The last time my wife's laptop died, I convinced her to give a Linux laptop from System76 a try. Then, when her store's Windows box died, I convinced her (and her business partner) to give Linux a try there. My daughter, 20, has a Linux laptop as well (although in order to get Adobe Creative Suite for school she still has to own a Windows desktop, thanks Adobe). None of these people were interested in software freedom, so their patience for problems during the switch was pretty minimal, and they all switched, and stayed switched. If you buy something like System76 that has Linux pre-installed, and help out with something like Spotify that is possible to install on Linux but not completely trivial, it is not so difficult to convince people anymore.
I want to second this point, but from a different experience. I'm definitely a linux "evangelist", in that I've convinced a lot of friends to switch over. But the biggest thing that's enabled me to convince people to give linux a try is... linux has changed.
Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.
A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.
But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.
Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.
It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.[0]
I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.
[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.
The Adobe Suite and those multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat are probably the two things holding up the Windows’ crumbling empire. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Microsoft pays those companies a boatload of money to remain effectively Windows-exclusive.
There was a great write-up that resurfaced on HN yesterday on specifically why anti-cheat on linux is so difficult. It has nothing to do with companies paying a boatload of money.
Isn't the current CoD anti cheat system also flagging Valorant as cheating software because of Valorant's anti cheat?[0]
Fundamentally the problem with any anti cheat system is that it is indistinguishable from a root kit. You're giving software full privileges to your machine with the ability to edit your kernel, inspect running processes, and inject code into running processes. I'm not saying there's no situations where you don't want a program to be able to do this but you should be extremely cautious about doing so because that program essentially owns your machine.
Put it this way. Suppose you trust those game companies and their anti cheat software. Do you trust that this software will never be hacked? I mean we're talking about an extremely high profile target with wide adoption. Sounds like you're adding a pretty valuable target that's worth far more to hackers than it is to the game studios. I mean we're talking about the same game studios that let easily solvable but game breaking bugs persist for years. Even ones where the community has provided patches for...
> It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.
I'm pretty sure it trounces Linux (for some value of whatever you think "Linux" actually is) on Accessibility. This is an area that could be vastly improved.
I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.
I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.
I'd add that computing has changed in the last 5 years as well. The amount of actual apps a typical user installs is minimal. You really just need a web browser for most tasks, and obviously Linux can provide that.
Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.
Yes, I'm with you - Chromebooks are the first successful Linux Desktop.
To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.
It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.
It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.
Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.
Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler.
I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™.
I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it:
Hardware has changed too. Previously installing from CDs only spinning hard drives was a big investment in time. Now I'm really not scared of doing a fresh install, its often so easy I can switch distros without much trouble.
I recently took the opportunity to get my 80 yr old mother to try out Popos after her old X200 finally stated glitching (and could not update to win 11).
She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.
Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.
Even for apps where that is true, sometimes the wrapper adds some features that it doesn't have running in a browser tab. For example, the Discord electron app can get hotkeys when it's not focused (useful for push to talk/mute when playing a game), but not when you run it in a browser.
It is generally true regarding the intent of the platform owner (the app is supposed to be better, they'll put efforts into it).
The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.
It doesn't show up as a separate task. I have to go to Firefox and find the window. It's not as easy as an alt-tab and gets lost in all my other web apps that are in my browser.
Secunding blibble's comment, the wrapper mode works fine in Chrome, and links will open in the standard Chrome instance so there is little downsides UX wise.
Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.
to be honest I don't know, I don't use Spotify much, but apparently for my wife it was a dealbreaker so I gritted my teeth and dived in, but then as I recall it was actually not hard to install at all. HOWEVER, IIRC, it involved typing something into a terminal¸ and for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason.
You don't need to type anything into a terminal with gnome and KDE software center supporting snaps and flatpaks which make installing proprietary software as easy as anything else.
> for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason
Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.
There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.
Of course, it's not 'intuitive', but I firmly believe that the actual process of using just about any CLI package manager is easier to use than a GUI-installer approach. By "easier" I mean more streamlined, and a more standardized process. Every single time I install a piece of software on my machine with my package manager, I do it exactly the same way, with literally zero different steps taken. The same cannot be said for GUI-based installers. Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
I think it depends on how you define "easier". Once someone learns how to use the requisite terminal commands and does so frequently enough that they do not forget them, I agree that it is significantly faster and more consistent.
> Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
Our experiences with home PC users must be qualitatively different.
I have trouble getting the PC users I help to remember the name of their web browser or to understand the difference between a webpage and an application. And of the few people I know who might be able to learn how to use the terminal, none have the slightest interest in devoting time to doing so -- they would prefer to use their computer time doing actual work or playing computer games than wasting it learning how to do computer admin tasks more efficiently.
The prospect of teaching anyone but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of PC users to successfully run terminal commands seems so removed from the realm of possibility I have trouble imagining it. Maybe I could see it catching on with an LLM as an intermediary to actually structure the commands?
You're not wrong, but in this case I believe all I had to do was copy the line of text and paste it into a terminal (it's a while ago so I might be misremembering). But, given that is what people are doing, it does raise the question of whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...
> whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...
Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.
Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...
There are 2 things here to note which explain why.
* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.
Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.
* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.
> Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop...
If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.
> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted
Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.
Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.
As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".
Point 1:
Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.
The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.
They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.
(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)
They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.
Point 2:
How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.
There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.
(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)
Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.
So this is clearly not a handicap.
Point 3:
Docs are really hard and don't pay.
I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.
Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.
This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.
Point 4:
The real context here.
Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.
> Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.
You're right, I was mixing up threads, I apologize. Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right? If so, I agree, and I understand why a volunteer-driven project would take this route.
However, two points:
First, a properly-designed GUI should require less documentation in the first place.
More importantly, I don't see how this refutes my original point that running shell commands copied from the internet is less efficient, learnable, and secure for end-users than using comparable functionality through a GUI.
Again, I understand why distros take this route, I'm merely pointing out that it is less efficient, learnable, and secure. With respect to the four points in your last post I agree so I'm not sure there's much worth discussing there.
Sounds very similar to my situation. I switched to Linux around the same time and for basically the same reasons. I had looked at Linux at various times in the past, and attempted to switch around 10 years ago, but wound up going back to Windows. The horrors of Windows 10/11 made me more determined this time, and also the Linux desktop experience has improved slowly but steadily.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
Thank you for sharing this. Scott is a tech guy so he is not the average user.
I fight for the average user for respect of privacy and security, because, go figure, the average user only knows what there is a browser or an app, and they can logon and use it.
They have no clue of what is really going on.
So how we fix this? Give the average user the power. And show them what is going on and what are the options.
GNU/Linux desktop is not an alternative to Windows or mac. It is the only one who respects you.
If should be the only option you learn in school and learn about open source.
Still a ways to go. I found out part of the reason for my linux bluetooth woes is that a settings in bluetooth called “JustWorks” and “FastConnect” default to off. Like. Why?
As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.
Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
Funny, I had issues with my adapter where I had to turn BT fast connect off. In computing there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?
EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
Using all 3 main OSes frequently (Windows the least) I think this is the key point I've noticed. There's tons of frustrations on each of them. But at least for me, the reason why I like Linux so much is that I am far more likely to be able to fix things and move on. With Windows and OSX a fix usually involves some super hacky method that comes with costs, often invisibly so.
It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.
These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.
> The name is stupid
"2 hard things in Computer Science" but it isn't a off-by-one error! Though these names are just objectively stupid and confusing. At least an incomprehensible name wouldn't be misleading.
