I see these MFs on a daily basis

99% of people want a drop-in replacement for Windows that will install and run every possible Windows-compatible application, game and device without them having to make any extra effort or learn anything new. Basically Windows but free (in all senses).

Any even slightly subtle difference or incompatibility and they'll balk. Linux can never be that, and Microsoft will keep the goalposts moving anyway to be sure of it.

Sure, a lot more works and is more user friendly than 15 years ago, but most people won't make the time to sit down and deal with something new unless it's forced on them... which is what Microsoft are doing with Win11.

More user friendly doesn't mean you won't have to spend hours troubleshooting driver issues that you will never have on Windows, that's a real problem...
(and when you find the solution you need to input commands in terminal that you can't tell what they do, that's a huge security concern as it teaches users to just trust anyone who tells them to do things they don't understand)
- Man, people really overstate the barrier to entry to the terminal. Windows troubleshooting is full of command line stuff as well.
  It's not the terminal, it's the underlying issues. Having more GUI options to set certain things is nice, but the reality of it is that if an option isn't customizable to the point of needing quick GUI access it should just never break, not be configurable or at least not need any manual configuration at any point. The reason nobody goes "oh, but Windows command line is so annoying" is that if you are digging in there something has gone very wrong or you're trying to do something Windows doesn't want you to do.
  The big difference is that the OS not wanting you to do things you can do is a bug for people in this type of online community while for normies it's a feature.
- Windows 11 doesn't even support first gen Ryzen CPUs. The amount of hardware that runs Windows 11 without tinkering is a tiny fraction of the hardware that runs Fedora Workstation without tinkering.
  Linux is much better with drivers and hardware support than Windows. Windows only works well if you use the very small subset of hardware it supports.
- Well, my brother installed linux (mint) on more than 30 laptops that we were fixing to reuse. Im pretty sure none of them had any driver problems.
  Tbh, unless you have a NVIDIA graphics card, or are using arch*, driver issues almost never happen.
  *my personal thinkpads wifi board didn't work in arch, but that may be because I had already borked that install completly.
- Shit, I can’t get Windows to print on my network printer. Have to uninstall it, reinstall it, manually set the IP, restart Windows, and then it’ll work for like one session and then not work again. Windows won’t even throw an error, it’ll just tell me it printed while my printer sits silent.
  On linux it works every time. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even try to print in Windows anymore, I just forward all documents to my laptop and print in linux.
- Sure AMD's drivers have not been a crapshot in windows forever, DDU dance is not a thing.
  Sometimes to solve a windows problem you also get terminal commands, or get told to change settings in the registry. But usually users download some random binary tool that claims it will fix their problem. They will accept any UAC prompt as trained to do since Vista.
  Frankly you are comically biased.
- On the other hand printers always work out of the box on Linux without even installing any drivers, whilst getting them go work on Windows can often be a nightmare
Most of the hobbyists I speak to that have failed linux desktop experiences mostly switch back to windows due to:
1. Hardware compatibility issues.
2. Microsoft office interoperability limitations of the web based office.
3. Display scaling issues on multi-monitor setups and some linux applications.
Personally for me the list is:
1. Bluetooth not being detected on my particular asus laptop. (The same bluetooth chip works in other laptops)
2. Multi-monitor scaling and resolution issues when 3 external monitors are connected via thunderbolt doc.
3. Lack of good alternatives to fancyzones
- fanzyzones
  Thanks!! This is just what I need. Pop_os has an equivalent in their DE and because work I have windows and I really miss it.
- Add binary compatibility issues to that list: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility The moment you need software that is not packaged by your distro you either need to be lucky that whomever compiled it accounted for your setup, or compile it from scratch yourself (if open source and publicly available). Especially with closed source software (like most games) the latter isn't even an option.
They want ReactOS.
- But they don't want to pay it to develop it fully
- Here's an analogy: You can do your own gardening, or you can hire one of the two landscaping services in town.
  This sounds great, but these days, no matter who you hire, the people who show up 1) want to install a fountain and an advertisement billboard that will run off your water and electricity supply and 2) want the right to take what they like from your house by default, they'll mysteriously "forget" and do it anyway even if you pay them not to.
  Furthermore, with their latest package, one of the landscaping companies are basically saying that if you don't have a yard large enough for their fountain, you have to move house, which is only marginally better than the other one who will only work on gardens for houses they sold in the first place.
  (A previous version of this comment involved the word "lube". I'm sure you can imagine the rest.)
Honestly I think potentially a bigger factor is that there are very few manufacturers who sell machines with linux preinstalled. Very few people have ever installed an OS before or have any desire to do so.
Also there is plenty of software with no real linux alternative even today unfortunately.
- That is exactly why Chromebooks were (are?) so popular. You got a cheap laptop with an easy-to-use OS without having to do any install. And let's be real here, most people don't need anything more than a web browser.
- This is a big point that not many people acknowledge. The reason SteamOS works as well as it does has less to do with SteamOS itself (it's ultimately as finicky as any Linux distro) and more with it being laser focused on making a specific piece of hardware do a specific thing.
  Problem is, it's a bit of a loop. It's not particularly profitable to launch Linux-only devices, let alone to put the work to ensure they will work reliably for their entire lifetime without user intervention. That makes it harder to grow the ecosystem, given that the default implementation is way jankier than most people will allow, which in turn keeps the business less profitable.
This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux's fault, necessarily, but hardware got... weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn't do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I'd have been on Linux full time.
These days it's a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
- Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I'd call user friendly...
- it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn't support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
  for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs great
- It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
  This is just patently false. Pick any common distro.
Personally I believe that unless you're able to do a slackware or gentoo installation, you're not ready for Linux.
/s but only kinda
Linux users need to have a higher level of technical literacy than windows users. It just can't be avoided unless you're okay with potentially reinstalling your os at some point. The bar has been lowered a lot, but because other companies refuse to play nice with Linux, it'll always be there.
If you're okay with that tradeoff, then yeah Linux is great. But a lot of people aren't even aware of it and it causes a lot of pain

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.

When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.

I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.

Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.

