given her a list of basic troubleshooting tasks to do, stuff like checking settings. She said to me “I don’t want to go hunting for these things I just want to hand it to someone and they can make it work!”

Linux and computer enthusiasts are happy to assemble things as we need them because the problem solving stuff is satisfying to us, for other people it’s just a slog.

After spending a bit of time today debugging a systemd issue I can start to sympathise with this. Not come across or really looked for viable alternatives that aren’t just a return to random bash init scripts though.

I’ve never known any of my immediate circle of friends and family to have any interest whatsoever. Windows 11 has been the nail in the coffin for one, the steam deck has piqued the interest of another. Year of the Linux desktop is a pipe dream but any step towards greater adoption is a great thing.

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The issue for me as a potential advocate to my immediate circle of friends and family is that I don’t want to become the only source of tech support. Now realistically they’ll probably have fewer issues, but as soon as they want to fix something they’ll have to come to me. No they won’t Google things, and if they do they won’t understand it.

Well after looking further it’s actually the processor isn’t supported in general so Linux it is! It’s going to be a hard sell to my partner who doesn’t like using office 365 on the browser because “it screws up templates”. If even Microsoft’s tools screw up I can’t imagine libre office would do any better so that’s an even harder sell… Sigh.

I think my limiting factor is TPM 2.0 which I believe isn’t supported by the device but is required by windows 11

In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.

Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.

The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.

I believe it’s 1% for access to the “entire post-open ecosystem”, rather than 1% per project which would be unreasonable. So you could use one or thousands of projects under the Post-open banner, but still pay 1%.

It will take years to develop the post-open ecosystem to be something worth spending that much on.

Literally just bought what I believe to be last generation’s X13 on ebay for half the price of the new one. It’s been great so far, especially with the power efficiency of Ryzen CPUs. My one complaint is the soldered RAM, which judging by the new lineup is getting phased out, thankfully.