Regarding Linux machines, I frequently hear "oh yeah I haven't had to re-install Linux in 5+N years, my computer just keeps running fine!" Linux system maintenence, bug-squashing, documentation, and fix-applying is all very transparent.
Over in Windows-land, you frequently hear "oh yeah you gotta reinstall Windows every couple of years, or whenever you do xyz operation (say, disk cloning)". Troubleshooting Windows is a huge pain in the ass. There's no good centralized documentation, SEO sucks, registry hacks are common, etc. I've spent much more of my computing life on Windows machines, and I still have no idea how they truly work. I have no idea why sometimes the only way to fix an hardware/driver issue is by running the built-in troubleshooters, etc.
My last job gave me a windows machine. I tried using Windows Hello for login and... it broke Outlook. Apparently this was a known bug.
My solution? Type my strong password at every reboot and move to using the Yubi key they offered me. Great, I like Yubi keys. Oh, I can't set a security key as my primary means of 2 factor? My options were Hello or using the Microsoft authenticator phone app (couldn't use my other OTP app...). So every single login always started with "Sign in with Hello or use a security key". If using Hello I could just tap my finger and move on (and Outlook might crash silently). If security key I had to go through this dumb process of clicking: "use another device", "security key", "next", "type credentials", "tap security key", "ok". I think that needless "next" button was what really got under my skin. It was already a manufactured problem but an extra dialogue screen that is just doing nothing. Quite Kafkaesque.
The flip side though is that on Windows you can run an installer from 20 years ago, or sometimes even just copy the program directory over, and it will work. You might not have to reinstall Linux, but you'll have to update it and sometimes those updates mean that old stuff starts working. The big win of Windows for a long time was that old stuff would still work no matter what, and you could maintain old workflows on newer computers till kingdom come.
That advantage has been lost with Win10, which jumped on the constant-update bandwagon and took control away from the user. For me that's what tipped the scales to Linux.
What distro are you on? I have `FastConnectable` off and `JustWorksRepairing` as never. Both are the defaults. I use a bluetooth connected mouse every day and an xbox controller quite frequently.
I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)
A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that
I always get like three weeks into using Linux and then find out some obscure functionality is missing in a super annoying way. "Oh sorry, you can't use that model of touchscreen and a Bluetooth mouse at the same time"
According to the comment in the config file for FastConnectable, "the tradeoff is increased power consumptions". Doesn't say anything for JustWorksRepairing, although in a quick search I read some stuff about security issues, so perhaps that's why?
I've used Bluetooth for a number of devices for about ten years, and I didn't even know there's a config file until now! Thus far, it's been mostly a "just works" experience except for the battery level on by BOOM 3 speaker, but that's their fault for doing some proprietary bollocks.
I don't want to be dismissive of some of the concerns of switching to Linux, but I feel like a lot of the "it's too hard!" in 2025 is "it's needlessly difficult to get a consistent Python container in NixOS Unstable" like that's something Aunt Jennifer is going to need. Even the Adobe suite is not a factor for most people.
I ended up in this discussion with someone on Reddit who was convinced to their core that asking an older person to use Linux was "cruel" because they shouldn't have to spend their remaining years learning to type esoteric commands and older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things. Aside from the bizarrely confident ageism, give someone a thinkpad running fedora with KDE (put away your knives for a moment) and they'll be fine. And if they have issues with Linux they're going to have issues with Windows too. (As to the distro, as long as it's not one of the DIY distros, it's also probably fine, and I'd bet most people--even those brittle, sad old people (/s)--would figure out Gnome in a day.)
Nontechnical folks are fine using a computer until they're not, at which point they need to find someone with more experience or become someone with more experience. Many Windows or Mac users rely on a combination of paid support and friends/family with computer experience. But few people know someone with Linux experience, and fewer still know how to get paid Linux support. That's why every story of a nontechnical person running Linux seems to include a Linux enthusiast friend or family member in the background.
> older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things
I agree that people of all ages can be interested and capable of learning new things, even something as dry as learning how to administer a computer. And Linux is a great option for someone who actually wants to learn more about operating systems.
But the overwhelming majority of people who use a computer use it as a tool to do things, like keep in touch with family members, listen to music, write a book, read the news, look up tutorials, draw, make a webpage, play computer games, etc. Unless you aspire to learn about Linux itself, every second spent dealing with Linux driver issues is a waste that steals time from the actual things you want to do.
In those cases it's absolutely cruel to force someone to dedicate time to learning esoteric technical skills before they're allowed to use their computer. That's why the only people I've evangelized Linux to are people I'm happy to continue to support indefinitely or who are actively interested in learning about Linux itself.
That's the underlying point though: spending time dealing with Linux driver issues just isn't as prevalent as it was, certainly on the wide range of well-supported machines (like Thinkpads). Hell, I'm on a Macbook running NixOS unstable via Asahi and I don't spend any time dealing with driver issues thanks to the unbelievable collective effort of hundreds of projects. Yes, the issue is still present and worse than Windows, but that would have to be part of the conversation around switching--"Hey, Aunt Jennifer, we can get you off the Windows weirdness, but it might be time to pick up a new laptop to do it."
As to the first issue, you're right about installed base of Windows helpers, but my assumption is that a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Pure, unfiltered anecdata, but my kid uses Linux at home and he doesn't experience even 5% of the bizarre issues he tells me about on the district Windows computers (which are, granted, about 8,000 years old).
It's better than it was 20+ years ago (jeez I'm old) when I first tried Linux. Back then you needed to be fairly technical to get it running and even to do basic day-to-day tasks, but now you can use a human-friendly GUI most of the time.
But not 100% the time. And that makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Linux expert in their life. Finding a file that got put in a weird place, plugging in USB devices, understanding what version of an application to install (apt? snap? flatpak?), permissions, weird issues after updates, etc. All solvable problems that seem simple to you or me but that would stymie a nontechnical person.
> a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Exactly. Linux is fantastic if you have a technical person on speed dial or are interested in investing time and energy becoming a technical person. For the other 90% of the planet it's just not there yet.
That it more likely to just work in Linux than Windows. The latter will probably need a special driver.
> understanding what version of an application to install
Most window managers provide software installers / managers.
> permissions,
A normal desktop user doesn't look at permissions.
> weird issues after updates,
Well, yes. Sadly the solution is the same for both Windows and Linux - wipe and re-install. It's a regular occurrence with Windows, sadly.
We had a guy bring in his Linux laptop to a LUG because it was behaving badly. Turned out he had run out of disk space. He could have fixed it himself, had he realised. But the surprising thing was - it was 15 years old, and never had an issue up until then. I've never had a Windows machine someone was using regularly last that long. App churn causes everything to degrade, NTFS fragments something horrid, it slows down to being unusable. You eventually wipe it and restart.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing that a user is less likely to run into issues on Windows (or Mac). The bigger issue is that when they invariably run into an issue it's significantly easier to get the help they need to return their computer to a working state. Between their computer manufacturer, their university/company IT department, friends, relatives, blogs, books, senior citizen tech-support groups, etc there are simply more resources available, and especially more resources that are tailored to a less technical audience.
Yes, the issue is still present and worse than [on] Windows
I'm not sure about that... over the years I've gotten lots of perfectly functioning hardware from my father because it didn't work for him anymore because of a new Windows "upgrade". Scanners, printers, audio and graphics cards all got their turn of becoming expensive paperweights after Windows introduced a new driver model and the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to rewrite their old drivers.