I've been using Linux for over thirty years and the nice looking App Stores that have appeared those last few years have always been shit and have always been mostly broken in various ways. I don't know why.
On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
- In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.
- On the other hand, the ugly frontends to the package manager just work.
  The misery I have trying to get a newer(or sometimes older) version of a package I want is sometimes immeasurable. Yet somehow usually the right version is extremely accessible on choco.
Windows is just more familiar. It definitely has problems just like this all the time. There's a reason most companies have to have a test environment to try out every update to make sure it doesn't break everything.
- Yep. Somehow people forget windows update breaking shit, weird issues, having to go to device manager to uninstall a shitty graphics driver update you didn't want, etc.
  Rose tinted glasses.
I agree with you, lemmings and the Linux community as a whole has the incredible lack of ability to put themselves in the shoes of a technologically less literate "normal" person and see that Linux is not exactly ready for mainstream
That being said, tour first fuck up was not going with EndeavorOS the actual distro that's for gamers (or anyone) that just works.
It's based on arch btw
- I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.
  I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.
- The fact that there is a "correct" distro only adds to the unreadyness for mainstream.
I just recently installed Bazzite and I have to say that your experience was unusual. Installing apps from the built in Software Center (it's not really an app store, because it's not really a store), just worked for me.
But, I'll agree with you that Linux isn't quite ready for mass adoption. Currently I'm tracking an nVidia bug that results in my GPU locking up when doing pretty normal things. The bug was reported 3 weeks ago, and is affecting a lot of people with more than 1 monitor, but still hasn't been fixed. I'm also tracking 2 annoying but not system-crashing bugs. Plus, there's another behaviour that happens daily that is annoying and I haven't had the time to track down.
Mostly, these are "chicken and egg" things. The nVidia bug was allowed to happen and wasn't fixed quickly because there aren't enough Linux users for nVidia to bother to fully test their things on lots of different Linux configurations before releasing them, or to make it an all-hands-on-deck emergency when they break. If there were more users, the drivers would be better. But it's hard to get people to migrate to Linux because there are frequently buggy drivers. Same with other drivers, and other commercial software. People don't switch because it's glitchy, it's glitchy because there aren't enough users for companies to properly invest in fixing things, that makes it glitchy, so people won't switch.
Having said that, the thing that prompted me to install Bazzite was that I was getting BSODs in Windows and I wasn't sure if it was a driver issue or a hardware issue. It turned out to be bad nVidia drivers... but they were fixed in days, not weeks. So, it's not that things don't break in Windows, it's just that it's a bigger emergency when they do break.
I'm not going back to Windows any time soon. Despite the issues I'm having, there are some parts of the system that are so much better than Windows.
Like, people complain about Linux having a bad UI, but have you ever tried to change low-level network settings in Windows? You start in a windows 10 or 11 themed settings app. If the thing you're trying to change doesn't show up there you have to click to open a lower-level settings app, this one styled in a Windows XP UI. And if that's not where the setting lives, you have to open up a lower-level thing that is using the Windows NT / Windows 3.1 interface.
Or, anything involving using a commandline. Windows does actually support doing a lot of things using the "DOS prompt" but that thing feels like a Fisher Price toy compared to a real shell. Even the "power" shell is a janky mess.
Or, any time you have to touch the registry. Only an insane person would prefer to deal with making changes there vs. making changes in a filesystem where you can comment out values, leave comments explaining what you did, back up files, etc.
But, while Linux isn't quite there for the end-user, it's getting closer and closer. Really, all that's needed is enough people taking the plunge to make it a higher priority for devs. It could be that Microsoft deciding that Windows 10 machines that are not capable of running Windows 11 should just be thrown out will convince enough people to try Linux instead. Linux might not yet beat Windows for the average end user, but the annoyances associated with Linux vs. a machine you just have to throw away? That's an easy one.
- Yeah, I get it’s unusual and it sucks it happened. I honestly would have been less upset if it was a driver issue or something like that. I at least could have looked at dmesg logs or something to try and figure out what was going on. I’m new to GUI Linux, so I had no idea where to start with this one. I think this was more frustrating than a driver issue or something similar for me because I would expect installing applications from the built in repositories to be something that “just works”.
  Hopefully as more people move over to Linux distros, we will get more people that donate to them as well so more dedicated developers can be hired to work on such things. I know it will get there one day, and it’s already so much better from when I last tried gaming on Linux back in the early 2010’s. Hopefully the full release of SteamOS will truly bring about the age of Linux desktop.
Choosing Bazzite was a big mistake, you could've gone for NobaraOS or PopOS
- I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.
  I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.
I also had a similar experience with bazzite and ubuntu.
Apps would look like they installed but they are nowhere. Tried the app store. Tried flatpak. It instilled but clicking on the icon wouldn’t launch anything. Ended up with two icons for the same app. One works one doesn’t. No easy way to uninstall non working app.
Bazzite bluetooth stopped working after update. Had to run two commands found on the Bazzite forum to get it to work again. Steam wouldn’t update either. Had to run another command I found on the forum to get it to update.
This is all last week. I am still running both but I wouldn’t call it ready for the non-IT user.
The App Store has to work consistently for it to be accessible for the average person.
Yeah that'll happen if you run Bazzite. It's extremely hardware dependent. It "just works" if you get lucky and use the same hardware as the developers. Otherwise, it's a shitshow
I would probably not recommend newcomers an esoteric linux distro tbh. People hate canonical but if people in academia can daily drive Ubuntu, anyone can
Linux will never be "ready", in a large part because it's made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and most of those people just don't understand how an end user thinks.
I got annoyed when my new Windows machine immediately had to install a bunch of updates, which only required me to click next every fifteen minutes or so, and I had to uninstall Onedrive and disable the news feed on the lock screen.
I'd have taken it back if I had to spend that much time actually researching, I've got far better things to do with my time.

"Have you tried installing Linux on your computer recently?"

"WTF is a computer?"

Everything's computer!
https://youtu.be/KQwOwuC9hLM
I don't quite remember whether it's the rectangle with all the buttons you press or the TV with all the funny pictures on it, but one of those.

Let's be real. Most people can't really use Windows, either. Anything harder than clicking the Chrome icon is beyond most users.

You don't see how terrible Windows is until you've switched to another OS and need to interact with it again.

The constant pop-ups, the ads everywhere, the settings hidden away.

It really feels like your PC isn't yours.

I have to use Windows at work. Once, apropos of nothing at all, a system pop-up asked me if I wanted to buy an XBox controller. When I lock the screen and come back, sometimes Edge will have opened all by itself, presenting me with the Bing homepage. Nice try, Microsoft!
Honestly, not being able to run Dolphin as root made me feel like my PC wasn't mine more than anything windows did up until recently.
Your computer is yours... As long as you're comfortable doing it via terminal... Yay...
- That's been fixed for nearly 2 years now.
  Install
  
  kio-admin
  Then in the location bar type:
  
  admin:
  It'll prompt you for your password and then:
- On mine I just right click in the window and choose open as administrator. It asks for a password and that's it. No terminal ever comes up.
- I much prefer using the terminal than the GUI if I can.
  But I understand that not everyone likes the terminal.
  To be fair, I couldn't tell you how to run my file manager as root from the GUI because I don't use it that much.

The average 'advanced' window user: CLI is scary!

Also the average 'advanced' windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it'll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it

The windows user brain cannot comprehend actually enjoying to use a computer.

It is funny to watch old Windows admins bring all sorts of bad habits to Linux
- Like what? Genuinely asking as a Windows user with a few Linux machines.
- Obligatory (semi)relevant XKCD
As a Windows & Linux user, I can, in the same way that I get that car people love working on cars.
I still really don't ever want to work on cars but I understand.
I largely use technology of any kind for the applications of its use, not because of an intrinsic desire to knee deep in technical work.
But muh games!

I've used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready

On Linux I'd have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn't user ready

Yeah, Linux was ready long ago

I used to think I could just stick to macOS. But I don’t trust the USA and by extension, I don’t trust Apple.

Switching to Linux isn’t a choice anymore. It’s a requirement for freedom.

Yeah, Apple will just cave when necessary. Honestly, even if the USA is removed from the equation, nobody is really safe from any government or corporation. We're only in better and worse condition because no one has done the unthinkable yet. The UK online safety bill, Signal's threat to leave Sweden, France busting activists using Swiss VPN. If you can't host it yourself, secure it yourself, rebuild it yourself, you can't trust businesses and governments to do these things for you in the long run.
Hell, it's starting to feel a lot less like freedom and more about the ability to hide, even if you're doing nothing wrong, because someone may eventually decide that what you're doing was wrong.
Encrypting your chats to keep them from being sold/mined for government oversight? ILLEGAL!
- I think you’re 100% correct.
  With all my Apple stuff I thought we were headed for a Star Trek federation. Instead we’re getting a starship troopers federation 😞
- The whole doing nothing wrong argument doesn't work when Nazis take over because Nazis will arbitrarily decide that normal things are now deserving of the concentration camp. Basically nobody who is oppressed at any point in history should ever feel like they have nothing to hide. Gay people, women, any minority religious racial Etc are all one Trump tweet away from Guantanamo Bay
Linux is American by that definition
- I'll bite. How? It's open source software championed by a Finnish academic professor.
- I think by America they pretty clearly meant corporate America and its corporate-owned government, neither of which controls how Linux works.

The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn't usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they'd consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.