Aunt Jennifer is the person iPads were made for. YMMV but it just seems to click for non tech people in a way a desktop OS (windows, Linux, or Mac) never does.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you, but between (a) Apple giving in to landscape orientation on their tablets as the default and risking the rise of angry zombie Steve Jobs from the grave in the process and (b) the increasing availability of desktop-like UI features in iPadOS--something I welcome for my use cases but that might be confusing for Aunt Jennifer--I have to wonder if that's still the case. Of course, some people insist they want a computer, so even if an iPad is a better option, it might not be a choice they're happy with.
I dual boot windows with linux, but I haven't used windows in over a year.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
The clock problem is actually a Linux issue. Linux sets the hardware system clock to UTC and only applies time zones when displaying the time.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.
Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
I wouldn't call that a Linux issue or a Windows issue. It's kind of like driving on the left or right side of the road: either way is fine, you just need to have everyone agree on which way they are going to use.
There in an advantage to using UTC: when legislatures change the rules about which time zone is which, or you move your computer while it's off, the time remains correct.
Using local time for the RTC theoretically makes it simpler to schedule wakeups at user friendly times, but that seems less impactful.
How do you autodetect the timezone, when the RTC clock doesn’t have one?
On Linux with one command you can switch between UTC or local RTC time to match Windows. On Windows you need to change a bit in the registry if you want it to adapt to the Linux way - i.e. the correct one.
I'd say that's a Windows issue and Linux has a solution to make it compatible with Windows.
Why would you want the system clock to be in local time instead of UTC?
For example you switch off your laptop in one timezone, fly to another timezone, switch it back on, the time has been ticking the same whether you moved to a different timezone or not, you only need to change the timezone for display, why would you need to save back to RTC a different value based on the timezone?
I never tested it but I'd like to see what happens on a Windows desktop if you change the timezone and unplug the computer without giving a chance to save to RTC. On next boot the local time read from RTC will be wrong.
At my last two workplaces Linux has been an alternative for those who wanted it, along with Mac (unlike Linux you have to ask for Mac, but you usually get it if you have a good reason or a couple of years experience it seems) and Windows (the standard).
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
I made the switch a few years ago mostly because the only thing I do on computers is write software for the companies I work for; I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
As usual, prepare for Linux suggestions to the papercuts, but...
I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.
For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
Default vfs and vm swap related settings are good for I dunno, 1997.
You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).
If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.
It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.
> It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior.
I think this is because for the most part people aren't running out of memory and swap. Makes sense for devs, but devs also usually have more memory (and consequently more swap too). Often an easier solution is just adding more swap or buying more RAM. I mean if you're running out of swap and RAM then you're problem is fundamentally related to trying to do things your system isn't capable of. Though, that doesn't mean it shouldn't fail more gracefully...
Swap is really interesting. The idea of swap sounds super useful - you get more RAM than you have. The reality is that RAM speeds are so important to fast computing that once you start to need swap, what you really need is more RAM on your machine.
If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
Swap is not 'super slow extra memory' (well it is, but that's not useful!), it's a place to temporarily store contents of memory for things less important than what wants to be in fast memory right now. Idle apps can (and are) swapped out to have more file cache even on boxes with large RAM. Memory can also be fragmented and you'll have nominally lots of free space, but in reality allocations will fail; in this case, swap can be used to defragment memory instead of OOM killing stuff.
You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.
I think you really are misunderstanding what swap is for.
If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.
Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")
I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.
The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.
What you should do:
- Follow the instructions from [1] or elsewhere[2] and get yourself at least 4G of swap but I would do 8. Are you really going to miss 8G of disk space?
- Change the swappiness value[2]. Set it to 10 to get pretty similar results to what you have but without crashes.
- Read more about what swap files actually are because you are currently giving a strong impression that you have vastly oversimplified how a computer's memory system works.
I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for. I've implemented swap for a hobby os.
Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.
You seem to be conflating swaps features with it being anything other than an extension of your physical memory. The primary use of swap is to enable a virtual memory space that is larger than the available physical memory. That can be leveraged for smarter things than "store page with the oldest access time" but fundamentally swap is to enable using more memory than you have more physical memory for. Yes, you can ramp your swappiness and have the OS be more aggressive about paging to disk, this is silly if you have so much unused RAM as the performance implication of a page fault and retrieval from disk is huge.
From your links:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq: "Swap space is used when your operating system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and the amount of available (unused) physical memory is insufficient." -> More RAM for your memory heavy usage. In this case if you buy more physical RAM your programs will run faster.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...: "The swap space acts as an extension to the physical memory and allows the system to continue running smoothly even when physical memory is exhausted." and "Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space." -> More RAM. Slow RAM, but more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness: "Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available." -> Do I need to repeat myself here?
Did you seriously write and link all of that without reading any of it?
Swap isn’t unlimited, it just delays the inevitable and makes everything slow while doing it. A 4GB swap partition isn’t going to save you if you run your 32GB computer out of memory.
It does help. It gives time for the kernel in this situation and also helps in general by allowing to defragment memory. You want to keep a small amount of swap space at all times.
Unless it's some sort of autonomous safety-related process, It's usually better for the process to die so I can just restart it.
Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.
> I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
I'm surprised by this. Valve has really made this easy these days. I switched to EndervourOS a few years back and things, for the most part, just works. 2-3 years ago the biggest hurdle was changing Proton version and 90% of the time I could play a game. For the last year (including after a reinstall and having never touched Steam settings) the only problems I've had are post an update and solved by restarting the computer.
> pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes
Same thing here. The only issue I can think of in the last few years was an update where a rollback solved it. The problem was only because Endeavour (Arch based) uses beta nvidia drivers AND the newest kernels. Was a really easy fix. Just two commands to roll back kernel and driver.
> Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
This sounds like there might be a swap space allocation issue. Did you manually set swap or just go with the default configuration? If the OS runs out of RAM and swap (there's overcommit_memory but you probably don't want to enable it[0]) then yeah, you'll run into trouble. Not sure how Windows is handling that but there's only so much that can be done here. Luckily you can always add more swap space, if you don't want to buy more RAM. But things should never crash just because you ran out of RAM (there are exceptions, like a single program using all the RAM).
> But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
You might like KDE[1]. It has a much more Windows like feel. Or Cutefish[2] for that OSX feel. It is pretty simple to make a switch (given you're comfortable with software I assume calling a few lines from the CLI doesn't scare you). Just some food for though. Personally I hate Gnome. Ugly as hell and unintuitive. I'd rather go headless than use Gnome.
I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>
Ubuntu 22.04 user here. Indeed it hangs when out of memory, never had the time to properly address this but i will try to follow the advice provided here in the thread. My servers that run Centos or Debian just do this thing called OOMkill on a ram hungry process, out of the box.
Windows will keep dominating the desktop PC market as long as manufacturers ship it by default. Convincing someone to install an operating system from scratch is a fantastically large ask.
and Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily. For most proprietary desktop software businesses, porting to Linux is not profitable.
There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.
Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.
Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
I don't see this as the Windows being default on a laptop problem. It is a problem of letting companies grow too big. Google equally abuses their position with Android. We need to force big tech into splitting. No way around it.
Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.
Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.
This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.
Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment
you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
> Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily.
Underrated point.
Most Linux distros have historically catered to an ecosystem of open source software with the distro repository model, and cross-distro software distribution is probably the biggest papercut still remaining with Linux today.
Thank goodness things are so much better these days with Electron, Steam, Docker, FlatPak and WINE. But there are still gaps that need filling.
In fact I was able to open some huge Excel files more easily in WPS than in MS Office (I have a work laptop that runs Windows 11).
But, I think you have a point, and that point is that the most stable Linux API to release software is actually the Win32 API provided by Wine. Native libraries treat backwards compatibility like a liability.
> Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily
That sounds like skill issue (i.e the company developing the software doesn't have engineers experienced in developing apps for Linux). There are many proprietary software available for Linux.
> For most proprietary desktop software businesses, porting to Linux is not profitable.
True, but mostly because they see software as a binary number on a disc.
If they saw software as an artefact to build, as Free Software does, this would not be a problem.
A pox on all their (propitiatory) houses. All they are all beneath contempt. They want money, above all. They love money, above all. They care not for their users
Any Electron app is a privacy nightmare as it connects to Google for "dictionary" download. You cannot disable this, unless you block redirector.gvt1.com domain.
I ah haven't looked very hard but Lenovo is the only company I've seen offer Linux (Ubuntu) machines, limited for a very small number or devices though.
The bigger players like Dell and Lenovo do and have for a very long time. Maybe HPE? Not sure
Then there are more bespoke vendors that cater specifically to Linux. System76 is probably the most well known, but there are many others.
I'm speaking mainly for laptops/desktops. For servers it's always been you just put whatever on.
Linux gets the most time on servers and containers but the desktop base continues to grow, so expect most problems to be there (bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Accessibility is getting much better.
One of the companies I'm working for has a b2c retail division.
We're still buying the Lenovo all-in-one destkops that are used as POS systems with Windows licenses even though we wipe the machine and auto-install our Linux-based POS system as soon as we deploy the machine. Trying to buy a machine w/o Windows is just too much friction. I call it the Microsoft tax. I really wish that not to be a thing any more.
That’s one way to frame it: Encroaching corporations are a front, trying to subdue the public, and we need to unite and fight back for ourselves.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
Im confused as to how this looks in practice. Are you saying you embody making the right choices in a relationship as setting an example? or convincing others that this is a good want to go? How do we stop the exploitation of each other in relationships? It seems like its burned into our genetic make up that started a long time ago. We sort of use each other to get what we want. I know there is a higher path, but as you said I don't see how thats possible in commerce as it appears like its exploitable by nature.
I was answering OPs comment, so in practice I’m saying I don’t use these pandering perspectives that provide convenient faceless enemies, and where I’m the good guy. Better to try to improve one relationship at a time, and re-examine ourselves for blame. And that probably we get most leverage out of improving the relationship with our own self first - it has knock on effects to all the others.
There’s overlap - I think mostly we harm ourselves, then we harm each other inadvertently, and lastly we harm each other intentionally. So promoting better relationships is a piece of it, but helping each other not harm ourselves (ie reach enlightenment) has the biggest effect. The hard thing is to balance it with our need to make a living, and to also not trigger some landmine of aspirational truth that others are determined to hold onto when we share our perspective.
Absolutely. RMS ultimately is completely right, its just the conditions for it to work are nowhere near right. If anything we seem to be slipping further all the time despite the uptake in users.
Unfortunately there's just no solution for an important part of my life - gaming. If it was completely up to me I would completely ignore games that didn't work on Linux. But I maintain an important friendship group through gaming, and those guys are not going to forgo Battlefield 6 or Dawn of War 4 or any of the many games that straight up won't work. Not to mention the additional effort on my side getting a game to work when it's not officially supported - something I am not willing to put a ton of persona time into.
Yeah I hear you. I also had a similar game that played with friends. PubG. But then when I switched to Linux and I couldn't play it any more. I switched to other games that I could play, some of the joined me and some didn't. I had reached a point that I wasn't willing to justify using software that was not in my control any longer. Relationships change and I chalk that up to personal growth. Some people join you, and some don't.
Not judging you, but for me I just couldn't tolerate it any longer.
Just to add a bit more context, the group of people who I play games with are not people I met playing games. They are my lifelong friends. I'm not willing to walk away from those friendships or my interactions with them for the sake of an operating system.
> One day their data was on the local drive and the next it became online-only files that had to be downloaded from Microsoft’s servers.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)
I always seem to end up dual booting Windows to play games. I’ve made it quite a while without installing Windows now. Mostly because I haven’t had the desire to game much, but also because of how good gaming on Linux is now. I will hold out until there is some big multiplayer game with anticheat that my friends get me into.
I've coded on linux for a decade now, but always used windows at home. Just last week I switched from windows 10 to ubuntu on my media computer since it cant upgrade to windows 11.
I open up firefox, go to youtube, and immediately notice that 30% of all frames are gone. Hardware acceleration isnt working.
I put the computer to sleep and go make dinner. When I return my wireless keyboard cant wake it up, I have to hard-reboot the computer to wake it up.
I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems, and it start spitting out terminal commands that end up making no difference.
In my experience, 2025 is not yet the year of linux. I'll try again in 2027.
You ask ChatGPT for answers to questions and your surprised that random terminal commands don't work? If you look at linux forums, all issues always include hardware and software versions. Some problems are extremely context dependent.
Hardware acceleration isn't working -> what GPU? Do you have the right drivers installed (yes for Linux this is a consideration as there are so many display configurations not all drivers cough nvidia work for all scenarios).
You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at. Is this 30% dropped frames at 4k60 or 1080p30? You can argue that this is too much detail for something that should "just work" but given where you are and what you're talking about I would think you would be more nuanced in the troubleshooting. If you want the most seemless and effort free web browsing and media viewing experience just buy a macbook air (good product and also good dev machines for most).
Is it even worth the time searching on forums to fix these issues? I can't speak for OP... but if an OS I freshly installed is unable to watch youtube videos and wake up from sleep, I'm wiping it and installing something else unless I can fix it extremely easily (eg. with chatgpt).
>You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at.
If hardware acceleration isn't working, it doesn't matter which youtube video made you realize the issue existed. It's not as if the method you use to fix the driver would be different when the video you want to watch is 1080p30 instead of 4k60.
I think the issue is how people view their operating system then. If you think an operating system (which for the sake of this I'll allow to mean the distro for linux) should just install and "work" with no configuration needed, then linux on abnormal hardware is not for you. Whether or not a small amount of effort to search for solutions to a problem or to learn more about system configuration being "worth the time" is up to the reader to decide.
I don't know if you're trying to make a rhetorical point here, by giving a sort of worked example of "how to go about this the wrong way and give useless feedback in the form of a complaint."
If not... Well, wow, I really hope you're not "coding on Linux" for anything important.
What did you do wrong?
> I switched from windows 10 to ubuntu
1. What version of Ubuntu?
2. After installing, did you update?
2a. If so, how? Firefox is a snap; doing an update with the "apt" or "apt-get" commands won't touch it.
3. Did you install graphics drivers? Did you even check if you need them?
4. Did you try Chrome? Youtube is a Google product. Test with the Google browser. It's about 2 clicks to install it.
5.
> my wireless keyboard cant wake it up
Well known issue with some wireless devices (especially Bluetooth). Don't use them if you have an alternative.
6.
> I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems
It's a predictive text tool. Of course it can't. Don't use LLM bots for search. Better still, don't use them at all.
If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
Trapping user's data in their roach motel formats (the data goes in, but can never leave with full fidelity) is the longest running objection I have to using any Microsoft software.
This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
The weird thing is that to a significant extent that battle is really just about the words "Microsoft Office". LibreOffice has some awkwardness and annoyances, but it's quite adequate for probably 90% of mundane office tasks people need to do (and MS Office has its own pain points). A major barrier is just a specific insistence that Word be used, without any reference to functional requirements of the actual document.
People always say this but the 90% doesn’t count. The 90% is easy. It’s the other bit that people hit and compatibility issues mean any non standard approach whether it’s fair or not will always, always get the blame.
Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.