I remember all of those shitty Tech journalism articles where the word intuitive was operationally defined as "looking and working exactly the way Windows XP does" and now that's completely irrelevant because people can operate an iPhone which doesn't work exactly like that either
I had a friend venting to me about Windows. They said "I want Windows without Microsoft!" And I was like "Yeah. That doesn't exist."
- ReactOS
Linux has a different use philosophy and workflow, once you udnerstand that you realize it's not a big deal.
Windows is basically stockholm syndrome. It's just so shit but people memory hole all the troubleshooting, searching 20 control panels and then still going to regedit, opening terminal to start regedit or dxdiag. I guess nothing says "hardcore gamer os" more than pressing windows key and typing program name only for windows to launch a bloatware browser you are not allowed to uninstall that then goes into an search engine nobody wants to use and gives you a result that is an ad all the while your screen is recorded and all that is sold to whoever wants to buy it.
- Half of the time when I press the Windows key Windows does nothing at all, or pops up an empty box where the Start menu should be and leaves me wondering whether it will eventually fill the box with things. When I finally get to click an icon, half the time nothing happens, or maybe the menu disappears and then nothing happens. But programs are so slow to launch that you don't know for sure nothing happened, so you have to wait half a minute before trying again. Then 2 instances of your app launch together. And then there's the constant focus stealing in Windows, still unfixed after decades.
  I really don't get how people can prefer that interface to basically any of the Linux ones. They're all faster and more functional than Windows. I do understand the issue with specialist photo, video or music software though. I still need to keep a Windows machine (physical or virtual) handy for the Affinity suite, Ableton Live, and legacy projects in Visual Studio. But my daily computing experience has been so much smoother, faster and more relaxing since I switched to Linux, and I think most ordinary users would actually have an easier time with something like Linux Mint than with Windows.
Because unfortunately nobody has made a better UI for an OS than windows, including the distributions that don't copy windows.
- I use Windows for work and I can easily say that KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Mate, all are better UI than Windows. The Windows start menu has become such utter BS it's crazy. Even MacOS is better at this point. What are you smoking lol
- I vastly prefer gnome or kde since I can use the windows button and a few letters to start a program instead of some unremovable bloatware that bing searches me an ad.

For server hosting it's the only way to go.

Gaming has improved significantly, although it's rather frustrating that it's by all these compatibility layers and such rather than native run.

For desktop, as a workstation and general purpose it's 'ok' with rough edges. Things like (limited tests with a couple common distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Bazzite) the nextcloud app not supporting virtual files that have been available for a while in Windows and domain auth being twitchy where I've tried.

For the end user a big part is being able to just find an app and use it, no compiling or tweaking of settings needed for it to do what's expected. Package managers help greatly, but with the huge number of distros out there it makes it really hit and miss to say just go for it. The relatively few times you can just download a Linux version of an app from a site (as people are prone to doing if they go read about something on the web) you often would have to go chmod +x it and quite possibly have to run it from a CLI rather than just click the downloaded app.

So usable yes, but in a place where I could just drop it on someone and say go to town less so...

I read that Ubuntu is trying to solve this with the Snap Store.
But to be honest, I'm just not the target demographic for that.
I honestly think if the EU had continued with rolling out Mandrake and SuSe to public sector employees 20 years ago, Linux would be dominant today. Microsoft lobbied hard to stop it.
And I think the way forward will be to have a handful of big customers making the switch. Either China or the EU will probably drive this.
Maybe Huawei might sell MacBook alternatives based on Linux. Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
- Or the EU might revisit that old SuSe/Mandrake strategy.
  They actually are ! I have seen a few posts talking about it. Not sure about SuSe/Mandrake, but they are talking to implement Linux or try to somehow get away from Microsoft.
Agreed. Just put Debian on a 17" i7 Asus laptop tonight as win11 didn't like the track pad or the display adapter.
To get Chrome on, had to download a deb file, then manually open it with a right click and choose software installer since it wanted to open an archive instead.
Just little things like that are tedious for the n00b.
- had you installed mint or pop, you could just install multiple chrome variants from the software manager
- Is it Linux's fault that Google doesn't provide an apt repository? Chromium is available in DebianStable
Absolutely 100% agreed.
I'm frustrated by app managers because on principle they all work so much better than the Windows alternative, but the moment you have to explain to people how and why they need to manually add repositories or what a flatpak is you've lost the battle.
For server hosting it’s the only way to go.
How I wish
- It’s like someone’s never used GroupPolicy.

Proton covers most games that I play, only a couple exceptions involving heavy handed anti-cheat stuff like League of Legends has now. For non-gaming Windows stuff that doesn't work in Linux I would guess that a virtual machine might work.

Based Linux wont run riot games
- Is that a bad thing?
  Dont get me wrong, I love the IP for League, but the I would never reccomend the game to anyone.
- They're just trying to match the toxicity of their players.
- With the most braindead reason,
  There are barely any Linux users...
  Riot... I quit the game because I didn't want to bother with proton and get mad when it goes wrong. And I knew kernel anti cheat would come. And all the Linux fans who are addicted enough are running the game on windows specifically. I literally have a friend with a windows VM with graphic card passthrough to play league of legends... That guy gets counted as a windows User....
  Fucking idiot create the most toxic environment for Linux users and then say they don't attempt to support Linux because the Linux users didn't bother to fight their shit enough in a detectable way.
Some would say that League not working with proton is a blessing.
- Because it is.
  Same goes for Valorant, I hear.

I stopped using Linux on my desktop PC in 2007. Last year I switched back, and wow everything is so much smoother now. Video, sound, webcam, networking, all worked perfectly out-of-the-box. No more messing with fglrx for hours to get ATI/AMD graphics working. No more figuring out ALSA vs OSS vs PulseAudio vs whatever else. I don't know what the sound subsystem is even called now, because I don't need to know. It just works.

KDE is beautiful now, too. I tried a few desktop environments and liked KDE the best.

Great time to switch. I've been using Linux on servers since 1999, but it's totally viable for desktops these days too.

I think once Valve polishes SteamOS for desktop environments there will be actual largescale migration.

I thought the holdup was the graphics drivers (Nvidia mostly) not the de. Normal desktop mode with KDE works fine on my steamdeck.
- Fair point. But even so I think SteamOS has the most viable potential to achieve something like a 5-10% adoption rate that could get entities like nVidia to pay more attention.
- It's pretty much just graphics cards at this point and games. Printer is weirdly enough work better on Linux then when I first started back in 2010. It used to be that everything was proprietary weirdness nowadays you just plug and play on Linux and then it's Windows where you have to mess with drivers. Personally I switched away from all in ones and just got a flatbed scanner so I never have to worry about needing that feature. I still need a good printer that isn't on the Israel BDS boycott and is cheap to operate on a per page basis. I feel like if printers weren't a scam more people would use them for more stuff again
Back in october I travelled for a lan party. I didnt bring my linux desktop with me, and just brought my steam deck and dock, and when I got there, borrowed a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
Then i swapped it to desktop mode, and the people I was with all commented on "Oh wow! it's just like a regular computer"
One of them has explicited said they were fed up with microsoft's BS and would swap their gaming PC over to steamOS once it's formally released for desktop (they were uninterested in Bazzite and wanted an official Valve release for their gaming PC).
Will ValveOS be useful for anything besides playing games?
- Games are pretty demanding, there will probably be widespread support just coincidentally. Also companies build software for where the market is, a big Linux population will command more development time for drivers etc.
- If it is useful at only playing games I think it will be a popular option nonetheless.
I'm certainly buying one of whatever they release.
A large scale migration would be wild. It would be like the Commodore 64 all over again - where one of the coolest things in gaming also happens to be the most functional personal PC of the year.
I guess it could happen.
Only a small fraction of people use Steam so I don't see that happening.
- Steam apparently has about 130 million monthly active users and about 70 million daily active users. About half the planet has a computer at home. So, Steam users are somewhere between say 2% and 10% of the world's active PC users.
  If someone is a daily active steam user, they spend a lot of time on the computer. If they have to make sure their drivers are up to date and their frame rate is high enough to support their games, they've probably developed a bit of knowledge about the system. My guess is that people who play Steam games tend to be the tech support people for their friends and family more often than not.
  So, it's a small group, but it's an influential group. If enough of that group becomes comfortable with SteamOS, they may be comfortable setting it up (or a variant of it) for a friend or family member, even if that friend or family member only uses their computer to watch videos, check emails, etc. In a world where Windows was free and just worked, that might not happen. But, in this world Windows 10 is about to lose support, and Microsoft is suggesting that if your computer can't run Windows 11 you should just throw it away and upgrade. In that world, more people might end up switching to Linux.
- Maybe. I just mean once(if) there becomes an OS that reliably runs Steam and the games on Steam, there will be a viable alternative to Windows for a significant population of users.