Let's not compare the advanced options of Excel or how Excel bugs annoy me. There are loads of them.
Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.
So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.
Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.
I’ve never met a document an office document that wouldn’t have been better as a wiki (if it is intended to be impermanent), or as a something like a LaTeX document (if it is not).
I've found that OnlyOffice has much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I just install it via flatpak, remove the network permission, and go about my business perfectly. While LibreOffice -> LibreOffice works perfectly fine, whenever it opens a .docx file it always wants to save it as a .odf which is a nonstarter. Not because I don't want to support open document formats but because everyone expects a .docx back if they send you one. It also struggles consistently for any type of advanced formatting (as a .docx).
Please consider checking LibreOffice periodically, every 4 - 6 months Ms compatibility increases at steady pace, it may have solved that issue that was keeping you back from using it (25 years using linux and staroffice)
Libre office has some annoyances though. I cannot for the life of me disable the document recovery model that always pops up on every launch regardless if a document needs to be recovered or not. Also I cant seem to get printing to default to 8 1/2x11 formatting.
These days you can choose between different UIs, some of which will have the "ribbon" style. I do agree though that it feels a bit dated if you're used to MS' office, but you get used to it quite quickly.
GP probably wanted to say that LibreOffice’s UI is 90s era Linux quality, rather than the beauty of Office 97 and such. Mismatched, not native, terrible stock icons, clunky and frankly ugly.
I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.
So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.
My employer blocks access to Google Docs as part of our confidential information protection policy. They're certainly not the only ones. I'd hesitate to call on-premises file management "specialized needs" - rather, it's (still) the default, particularly if you take a peek outside of the software bubble.
Don't want anyone to use that but that is good to prove that almost everybody can use a spreedsheat that is not Excel. Including LibreCalc. And many others.
The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!
I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
I've used it for very simple things but I don't thing it even has 1% of the installed Excel program does. It is too simple and buggy.
Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.
Gaming has actually seen the biggest improvement on Linux in the last couple of years, check out https://www.protondb.com/ for just how many titles are playable.
Hmm. I might be speaking from a perspective of a more.. restrained gamer ( my last bigger indulgence was BG3 and, while there were issues after updates, drivers tended to solve those eventually ). Any particular titles you have a problem with?
If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).
Battlefield 2024 (and the upcoming 6) and all recent Call of Duty games are the obvious ones. And if you're interested in sim racing then device compatibility is a major problem even before you get to launch the game.
> I am ok with that not being solved
Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
<< You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.
It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.
> I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'
Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.
Hmm. What solution would you propose if you were in a position to do that ( change linux in a way that allows you to play online games like new Battlefield )?
I don't know enough to understand what prevents it I guess. I thought it was a matter of game or anti cheat developers not writing software that will cooperate properly. It's a chicken and egg problem, has been for decades.
That's fair. I don't want to sound too cynical with a reflexive 'money' response.
As you note, some of it is indeed a question of software not playing nice together. I have zero solutions for this.
Tbh, it sounds like you may be forced to use a Windows VM ( if you want try 'dropping' windows that way ). Last time I was looking at it, VMs were still fair game, but were starting to be identified as a way to bypass some of the restrictions ( mostly because they were only doing a couple of checks for whether OS is in a VM ). That said, few friends were recently sharing pics suggesting those checks were getting more invasive.
<< Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
Just in case it helps, I went through a major system issue at some point with Windows 7 and once it was clear that CPU/GPU passthrough works surprisingly well ( before nvidia started messing with it after 3060 ), I got a way to ease myself in with better fallback position should my linux install fail somehow. This approach ( OS engaged for a specific purpose ) worked better than dual boot, which in practice was never used. There is some learning curve, but nothing excessive or something that is not well covered online.
The two last issues facing users switching are (imo) battery management and track pads. I know there are solutions but they're very complicated to setup properly for the average user.
I was messing around with a Framework laptop about a year ago and was amazed at how awful trackpad support is. If the default acceleration curves are going to be garbage, at least give me an easy way to edit them. Dealing with a config file sucks compared to being able to move sliders and feel the changes immediately.
And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.
Libinput is adding Lua scripting to handle hardware quirks and edge cases without needing to rely on hardcoding hacks into the library[1], which might help the trackpad situation.
Is that really still a problem? I've always had trackpads work straight-off 100%, and find battery life to be way better under linux (perhaps because it's not running a million unwanted services.)
Trackpads pretty much always work out of the box, but typically do not support more advanced features, and/or they're kind of a pain to set up. I think you and the person you're replying to are talking about different things(?)
Whether these advanced features are desirable is of course a matter of opinion. Personally, I find macbooks very hard to use because the trackpad never does what I want on account of having the motor skills of a spastic five year old. So I don't miss this at all.
I agree they work out of the box but badly. I use non of the advanced features (gestures) of trackpads apart from two fingers to right click. I still struggle with most trackpads on linux.
On mac I disable nearly all gestures, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
You are right though, we're probably all talking about different aspects of trackpad usage.
it's funny that a lot of us Linux nuts on comp.os.linux.advocacy back in the 90s predicted this was Microsoft's planned endgame. I personally thought it would take less than 30 years for them to get around to it though.
I run manjaro on a 12 year old Thinkpad and it's the best computer I've ever had. It needed a CPU upgrade, but now I can do all my development work on this ancient beast.
An option if you don't want to deal with dual boot: buy something like a Bee-link SER8 for $499 and use that for Linux. It's tiny and performs well. Use a KVM or swap cables between computers.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Finding a good KVM switch at a good price can be hard. Usually the video output isnt great. what I found works isnusing a USB switch with a monitor that supports two inputs. Switching machines is two operations. First, switch monitors, then switch USB.
Computers are so stupidly fast now, it does seem like this is the future. Thanks to the laptop market, the tiny desktop models have more then sufficient oomph to do everything that 99% of users require. Keep the bulky tower for gaming or workstation loads.
Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
Not a bad idea in principle but I can't justify purchasing separate hardware just for this purpose -- I have an almost perfectly running machine, and I don't want to spend a few hundred dollars on a separate one. If I have files that need to be shared, that makes things more complicated.
When I started at my current job I started with a dual boot machine (Windows/Linux) with the thought of testing Linux as a desktop OS out for a bit. After a year I realized I wasn't booting into the Windows installation anymore so I removed it.
Now 5 years on I am still as happy as ever. I am still struggling with some Adobe Creative Suite replacements, but in those 5 years things have gotten so much better already (and so much worse on the Windows-side) that I can see myself doing this for the long-term future.
There is just something relaxing about working on an OS that treats you with respect instead of trying to trick you into something constantly.
Finally managed to switch everything too. Was probably my 3rd serious try over the span of a decade.
Travel laptop to Mint was smooth so then decided to get ambitious and try Arch/Hyprland on Desktop. Was far easier than expected (cuda, audio, bt etc) and the fiddly parts were mostly because its Arch/Hyprland - fiddling is kinda what you sign up for with that combo
The only 2nd thoughts I'm having is that I kinda want to play the new battlefield and the anticheat makes that a no go on linux
Ever since Steam released in Beta for Linux (proud owner of the Tux accessory for the Demoman in TF2!) I switched to Linux and stayed there. In the beginning I ran Ubuntu 12.04 and used Steam there. I also used Wine to run Diablo 3 and WoW, although performance was bad at that time. All other programs I needed where there also. (Im a software engineer, so using Linux is even better). But Ubuntu moved to slowly and broke here and there.
What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game.
Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.
Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine.
If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.
There's no equivalent to Excel if you need compatability with a proper Excel spreadsheet (anything more than basic formulae), outside of spinning up a VM.
Want to thank the OP and commenters for this. I am not a hacker, and am hanging on to a Windows 10 and 7 (yes) laptop. I need to make some time and get one of the Linux systems. It would help a great deal if someone wrote or pointed to a blog that has step by step instructions. Something like a Hello World including what to use for common applications like browsing, writing documents, and spreadshees. Thank you.
Executive summary: use Linux Mint. The latest version, with the default Cinnamon desktop. Anyone who disagrees has an agenda and it's not ease of use, so can probably be ignored.
In about 2021 I set up dual boot on my Windows PC and slowly ended up using Linux more over time. In 2023 I built a new PC and this time didn't even bother getting Windows.
the only things that didn't run natively were a few video games, and even for these it seems there is a good emulation (?) layer now in Steam (I forgot the details as I didn't game often).
It's impressive how these Microsoft-owned products became fundamental to my daily software needs. I know I have to find better alternatives, move to using Codeberg/Forgejo, Spacemacs/Neovim..
And programming languages? I like TypeScript, and Microsoft has been a good steward of the project. Similarly with Go and Google. I also rely on VC-funded language runtimes, frameworks, libraries. That's a risk I sometimes question. Ideally I would shift to using FOSS altogether, the whole stack top to bottom.
Even the hardware I'd prefer "open source" if possible.
I did this a few months back and never looked back. Linux failed me in music production and gaming, while the latter isn't important, I have invested heavily in audio VSTs and it's unacceptable that even with Wine, they do not work and no virtual machines are not enough. I hope MacOS treats you well.
This post has come along at an interesting time as it happens...
I was at my mum and dads yesterday and I was asking my dad if he'd seen any messages or nag screens about upgrading his computer from Windows 10? It's ancient and I wouldn't put Windows 11 on it, even though I can burn a copy with Rufus to remove all the requirements. As it happens, he had. In fact, he thought Microsoft wanted him to pay for it, such is their confusing marketing!
Now, my dad is no dumbass. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, all his faculties are still present and correct and he's used computers for years and he won numerous awards as uni for being smart af! Anyway, I put him off the idea of Windows 11 and onto the idea of a Chromebox instead. He seemes keen to try it.
Also, my dad only uses the web, the odd spreadsheet to keep track of his money, the odd YT video and that's about it: he's not a power-user.
My reasoning for the Chromebox is that I can't be about all the time when he needs tech support and I'm worried he's scammed by someone wanting him to "install an anti-virus, quick, before all his money is gone" or something. Plus, he has an Android phone already... it makes sense I think.
Next week I'll drop off my Chromebook and set it up for him to try. I think it'll work out, and if it does, I'll buy a Chromebox for about £300 and that'll do him for ever I think.
On a side-note, I've switched back to Windows 10 a few weeks ago: specifically Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I used the Massgrave script and it's valid until 2038 or something. I've had it with the latency and general dystopia (and the broken printer... ffs Microsoft!) around Windows 11, which I'd been using for a couple of years until last week.
It may sound trivial but I still can't get over the volume slider latency in Windows 11: When you change the volume slider in the quick launch area and the "ding" sound happens 400ms later, not at the same time, it drives me nuts!
> It’s been two years now. I finally weaned myself off of Big Daddy.
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
> The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
Back in university RMS came to a neighbor uni in Stockholm for a traditional lecture about software freedoms etc. I think everyone thought he was a bit crazy or idealistic (I guess most still do). But the warnings of how you weren't going to own anything, that you have to ask permission, that your devices can be disabled etc, that sounded like fiction at the time. But looking back to that era (2011 or so), it slowly did change for the worse exactly like he warned.
While a lot of the early internet idealisms have fizzled out, I think today those ideas and passions were much more important than we thought. For instance, I usually say that if the web was invented today, browsers would not be approved by the app stores. We take some things for granted, and a lot of those things came from a different era, arising out of preconditions that largely no longer exist.
There's nothing wrong with, and possibly better, to start out with a protocol only to support an application. But nowadays the pipeline for graduating into open protocols has broken. We have 15 messaging apps and no interop. Even Facebook and Google Gchat used to support open protocols. That's gone. It's actually much worse than before the internet where telephones were all globally interoperable.
The last time my wife's laptop died, I convinced her to give a Linux laptop from System76 a try. Then, when her store's Windows box died, I convinced her (and her business partner) to give Linux a try there. My daughter, 20, has a Linux laptop as well (although in order to get Adobe Creative Suite for school she still has to own a Windows desktop, thanks Adobe). None of these people were interested in software freedom, so their patience for problems during the switch was pretty minimal, and they all switched, and stayed switched. If you buy something like System76 that has Linux pre-installed, and help out with something like Spotify that is possible to install on Linux but not completely trivial, it is not so difficult to convince people anymore.
I want to second this point, but from a different experience. I'm definitely a linux "evangelist", in that I've convinced a lot of friends to switch over. But the biggest thing that's enabled me to convince people to give linux a try is... linux has changed.
Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.
A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.
But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.
Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.
> linux has changed
Windows has changed too, their bad practices are increasing and the public perception is suffering by that.
It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.[0]
I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.
[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.
The Adobe Suite and those multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat are probably the two things holding up the Windows’ crumbling empire. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Microsoft pays those companies a boatload of money to remain effectively Windows-exclusive.
There was a great write-up that resurfaced on HN yesterday on specifically why anti-cheat on linux is so difficult. It has nothing to do with companies paying a boatload of money.
Adobe, I can't comment on
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980064
Isn't the current CoD anti cheat system also flagging Valorant as cheating software because of Valorant's anti cheat?[0]
Fundamentally the problem with any anti cheat system is that it is indistinguishable from a root kit. You're giving software full privileges to your machine with the ability to edit your kernel, inspect running processes, and inject code into running processes. I'm not saying there's no situations where you don't want a program to be able to do this but you should be extremely cautious about doing so because that program essentially owns your machine.
Put it this way. Suppose you trust those game companies and their anti cheat software. Do you trust that this software will never be hacked? I mean we're talking about an extremely high profile target with wide adoption. Sounds like you're adding a pretty valuable target that's worth far more to hackers than it is to the game studios. I mean we're talking about the same game studios that let easily solvable but game breaking bugs persist for years. Even ones where the community has provided patches for...
[0] <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/battlefield-6-and-valorant...>
> It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.
I'm pretty sure it trounces Linux (for some value of whatever you think "Linux" actually is) on Accessibility. This is an area that could be vastly improved.
> It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.
For people who have been using Linux for decades, it is not so shocking.
Definitely frustrating it has taken so lone.
I think a little of both?
I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.
I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.
Agreed. This has also made it easier to get people to switch. This Windows 11 stuff has been great for Linux adoption
I read a comment on a forum recently that I'll just leave here:
"Windows 11 is a hate crime."
I'd add that computing has changed in the last 5 years as well. The amount of actual apps a typical user installs is minimal. You really just need a web browser for most tasks, and obviously Linux can provide that.
Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.
Absolutely. The year of linux on the desktop was probably somewhere around 2020.
I'd argue 2017: that was the year Chromebooks first outsold Macs in the USA.
(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)
Two things are non-obvious about this info.
1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.
2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.
Yes, I'm with you - Chromebooks are the first successful Linux Desktop.
To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.
It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.
It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.
Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.
Thanks for that.
Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler.
I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™.
I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chr...
I like the current ChromeOS. I am concerned by the change.
Hardware has changed too. Previously installing from CDs only spinning hard drives was a big investment in time. Now I'm really not scared of doing a fresh install, its often so easy I can switch distros without much trouble.