Had a friend of mine rib me for "not just paying for a license (for windows)". Tried to explain that wasn't the point to their befuddlement. Smh

Wild. That has the vibe of them yelling "buy a real car" as they park their Pinto next to your Ferrari. Lol.
I get that not everyone has time to try new things, and -sure- their Pinto gets from A to B.
But it's still pretty funny.

Mum wouldn't even notice as long as the wallpaper is the same

Before I bought a Steam Deck I had never used Linux but now I really like it, honestly I'm tempted to install SteamOS on my PC as it's only ever used for gaming anyway

Bad experiences from the past are valid reasons to be apprehensive.

The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn't there yet, because I can't use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as "no big deal", you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won't work. Well yeah, that's a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?

Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don't game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.

Ok, I'll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn't work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.

The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don't have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.

Wow, so many wrong comments. My parents using Linux laptops for 10 years (which i give them second hand when i buy a new one). Now i set up NixOS with auto updates, and never needed to touch it again myself.

People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks

Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/

By all standards, a completely understandable outcome

I have had people tell me " I dont feel like building my own OS from scratch " I'm like what are you even talking about?

The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.

I've been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.

Linux is not ready for most people

The last time i used it was 30 minutes ago

That depends on your definition of "ready", and of "most people".
My mom, for instance, could pretty much do all her stuff on a Linux machine, and as soon as her current laptop with Win11 gets a tad too old and she starts complaining that everything is so slow, I'll switch her over to Linux.
All she does is edit her photos, read emails and does online banking and some web-only games (like boardgamearena). She needs an image editor (she still uses Picasa, so Shotwell could be a valid alternative), an email program (she already uses Thunderbird), text processor (she already uses LibreOffice).
- I have had problems with those tasks
  The screen completely freezing, requiring me to restart the computer and lose everything i have not saved; putting the computer on sleep sometimes wouldnt let me open it unless i held the power button to shut it down and then restarted; connecting the certain wifi networks doesnt work
  These arent enough to stop me from using linux, but other people probably wouldnt ignore them so easily
- Oh, boy. Go on. Try that experiment. A regular person will encounter problems you could never imagine would be a problem in the first place. Say what you will about Windows but it at least has ~30 years of experience dealing with regular people. Switching my mom to Linux because "all she does is browse the internet anyway" is exactly how I became part of the "Linux isn't ready" crowd.
- My mom is similar. She uses a Mac Mini.
  She still has lots of problems, but almost none of them are due to the computer, they're mostly due to her complete lack of knowledge about anything computer.
  Like, she uses gmail, gmail told her she was near her limit on mail storage, so she started trying to delete things on her hard drive, which is something like 5TB and 95% empty. Even once I explained to her that it was gmail that was full, not her computer, she just started deleting thousands of old messages. That's fine, but it's not the random old messages that are the problem, it's the ones with attachments. She deleted something like 5 years of old mail and it didn't make a dent in the problem because the ones she happened to delete weren't the ones with the 30 MB video attachment featuring a puppy doing something funny. I've shown her multiple times how to find the big and old messages so she can delete them. I've asked her to take notes, but it's pointless. She understands every step as I show it to her, it all makes sense as I'm doing it. But, when she tries to do it herself she gets tripped up immediately and is completely lost.
  Basically, no matter how easy to use the OS is, she's going to have problems and I'm going to need to provide tech support. She'll probably stick with MacOS, but if she ever had to switch to Linux or Windows, I'd definitely push her to Linux because it would be easier for me to provide tech support remotely that way.
That's because the computer most people actually need is a tablet.

I run Linux daily, Linux isn't ready, its really not much of a debate. If the average person can't operate it efficiently then the average person will just stick to mac or windows.

I'll admit it is closer than it has ever been thanks to compatibility layers like proton but the average user still can't figure it out so it still has a way to go.

The average person can't use Mac or Windows efficiently either lol
Honestly, Windows isn't ready for the desktop, either, it's just not ready in a different way that most people are familiar with.
Things like an OS update breaking the system should be rare, not so common that people are barely surprised when it happens to them. In a unified system developed as one integral product by one company there should be one config UI, not at least three (one of which is essentially undocumented). "Use third-party software to disable core features of the OS" shouldn't be sensible advice.
Windows is horribly janky, it's just common enough that people accept that jank as an unavoidable part of using a computer.
the average user clicks on the chrome icon to open the internet and goes to gmail.com.
you can do all that in linux.
- Until everything breaks because the average user hasn't bothered updating.
I disagree. I'm running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren't much of a hassle anymore and I haven't had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora's immutable distros variant, but there might be more.
I've been playing FFXIV on Linux with dlss, reshade and 3rd party mods and it's been a blast.
Linux is 100% ready for gaming even with the worst case scenario (nvidia) I've been able to overclock and play just fine.
My grandma uses Linux, you stupid?
- Are you calling your grandma stupid? I already stated I use linux as well.
- Did she install it herself or did you set it up for them?
  Because the majority of people do not have the luxury of someone who will fix their shit if it breaks. They just bring it back to the store.

My excuse for not switching to Linux for a long time was that it couldn't play games. Now that proton is a pretty developed thing, that's no longer an excuse. I actually tried out mint Linux for a friend to see how easy it was to use and I just kept using it because it did everything I wanted it to. As a power user I had to modify it quite a lot but my friend just wants to basically load into the OS, launch a browser or play games from steam and that's about it, so for him it's pretty easy and straightforward.

I actually ended up installing kubuntu on his computer and modified it to look exactly like Windows 7, which is what he's upgrading from. It's kind of scary how close it got.

I dual booted with Windows purely for gaming and Linux for everything else for a long time.
After upgrading to Windows 11 I switched the default boot option to Linux and moved all my games there.
Now Windows is used exclusively for printing with thay pesky Canon printer of ours.
Tobii haven't released Linux drivers for their eye-tracker, but that's the only gaming-related problem I've had this time around.

If you want to see what linux was like 15 years ago try installing OpenBSD lol

So, which distro is the ready one?

I love Linux, but it isn't ready.

Two weeks ago my side mouse buttons started working (they require Logitech software on Windows, wasn't expecting them to work). Last week they stopped. This week they work again.

Is this major? Not at all. Would it drive my mother-in-law into a rage rivaling that of Cocaine Bear? Absolutely. Spare me from the bear, keep Linux for the tinkerers.

they require Logitech software on Windows
This seems more like a logitech issue than a linus issue.
- The issue isn't that they didn't work, as I said I wasn't expecting them to when I bought the mouse.
  The issue is their behavior has started changing with updates. I don't mind, but I'm a tinkerer. My wife, my MiL, most of my friends, absolutely do not want to deal with an inconsistent computer experience.
  Different definitions of 'ready' I guess. Been using primarily Linux for years, so it was 'ready' for me back then - but nothing has changed in the mean time that would change my recommendation for people who just want a boring stable computer.
- Compatibility problems caused by third parties only targeting Windows are still Linux issues for the end user if they become a problem when they use Linux. It isn't fair but that is the practical reality.
By this standard, Windows isn't ready either. I use Mint, Windows and Mac interchangeably at work, and of the three, Windows is definitely the one with the most unpleasant surprises: computer slowing down for no apparent reason, printers disappearing, updates forcing you to reboot in the middle of something...
Mac is fantastic if you don't mind feeling like your computer doesn't belong to you.
- Yeah. It's not that there's never a surprise on Linux. The interesting thing from about the last year is that the surprises are nicer and less frequent than on Windows.
  This user's mouse issue is a hilarious example - is they gained new compatibility, without any effort, but it took a week to settle in.
  I've never had something on Windows go wrong that nicely. Lol.
Steam OS is getting us closer as far as gaming goes.
- You given bazzite a run on a gaming setup? Works remarkable well
What distro are you on? I've been out of Linux for like 3 months now but never had issues with my mouse randomly changing behavior in the year or so prior to that. Whether they work or not is up in the air, but random behavior changes seems like a weird practice
Probably KDE settings can deal with this. At least that worked on mine. Hyprland also has stuff for remapping extra mouse buttons.
on windows:
- My huion drivers require you to manually download them from an internet site and manually make sure it is a site you trust. Then you need to run them every time you want to use the pen functionality.
- My DAC drivers needed to be installed from a site you think you trust and then sometimes I had to restart dac to run it.
- My usb mic would randomly stop working and I'd need to reboot the drivers manually. If it hadn't be a common fucking issue on fucking windows since the start of time it would be a very enjoyable half day of troubleshooting and googling.
On my linux: Upon first bootup after install I fully expected a nightmare but they all ended up working out of the box.
No downloads
None.
None at all.
No restarts of hardware.
No reboots.
They all just work. All the chifi and chinese tablets. Unlike on "user friendly windows". I haven't used the psu power button once cause linux is more stable.
Sounds more like your hardware isn't ready for Linux.
- Well this is what we are accusing Microsoft of: Generating e waste, because they don't want to support older hardware.
I am sorry, is your mother in law really buying logitech mouses that specifically require a software to run even on Windows?
I tried switching to linux like 10 years ago, but then, all the games i played didn't work. I tried switching again a month ago, but my cpu (i honestly don't remember) wasn't compatible. I watched youtube videos for a workaround, and that was way above my paygrade, because i'm worried i'm gonna skullfuck my computer by changing random ini files because a youtuber said so. I tried it on the laptop and i kinda just didn't work either for a diffrent reason. I don't care as much about my laptop, so i'll try again. As much as i hate windows, and i really really do, you hit a button and it's installed.
- You sound like the exact person this meme is about... Having installed both windows and Linux each several times in the last 5 years, the process has been significantly easier for Linux every time.
- Yeah definitely not the cpu, maybe the gpu if it was Nvidia and you weren't on a distro that handles packing the Nvidia proprietary driver
- what distro(s) did you try?
Same. I have a Kensington trackball with a decent config and button mapping software in Windows that I will NOT give up. I tried Mint for a few weeks, but it just became too stupidly cumbersome to Google every single thing. Like I wanted to implement the Windows PIN thing for startup on my PC.... Yeah no.
Linux has come a long way but it's not ready for the commoners like me. And a free open source OS probably cannot be developed for the masses without some major funding with a dedicated team.
So back to Win 10, Enterprised with massgrave.
- KDE has settings for extra mouse buttons. Linux Mint is kind of behind in several areas unfortunately.
- implement the Windows PIN thing for startup on my PC
  If you’re that specific in your requirements, you’re gonna have a bad time. I don’t think Microsoft makes “Windows PIN” for Linux.
- You're getting downvoted because the Linux community can't understand people like us that just want things to work without needing to google everything or paste in random scripts into terminal. Linux is just an OS for tinkerers and not for normies.

Linux was awesome 15 years ago. They probably just had driver problems. Those used to be much worse.

In the command-line-only world of the 80s I thought Unix was awesome already!
- I mean, the core utilities are all from then and there.
- It was.

Question: Would I still struggle to get games working on a desktop using Linux as I have in the past (always some driver issue for some crucial bit of hardware; either the GPU can't do 3D or the NIC doesn't function, etc) or would they work as well as on a Steam Deck, that doesn't have to account for a variety of hardware differences? Almost every single person I have seen lately saying gaming on Linux is awesome now, is using a literal device designed for it. But what about my hardware? Is getting wrappers for nVidia drivers still a fucking PITA with a 50/50 chance of actually working correctly?

I love Linux for just basic computing needs or running servers. But I've always had a bad time when trying to play games.

Most people's measure of whether it's ready is "How soon until I have to type into a console to get something done".

If it's within the first three months - then it's not ready.

By that definition Windows 11 isn't ready for people too. You'll need the command line at installation to circumvent the mandatory MS account requirement.
- No, you need the command line for that. Most people will just create an MS account and continue.
- You need a command line to install it on unsupported hardware.
Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won't kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.
It's like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that's becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.
- There's a guy at work proudly reminiscing about how we had to fuck around with autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day to get things to work
  But refuses to use linux because CLI...
- Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS
  People for the most part haven't had to deal with the command line since Windows 95 was released, and that was 30 years ago. Which means anyone old enough to had regularly used DOS is at least in their 40's now.
I've definitely had to do that with Windows so is it not ready?
Most people's measure of whether it's ready is "How soon until I have to type into a console to get something done".
[citation needed]
I agree that that's one possible way someone could decide that Linux isn't ready, but I don't think it's a particularly good one, and definitely not one I'd agree with.
Would you agree that if you need to use the Registry Editor, Windows isn't ready for mass adoption?
- Regular users would never have to put anything in the registry.
  That is only for power users.
- Opinions don't have citations, they're opinions. That's why you didn't include citations for yours either.
  Would you agree that if you need to use the Registry Editor, Windows isn't ready for mass adoption?
  No, because this statement shifts the goal posts. I specified a time frame in what I said (first three months), now you've dissolved that requirement. But also, RegEdit does have a graphic interface (all be it a bad one) so doesn't fit the idea that people equate console commands with unfinishedness.
  So no, I disagree. To many users I think even a bad UI beats "oh no, blank window I have to know what to type!"....
  .... it's the fear of not being smart enough or not knowing what to type. People want the answers to just come to them, or be intuitive.

I swapped to Arch Linux in the last month and it's been great. Gaming has been fun. The Nvidia drivers are still kinda confusing, and honestly I wouldn't put my mom on Arch Linux as of right now, but it's good enough.

I'm writing a document so my SW engineering friends can swap over as well within a day and be up and running, and it's just neat to see Linux gradually growing in my circles.

If you're on Linux, don't forget to donate to your favorite SW creators even if they're less flashy than say Larian studios or what have you lol.

it still surprises me that something like linux exists.

Lots of high quality FOSS projects exist. Interrogate that feeling of surprise!
- Not talking about quality or utility. But how gigantic the project is and how diverse its users and developers are. All that for nothing being asked in return, just some evolved monkeys satisfying their curiosity of tinkering.
Hello Tim Sweeney
- Didn't get that reference?
And it's all because Richard Stallman got pissed off at Xerox.
- I mean, who wouldn’t? Two sounds for X in one name? Surely it’s eckserocks or its zeroz. Make up your darn mind!
It is surprising that it has prevailed against all the billion dollar companies and their hatred for it. The many people making, maintaining and testing the kernel and all the applications should be applauded.
- Which billion dollar companies hate Linux? The likes of Microsoft and Google actively contribute to it and make money from it!
Not everything is about capitalism.
- Do you think it‘s all unpaid volunteer work?

It like the endless and useless fight between Android and iOS fan boys, it's much simpler than that, you use what you like/comfortable with, you don't need to convince anyone how right you are and how wrong they are, never really understood this weird behaviour from supposedly well educated people. You enjoy Linux, good for you , you like windows, kodus, you're mac person have at it .