Another aspect is that Windows has gotten so terrible and distracting.
I recently took the opportunity to get my 80 yr old mother to try out Popos after her old X200 finally stated glitching (and could not update to win 11).
She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.
Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.
what's wrong with the web app
In my experience web apps are almost always worse than native apps unless the native app is just a wrapper around a web app.
The native Spotify app is just a wrapper around the web app though.
Even for apps where that is true, sometimes the wrapper adds some features that it doesn't have running in a browser tab. For example, the Discord electron app can get hotkeys when it's not focused (useful for push to talk/mute when playing a game), but not when you run it in a browser.
> a wrapper around the web app
All Electron apps are.
This is decidedly untrue.
It is generally true regarding the intent of the platform owner (the app is supposed to be better, they'll put efforts into it).
The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.
Spicetify offers a much better experience than web+extensions. And of course, you can use alternate, lightweight clients based on 'librespot' instead.
It doesn't show up as a separate task. I have to go to Firefox and find the window. It's not as easy as an alt-tab and gets lost in all my other web apps that are in my browser.
Chrome+Firefox support pulling tabs out as individual apps, with a separate window icon + launcher
well, Firefox did, until Mozilla (of course) removed it
Chrome still supports it
Secunding blibble's comment, the wrapper mode works fine in Chrome, and links will open in the standard Chrome instance so there is little downsides UX wise.
Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.
to be honest I don't know, I don't use Spotify much, but apparently for my wife it was a dealbreaker so I gritted my teeth and dived in, but then as I recall it was actually not hard to install at all. HOWEVER, IIRC, it involved typing something into a terminal¸ and for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason.
You don't need to type anything into a terminal with gnome and KDE software center supporting snaps and flatpaks which make installing proprietary software as easy as anything else.
> for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason
Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.
There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.
Of course, it's not 'intuitive', but I firmly believe that the actual process of using just about any CLI package manager is easier to use than a GUI-installer approach. By "easier" I mean more streamlined, and a more standardized process. Every single time I install a piece of software on my machine with my package manager, I do it exactly the same way, with literally zero different steps taken. The same cannot be said for GUI-based installers. Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
I think it depends on how you define "easier". Once someone learns how to use the requisite terminal commands and does so frequently enough that they do not forget them, I agree that it is significantly faster and more consistent.
> Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?
Our experiences with home PC users must be qualitatively different.
I have trouble getting the PC users I help to remember the name of their web browser or to understand the difference between a webpage and an application. And of the few people I know who might be able to learn how to use the terminal, none have the slightest interest in devoting time to doing so -- they would prefer to use their computer time doing actual work or playing computer games than wasting it learning how to do computer admin tasks more efficiently.
The prospect of teaching anyone but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of PC users to successfully run terminal commands seems so removed from the realm of possibility I have trouble imagining it. Maybe I could see it catching on with an LLM as an intermediary to actually structure the commands?
You're not wrong, but in this case I believe all I had to do was copy the line of text and paste it into a terminal (it's a while ago so I might be misremembering). But, given that is what people are doing, it does raise the question of whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...
> whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...
Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.
Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...
There are 2 things here to note which explain why.
* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.
Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.
* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.
I speak as a former docs writer.
> Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop...
If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.
> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted
Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.
Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.
As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".
Point 1:
Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.
The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.
They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.
(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)
They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.
Point 2:
How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.
There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.
(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)
Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.
So this is clearly not a handicap.
Point 3:
Docs are really hard and don't pay.
I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.
Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.
This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.
Point 4:
The real context here.
Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.
> Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.
You're right, I was mixing up threads, I apologize. Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right? If so, I agree, and I understand why a volunteer-driven project would take this route.
However, two points:
First, a properly-designed GUI should require less documentation in the first place.
More importantly, I don't see how this refutes my original point that running shell commands copied from the internet is less efficient, learnable, and secure for end-users than using comparable functionality through a GUI.
Again, I understand why distros take this route, I'm merely pointing out that it is less efficient, learnable, and secure. With respect to the four points in your last post I agree so I'm not sure there's much worth discussing there.
I wonder what OS you were trying.
For most, it would be:
1. Open the app or software store
2. Type "spotify"
3. Click "install"
If it doesn't, then it's not a distro for non-techie end-users.
It locks out a bunch of features
Sounds very similar to my situation. I switched to Linux around the same time and for basically the same reasons. I had looked at Linux at various times in the past, and attempted to switch around 10 years ago, but wound up going back to Windows. The horrors of Windows 10/11 made me more determined this time, and also the Linux desktop experience has improved slowly but steadily.
I hope that Linux continues to improve as a viable solution for average nontechnical users. The level of evil that's being pushed by mainstream for-profit software vendors is becoming outrageous.
Thank you for sharing this. Scott is a tech guy so he is not the average user.
I fight for the average user for respect of privacy and security, because, go figure, the average user only knows what there is a browser or an app, and they can logon and use it.
They have no clue of what is really going on.
So how we fix this? Give the average user the power. And show them what is going on and what are the options.
GNU/Linux desktop is not an alternative to Windows or mac. It is the only one who respects you.
If should be the only option you learn in school and learn about open source.
Still a ways to go. I found out part of the reason for my linux bluetooth woes is that a settings in bluetooth called “JustWorks” and “FastConnect” default to off. Like. Why?
As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.
Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands
Funny, I had issues with my adapter where I had to turn BT fast connect off. In computing there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies. You're just used to them. Bluetooth hardware is terrible, often proprietary and vendors write drivers only for Windows and macOS. What is Linux supposed to do about that?
EDIT: By the way, JustWorks and FastConnect are the official names of two Bluetooth connection techniques. The name is stupid because that's what the marketing people decided to call it, Linux is being consistent so you know what's going on when they're active, and I assume they have their downsides.
It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.
These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.
"2 hard things in Computer Science" but it isn't a off-by-one error! Though these names are just objectively stupid and confusing. At least an incomprehensible name wouldn't be misleading.Regarding Linux machines, I frequently hear "oh yeah I haven't had to re-install Linux in 5+N years, my computer just keeps running fine!" Linux system maintenence, bug-squashing, documentation, and fix-applying is all very transparent.
Over in Windows-land, you frequently hear "oh yeah you gotta reinstall Windows every couple of years, or whenever you do xyz operation (say, disk cloning)". Troubleshooting Windows is a huge pain in the ass. There's no good centralized documentation, SEO sucks, registry hacks are common, etc. I've spent much more of my computing life on Windows machines, and I still have no idea how they truly work. I have no idea why sometimes the only way to fix an hardware/driver issue is by running the built-in troubleshooters, etc.
My last job gave me a windows machine. I tried using Windows Hello for login and... it broke Outlook. Apparently this was a known bug.
My solution? Type my strong password at every reboot and move to using the Yubi key they offered me. Great, I like Yubi keys. Oh, I can't set a security key as my primary means of 2 factor? My options were Hello or using the Microsoft authenticator phone app (couldn't use my other OTP app...). So every single login always started with "Sign in with Hello or use a security key". If using Hello I could just tap my finger and move on (and Outlook might crash silently). If security key I had to go through this dumb process of clicking: "use another device", "security key", "next", "type credentials", "tap security key", "ok". I think that needless "next" button was what really got under my skin. It was already a manufactured problem but an extra dialogue screen that is just doing nothing. Quite Kafkaesque.
The flip side though is that on Windows you can run an installer from 20 years ago, or sometimes even just copy the program directory over, and it will work. You might not have to reinstall Linux, but you'll have to update it and sometimes those updates mean that old stuff starts working. The big win of Windows for a long time was that old stuff would still work no matter what, and you could maintain old workflows on newer computers till kingdom come.