That's a feature (probably)

Linux was ready for me 15 years ago.

I don't think Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, whatever is "ready yet" either. operating systems are always in development. There are things I can do on my linux machine that I can't do on my windows machine, and vice versa.

I have to use Windows at work and by early afternoon if I'm not forced to reboot for an update I have to reboot because the machine has basically ground to a halt.

Why does Windows slow down the longer it's been booted?

It's ready enough, but at the same time not ready. It could be better

Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.

I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.

When I'm not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can't substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.

Month and a half into using Mint Cinnamon... frankly it's hard to feel like I'm not still using Win10. What comes to mind immediately is that file management dialogs in apps are less consistent with how the file manager itself works, whereas in Windows it's all more uniform. But IMO that's very minor. Overall UX feels the same to me.

Note: I am not a computer gamer so can't comment on how games work on Linux, and also I've used Ubuntu and BSD in the past. Just had Windows at home to be consistent with work. I retired several years ago and it still took me this long to switch over.

My first trial (after 2 months) was installing something that was not on the software manger. With installation instructions writen for Arch. That needed Python to work. It stops feeling like windows real quick then :-)
- I felt that way when I tried to get setup on Windows to do Python programming on Arduino. In fact I gave up. Yesterday when I installed GIMP 3.0 on Mint it took a minute of research to decide which thing to download. It turned out that Flatpak is installed on Mint by default, so I just clicked on the Flatpak download for GIMP and boom, painless installation.
  But another difference between Mint and Windows for me is Arduino development. Uploading code to microcontrollers on Windows was always a crapshoot - the Arduino IDE would be unable to connect to a COM port, or couldn't see a COM port at all. On Mint it's pure smooth sailing.
Month and a half into using Mint Cinnamon... frankly it's hard to feel like I'm not still using Win10.
I haven't used Mint in a minute, but yeah, I think that's the dream with Mint.
I've been digging the vibe of recent stock Gnome and KDE releases, myself.

How do I make the change less scary? I made my pc like 10 years ago and not looked at it since. I just use it for personal admin now and Rome 2 total war twice a year.

It's ready if you use a Linux device, you get dedicated laptops for as low as 600€ by now.

Unfortunately people keep comparing diy machines with Windows and Mac. That's simply not a fair comparison, there are reasons a Linux vendor often charges a few hundred bucks more for a Clevo or Tongfang design laptop (not just because they have to finance their support). Thousands of work hours are needed for every detail of a device-software combo to be prepared for the average user. And most of that hard work eventually get upstreamed or is about fixing FOSS bugs in the first place, so buying from Linux computer vendors is a win for everyone.

That's also the reason why Channels (or "Influencers") like The Linux Experiment are talking so positively about everything while still aiming at a relatively "average" audience (meaning no Linux nerds). They use Slimbooks, Tuxedos, System76's, Star Labs…

If you got the money, get one of those. If you absolutely hate it Windows will, in 99% of all cases, still work on them.

I bought a cheap arm based Linux laptop a couple of years ago. The official distribution with full hardware support never received any updates. ARMbian didn’t fully support the hardware more than a year later. E.g. no sound output.
- A couple of years ago must mean it was either a kit aimed at developers (like the current RISC-V machines) or some chinese garbage (they often just ship one distro and never update or push any drivers upstream). 🫤
  Unfortunately bad companies (incl. those who do not label their products correctly, as in "for developers & enthusiasts) can be found in any space.

It is in mixed states of ready. Each distro has something it's ready for and something it isn't. It'd be nice if all the ready parts were in a single distro, but that's an XKCD 927 issue. I am hopeful that Valve puts thought and effort into making SteamOS a solid desktop on top of a solid gaming platform.

I never see much love for ZorinOS, but I find it a very solid replacement. I still use my Macbook for certain things, but I am slowly moving away from even that thanks to Apple’s spying and whatnot.

I switched 15 years ago. It was ready then. It is ready now. I was in my teens and have used it ever since.

you know, I'm begining to think this whole "readiness" idea is completely arbitrary. The same people who today complain about linux's supposed difficulty, were just fine using their home micro-computer in the 80's. If you ask me, the only people who are defining what "ready" means, is Microsoft's marketing department.

Tried it again a few months ago when HDR support first dropped in KDE. It didn't work at all. Everything was desaturated and dim. Literally the opposite of what HDR is supposed to do.

I'm giving it another year before I try Linux again. Hopefully the bugs are sorted by then.

The main push back i get is in order to maintain soc2 compliance the IT department needs to run auditing software on the laptop. Microsoft intune barely support linux and is years behind on the os versions it will work with. IT does not want to run multiple audit software packages.

I'm at the point where printers, bad WiFi, local file sharing/casting, crash recovery, GPU compute, even some driver issues, stuff like that just works in Linux (CachyOS specifically), but doesn’t in Windows.

Windows is getting progressively worse.

I still dual boot a very-stripped Windows for games, HDR stuff, and anything that requires a weird driver (like phone tethering), but man, Microsoft just keeps removing or hiding things I use to make Windows sorta functional.

So my experience has been mixed. I should note that I have always run some Linux systems (my pihole as an example), but I did, about 2 months ago, try to switch over my windows media sever to Linux mint.

(Long story short, I am still running the windows server)

I really, really, really liked Linux Mint, I should say at the outset. I wanted to install the same -arr stack I use, and self-host a few web apps that I use to provide convenience in my home. To be very fair to Linux Mint, I’ve been a windows user for 30+ years and I never knew how to auto-start python scripts in windows.

But, to be critical, I spent hours and hours fighting permission settings in every -arr app, Plex, Docker, any kind of virtual desktop software (none of which would run prior to logging in which made running headless impossible), getting scripts to auto-run at startup, compatibility with my mouse/keyboard and lack of a real VPN client from my provider without basically coding the damn thing myself.

After about a month and a half of trying to get it working, I popped over to my windows install to get the docker command that had somehow worked on that OS but not Linux and everything was just working. I am sorry I love Linux but I wanted to get back to actually coding things I wanted to code, not my fucking operating system.

I’ll go back to Linux because Windows is untenable but I’m going to actually have to actually set aside real project time to buckling down and figuring out the remaining “quirks”.

The "arr" stack is a very Windowsey. It's built in C# and has some baked-in assumptions that mean running it in a container is a bit of a pain. But, I've been running it for years on Linux. My linux server boxes are all headless, and I've never needed a GUI for anything. I don't use Plex though, so maybe it's the difference?
I don't know why you were trying to run virtual desktop software, or what that has to do with running the "arr" stack. But, of course, a virtual desktop is a GUI thing, so if you want a virtual desktop of course you'll need some kind of GUI connection. Also, your talk about "getting scripts to auto-run at startup" makes me suspect you were approaching the problem in an usual way, because that's not how you run services in Linux, and hasn't been for decades.
If you ever want to try again, I recently migrated my personal kludged-together "arr" stack to the "Home Operations" method of running things. They run a bunch of apps in a local at-home kubernetes cluster using essentially "declarative operations" based on Flux. Basically, you have a git repo, you check in a set of files there describing which parts of the "arr" stack you want to run, and your system picks up those git changes and runs the apps. The documentation is terrible, but the people are friendly and happy to help.
Currently I have the parts of the "arr" stack I want, plus a few other apps, running on an old Mac Mini from 2014.
Oh, and for a VPN on Linux, I recommend gluetun. It's one app that supports just about every major commercial VPN provider, and provides features like firewalling non-VPNed traffic, and re-connecting if something goes wrong.
- that's not how you run services in Linux, and hasn't been for decades
  Thanks for your response. I’m open to the idea that Linux is a different computing paradigm, my frustration is on needing to learn that on the fly and how much of a distraction it was, even on a tertiary machine.. that said, how should I be thinking about this?
If you do try again try lmde (Linux mint Debian edition) you should have less issues Ubuntu has weird permission issues that I’ve ran into before
- There’s actually a good UI for managing permissions I eventually found in Mint, I think the main issues I’m having with it now are the lack of it running headless and unreliability with running my native scripts. I’ll try the Debian version though, that sounds intriguing. When y’all talk about distro hopping, how much re-setup are we talking?

I always loved the "it's not polished" excuse withoutb a single example

Let me check dmesg:
amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: amdgpu: failed to write reg 291c wait reg 292e
or
[46531.357889] amdgpu 0000:c5:00.0: [drm] ERROR lttpr_caps phy_repeater_cnt is 0xff, forcing it to 0x80.
Let me know if more examples are needed ;)
- It's not because you can't check on Windows, that it doesn't exist ! I'm sure there are a lot of different boot issue logs in Windows, they are just hidden behind a "beautiful" Welcome page.
How is support for HDR colors nowadays?
- Support for HDR is fully implemented in Wayland last I checked

Only when the pain of bowing to Microsoft, and their increasing intrusions and demands, exceeds the (IMO) minor pains (multiple) of switching to Linux, do people make the jump. That threshold is low for some, and high for many.

I'm a Linux Mint exclusive guy for one year next month, and I'm never installing Windows again. No, it didn't "just work", but it did work 85% out of the box, and the rest I was able to figure out. I'm NOT "an IT guy", and the only OS I used before Windows was MS-DOS (so, yeah, I'm old).

I play Fallout 4, and Half-Life 2, and run Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, LibreOffice, Calibre, Jellyfin, Forge AI, PrusaSlicer, Meshroom, SABnzbd, etc. etc. Everything works fine, now, and I'm perfectly happy without Microsoft all up in my shit.

Oh, and, BTW, Gimp 3.0 is the shit. I've used Gimp off and on over the years, as a Photoshop user for nearly 30 years. Gimp doesn't do everything Photoshop does, but it now does everything I ever used Photoshop for as a graphic designer for 20 years.

Fits but hurts. Like Linux is ready now

Android, too.

ah the early 2000s days of fedora.

This was me, to an extent. At least with regards to gaming.

I am one of these people.

Last I used the desktop was 1996: modelines, xfree86 errors, etc. Not since. I've used Linux every day of the last 30 years, 28 as a pro. It's fed me, housed me, delighted me and frustrated me.

But even when I worked at a distro that shipped two Unix variants and an Enterprise Linux distro of its own, everyone at the shop was on windows 98se and vandyke for ssh. It was simply more reliable for the tiny use case and the time : we didn't want Devel upended because the team had a crashing wm, and our use case was Mozilla, VanDyke, WinAMP. Really-really.

Do I understand it's improved since then? Of course. Do I want to support my mom running Linux desktop or run it myself? The thought frightens me to my core. I don't have time in my day for the added hassle when we just need SeaMonkey, zoom, and (for me) putty and WoW.

But win10 is dying, and ImTiredBoss.jpg of learning the shit of a new MS desktop every goddamned time so I can coach them over the phone as their eyesight and hearing declines like my patience. This year stands a good chance of seeing my return to a Linux desktop and theirs too.

Wow works, right?

https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/
Wow works, right?
Apparently even Curseforge runs on Linux so you can keep your addons up to date. (I couldn't run WoW without bucketloads of addons, dunno about you.) I haven't tried yet though, I've been playing other games lately, but I'm glad to know that it's supposed to work just fine when I get around to it.
- I fled curse forge during the troubles, but I get you.
  And that's great news. I have so few vices and I love popping in as a stinking casual when I have a half-hour.

I tried this year.

It's not ready.

Don't get me wrong, it's fine for most things, but end-user, normie fire-and-forget stuff? Nah.

But by that standard, Windows isn't ready either...
- It is by far more "ready" than Linux. But even if it wasn't, that's where 80% of people already are. Whatever quirks Windows has, they are already aware of them.
  But seriously, no, that's not a valid argument. Forget software. Hardware compatibility alone makes those two things entirely different from each other. Tell me again what types of GPU I should buy for my Linux gaming PC using an HDR VRR display and what DE I should choose. Is the answer "any"? No? So it's not ready.
I've put Fedora on my mum's pc after it became clear that Win10 will EoL soon, and that Win11 would refuse to run on it. Have had significantly fewer support requests since then.
Her work is mostly done via Citrix, which has an official Fedora Client. Everything else happens in the Browser, or sometimes in OnlyOffice, which so far has worked as a drop-in replacement for MS Office.
As always, it really depends on the use case.
- There's always one "I gave it to my mum" post on these. I don't know if it's always you, but man, it's starting to get very funny.
  Yes, my parents are on an Android tablet now as their sole computing device. Want to start arguing for the year of Android desktop? Sure, "for most applications" everything happens on a browser.
  That's not what people have desktop PCs for, though, is it? You may be surprised to know I also don't run Windows 11 on my phone. For the same reasons it's less comfortable to run Linux on your desktop PC, incidentally.
  For the record, I actively tried to use my Manjaro install to work whenever possible. I only switched back and forth between it and Windows when one broke or something didn't work, as a bit of a test. Turns out I ended up in Windows like 80% of the time.
  It's fine, but not ready for mainstream.

So long as you need a terminal to do anything on a Linux machine it's not gonna get any mainstream appeal, most people can barely install a app on windows where they just have to click next a few times. Also if the laptop you buy comes pre-installed with windows what would motivate a regular joe to go out of his way to install Linux on it and risk messing things up by making a mistake. Also people don't want to replace their windows only software and gaming is another reason to stick to windows for now. I'd rather use Linux, but I'll wait till Steam has made most games compatible with Linux, and Nvidia and Amd give proper driver support for linux

I have Linux dual booting on my machine. No it isn’t there yet. I’m tech savvy but still it has issues where I prefer to use windows.

I keep going back hoping it will work.

For example a Simple task that has an issue for me, in KDE I browse to watch videos on my network share. Double click to open but none of the video players can see the file. Works fine on gnome, but not on KDE. This isn’t something I should be dealing with in 2025.

same i'm using Fedora KDE also my filebrowser crashed 3 times, when i tried copying my Photos to a Harddrive. I don't want to look at logs, because i'm not tech savvy enough to understand them. AND BECAUSE I DON'T CARE

Linux isn't ready. Not for home users anyway. And I've tried recently. Just constant problems that if I wasn't getting paid I wouldn't have wanted to deal with.

Perhaps they should have tried again sooner

Hey I've got them beat I've never tried Linux!

(I need to though, I really do.)

Last time I tried was last autumn. It didn't go well (again). I try regularly because computer OS is pretty much the last thing I have to switch to get rid of spytech. I suppose I'm not skilled enough, but it's not fair to suppose that people don't switch to linux on pc because they're lazy, or ignorant, or bad or things like that.

What are you having trouble with? Which distros have you tried?
- I was writing a wall of text but I got fed up because it's a useless effort and English is not my language. So in short battery management, time and date management (the dual boot thing), inability to use the second internal drive for more than a few weeks, after that I need to reformat it regularly, casual errors here and there. Last time I was using Ubuntu, in the past various derivates of Ubuntu or maybe some other distributions, I don't remember

It depends on who you are

I'm running a homelab with tons of CLI Ubuntu and whatnot, but I'm fine with Windows and Mac for desktop laptop, so I've never tried gnome or anything.. I reflect on the last time I saw gui Linux... Creepy basement of dude we called Crazy Eyes around the neighborhood, around 2006, trying to convince us of the future.

I just tried using Linux as my main Gaming OS desktop probably about a month and half ago after using it for college for 5 years.

I love Linux but for NVIDIA drivers and gaming it still very much isn't there.

I use an NVIDIA card, running bazzite on my gaming setup, and it works really well. What issues where you having?
- Just now seeing your comment. I was using Nobara my monitors just freeze as in become completely unresponsive and it was entirely random. And there was a keyboard combo that was designed to fix it and that didn't work then the community's answer was, "we don't know."
  To me the Linux systems are great but the community acts as if people shouldnjust switch without a second thought then get rally together when someone says, "I am having issues and don't understand." The Linux community then almost always proceeds to say, "did you try Googling it?" What would the person even know to Google if they don't even know entirely what they are facing and when Linux issues get involved you are deep diving into Terminal and bash commands and most people barely understand how a Driver in Windows works or how to uninstall it. Then the response from the sake community is, "well clearly your the issue." Its just odd to sell something the community won't really assist with but then get offended when someone doesn't want to switch.
Are you using Proton? Also, what games do you usually play?
Maybe try a distro that is known for compability with NVIDIA such as popOS or bazzite. I have used both for the last 4 years, and other then some specific games where anti-cheat or kernel level anti cheat is an issue (and honestly, fuck those games anyway because those developers spend extra effort to make sure their games dont run on Linux), the rest just works flawlessly.
Nobara's got you covered.
- Funny enough, that is what I was using my friend.

Yesterday a guy was mad about that why everything has to go through his igpu and why not directlg through dgpu then I told bro that hdmi or anyother port on your laptop doesn't use your dgpu then he understood.

If you see this meme and think "well actually, I had a really difficult time last time I tried to install Linux" - did you ask for help? That's what the internet is for.

I did, and the feedback told me to RTFM and LMGTFY.
I plan to install Linux mint on my laptop when I get time. I'm sure Linux is ready, never really doubted that, but I wonder if the Linux community is ready.
- In fairness, the community has plenty of assholes. However, I think there's something to be said about electronic literacy and how a lot of people expect to have their hand held through every process.
did you ask for help? That's what the internet is for.
And wait 3-5 business days for whatever menial problem
- It's almost like people have gotten really used to instant gratification and it's not reasonable. A certain amount of figuring it out should be expected.

Until I can run special K or RTX HDR to inject HDR into games that don't support it I'm not going to switch to Linux on my main gaming PC. Its hooked up to my Nice OLED TV in my living room and games look too damn good with HDR to give that up for Linux. Yes I know HDR works on Linux now. But it only works with games that support HDR and the only "Auto HDR" solution I've found is a janky reshade plugin that only works with dx11 games and doesn't really produce very good results. I'm really holding out hope that valve figures out a nice auto HDR solution they can build into gamescope.

If you have to use a command line or terminal ever then the OS is not 100% user friendly.

In Linux you still have to use a command like, the average windows user does not.

They forced him to type sudo apt update
- Forcing people to type in a command line unironically alienates your userbase, the average user logs in and then opens Netflix/youtube/social media. If it can't be done with mouse and keyboard then it can't be done by most users.
  It's crazy that elitism is still holding this community back decades later. Nobody thinks you're cool for typing in terminal, this isn't the matrix it's been 30 years.
  This kind of shit is the reason Windows is still way more popular
Nothing that requires the command line in Linux can be done in a "friendly" way in Windows.
- I have to disagree with you on that, sometimes even running certain apps needs some command line knowledge there might be a way to run them without but it's a lot of hassle
  not to mention people are very familiar with windows so learning a new OS feels way more complicated than it actually is
  I love linux and always try to get people to use it but lying to ourselves about the current state of linux does not help at all
My wife uses Linux Mint Debian Edition and never uses the command line. She has literally never opened it because she's intimidated by it lol.
Even if you are right that using the terminal ever is not user-friendly, that means that Windows is not user-friendly since I was forced to use it every time the OS fucked up randomly and I had to do sfc /scannow to fix my boot drive.
Not to mention the countless times a Windows forum power user posted a command for people to run that was supposed to fix everything.
- Windows is quite stable these days. (Same for Linux and Mac OS)
I think that's a bad comparison honestly. People keep thinking that Linux is going to somehow be useful for the average user which isn't really the case. Linux is perfect for those who are interested in computers or computer related things.
It would be really cool to see something like Chrome OS but with Linux native tech. I haven't seen it yet but Bazzite is interesting.
- Then it will never be popular or a realistic alternative to windows like we all want it to be.

What didn't help my confidence is that whatever Steam Deck is running on is one of the most complicated fucking things I've ever seen and I only really wanted to set it up to play Fallout 4 with mods well, using all the tutorials available. Still gave me an error that I literally couldn't find in Google. Yeah, nah, I'll keep on pirating Windows instead.

It's sadly far easier to gut windows than it is to get Linux working for everything I need. I'd love for this meme to be true because I'm gonna end up fighting the good fight come EoL win10 but don't kid yourself.

I'm obviously going to be downvoted for this, but the second you ask me to use the terminal is the second the OS is not ready.

Last week I reinstalled Windows after trying MintOS. I have a 54" Ultrawide screen monitor and I wanted the windows to snap in 3 sections.

I spent a few hours in terminal trying to install something after trying everything in flatpak. Windows 11 split screens out of the box. It can even tile. You can even use hotkeys to snap left and right.

In order for normies like me to switch, you have to make the OS at as easy to use as Windows. Don't make us use terminal like I'm on DOS.

It’s funny how little has changed since 15 years ago

Last time I tried? Last year before new computer.

Next time l try? I dunno. It will happen again, not sure when.

2 days ago, and about 4 different distros to get one that would even load on my laptop with discreet video cards...

Have you tried bazzite? I use it on my laptop with dGPU and it works fine out of the box.
- That is the one I finally got to work.

I tried installing Linux (dual-boot alongside Windows) on my dad's computer two weeks ago and it didn't work (something to do with the TPM chip i think). I gave up after 15 minutes. It was supposed to be a demonstration how "quick and easy" it is to install Linux nowadays. On top of that, it broke the Windows install. Bad first impression IMO.

The phrases "quick and easy" and "dual-boot" have never been compatible.
Dual booting? Should've tried nested virtualization first.

Sadly I'm still not sure if it is ready. I installed Mint to a couple systems this year and am really disappointed at how much tinkering and troubleshooting I have had to do. Like I had to order a specific wifi card because almost nobody makes linux compatible wifi usb adapters. My brand new computer couldn't connect to the internet despite me already having an expensive wifi dongle.

The linux community will do anything besides improve the usability of their technology in their quest to get people to use their inferior technology.

Post less memes, make an OS that is stable, has a navicable UI, and runs the things people want to run.

Crazy how different our experiences have been. Over the last decade I've hopped from Ubuntu to Mint, Debian, Fedora, Nobara, and currently on Bazzite. Never had an issue connecting to the internet. (shrugs)
- And for me when I use windows it has not had an issue with anything I've wanted to do. (Shrug)
  I've tried Arch and Mint, and both took constant tinkering just to use the internet and getting basic apps like Steam and Acrobat installed.
  I had to fucking download and install a set of libraries through the command line and follow a 20 step tutorial to make it so I can open a fucking .exe file.
  Shrugging and saying "it just works" instead of wanting the system to be accessable to non autists is what will forever keep Linux in the fringe.

Maybe when it has a GUI. If I wanted to use glorified MS-DOS, I'll just open the command prompt.

Very recently they revealed this new graphical user interface called GNOME. Maybe it's time for you to try Linux again.
Are you talking about the OS/DE or all of the software? Most Linux distros have a GUI (and have had them for over a decade if not longer) so I'm really confused by your comment.
Almost all of my software has a GUI, and my GUI file manager is more than capable, so I don't even usually use mv, cp, touch, mkdir, etc. for files anymore. I use a GUI text editor, email client, browser, music player, etc. Even Steam looks exactly the same as on Windows.
- I was just running with the joke and did it a little too well, I guess.
Far enough