That advantage has been lost with Win10, which jumped on the constant-update bandwagon and took control away from the user. For me that's what tipped the scales to Linux.
What distro are you on? I have `FastConnectable` off and `JustWorksRepairing` as never. Both are the defaults. I use a bluetooth connected mouse every day and an xbox controller quite frequently.
I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)
A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that
I always get like three weeks into using Linux and then find out some obscure functionality is missing in a super annoying way. "Oh sorry, you can't use that model of touchscreen and a Bluetooth mouse at the same time"
According to the comment in the config file for FastConnectable, "the tradeoff is increased power consumptions". Doesn't say anything for JustWorksRepairing, although in a quick search I read some stuff about security issues, so perhaps that's why?
I've used Bluetooth for a number of devices for about ten years, and I didn't even know there's a config file until now! Thus far, it's been mostly a "just works" experience except for the battery level on by BOOM 3 speaker, but that's their fault for doing some proprietary bollocks.
I don't want to be dismissive of some of the concerns of switching to Linux, but I feel like a lot of the "it's too hard!" in 2025 is "it's needlessly difficult to get a consistent Python container in NixOS Unstable" like that's something Aunt Jennifer is going to need. Even the Adobe suite is not a factor for most people.
I ended up in this discussion with someone on Reddit who was convinced to their core that asking an older person to use Linux was "cruel" because they shouldn't have to spend their remaining years learning to type esoteric commands and older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things. Aside from the bizarrely confident ageism, give someone a thinkpad running fedora with KDE (put away your knives for a moment) and they'll be fine. And if they have issues with Linux they're going to have issues with Windows too. (As to the distro, as long as it's not one of the DIY distros, it's also probably fine, and I'd bet most people--even those brittle, sad old people (/s)--would figure out Gnome in a day.)
Nontechnical folks are fine using a computer until they're not, at which point they need to find someone with more experience or become someone with more experience. Many Windows or Mac users rely on a combination of paid support and friends/family with computer experience. But few people know someone with Linux experience, and fewer still know how to get paid Linux support. That's why every story of a nontechnical person running Linux seems to include a Linux enthusiast friend or family member in the background.
> older people simply aren't interested in or capable of learning new things
I agree that people of all ages can be interested and capable of learning new things, even something as dry as learning how to administer a computer. And Linux is a great option for someone who actually wants to learn more about operating systems.
But the overwhelming majority of people who use a computer use it as a tool to do things, like keep in touch with family members, listen to music, write a book, read the news, look up tutorials, draw, make a webpage, play computer games, etc. Unless you aspire to learn about Linux itself, every second spent dealing with Linux driver issues is a waste that steals time from the actual things you want to do.
In those cases it's absolutely cruel to force someone to dedicate time to learning esoteric technical skills before they're allowed to use their computer. That's why the only people I've evangelized Linux to are people I'm happy to continue to support indefinitely or who are actively interested in learning about Linux itself.
That's the underlying point though: spending time dealing with Linux driver issues just isn't as prevalent as it was, certainly on the wide range of well-supported machines (like Thinkpads). Hell, I'm on a Macbook running NixOS unstable via Asahi and I don't spend any time dealing with driver issues thanks to the unbelievable collective effort of hundreds of projects. Yes, the issue is still present and worse than Windows, but that would have to be part of the conversation around switching--"Hey, Aunt Jennifer, we can get you off the Windows weirdness, but it might be time to pick up a new laptop to do it."
As to the first issue, you're right about installed base of Windows helpers, but my assumption is that a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Pure, unfiltered anecdata, but my kid uses Linux at home and he doesn't experience even 5% of the bizarre issues he tells me about on the district Windows computers (which are, granted, about 8,000 years old).
It's better than it was 20+ years ago (jeez I'm old) when I first tried Linux. Back then you needed to be fairly technical to get it running and even to do basic day-to-day tasks, but now you can use a human-friendly GUI most of the time.
But not 100% the time. And that makes it inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a Linux expert in their life. Finding a file that got put in a weird place, plugging in USB devices, understanding what version of an application to install (apt? snap? flatpak?), permissions, weird issues after updates, etc. All solvable problems that seem simple to you or me but that would stymie a nontechnical person.
> a large proportion of folks would be switching because a family member was helping them make the move.
Exactly. Linux is fantastic if you have a technical person on speed dial or are interested in investing time and energy becoming a technical person. For the other 90% of the planet it's just not there yet.
> Finding a file that got put in a weird place,
It's no different to Windows in that way.
> plugging in USB devices,
That it more likely to just work in Linux than Windows. The latter will probably need a special driver.
> understanding what version of an application to install
Most window managers provide software installers / managers.
> permissions,
A normal desktop user doesn't look at permissions.
> weird issues after updates,
Well, yes. Sadly the solution is the same for both Windows and Linux - wipe and re-install. It's a regular occurrence with Windows, sadly.
We had a guy bring in his Linux laptop to a LUG because it was behaving badly. Turned out he had run out of disk space. He could have fixed it himself, had he realised. But the surprising thing was - it was 15 years old, and never had an issue up until then. I've never had a Windows machine someone was using regularly last that long. App churn causes everything to degrade, NTFS fragments something horrid, it slows down to being unusable. You eventually wipe it and restart.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing that a user is less likely to run into issues on Windows (or Mac). The bigger issue is that when they invariably run into an issue it's significantly easier to get the help they need to return their computer to a working state. Between their computer manufacturer, their university/company IT department, friends, relatives, blogs, books, senior citizen tech-support groups, etc there are simply more resources available, and especially more resources that are tailored to a less technical audience.
Yes, the issue is still present and worse than [on] Windows
I'm not sure about that... over the years I've gotten lots of perfectly functioning hardware from my father because it didn't work for him anymore because of a new Windows "upgrade". Scanners, printers, audio and graphics cards all got their turn of becoming expensive paperweights after Windows introduced a new driver model and the manufacturer couldn't be bothered to rewrite their old drivers.
Aunt Jennifer is the person iPads were made for. YMMV but it just seems to click for non tech people in a way a desktop OS (windows, Linux, or Mac) never does.
A few years ago I'd have agreed with you, but between (a) Apple giving in to landscape orientation on their tablets as the default and risking the rise of angry zombie Steve Jobs from the grave in the process and (b) the increasing availability of desktop-like UI features in iPadOS--something I welcome for my use cases but that might be confusing for Aunt Jennifer--I have to wonder if that's still the case. Of course, some people insist they want a computer, so even if an iPad is a better option, it might not be a choice they're happy with.
I dual boot windows with linux, but I haven't used windows in over a year.
The thing that stuck me about windows (windows 11) was how slow the right mouse button click feels. On the main screen, between right clicking and seeing the modal pop up, there is a ~150-200 ms delay that wasn't there on Windows XP and Windows 7. Those were the last major version of Windows I used as my daily drivers.
In windows 11, I was also annoyed by all the bloat on my home screen that I had to turn off manually, like the news feed or the weather or the stock market tracker. Oh -- and here is a good one -- my system clock resets every time I restart. I easily spent 2-3 hours trying to figure out why, and I eventually I gave up. Yes, there is a setting for "synchronize time automatically", but it doesn't work for me. Every time I log into windows, I have to go into the clock settings and manually force a resync with the correct time zone. To me this is just wild.
I transitioned to using Linux full time around 2018-ish, when I stopped playing MMOs. I still keep a version of Windows on my PC, but single-player gaming is a first-class citizen on Linux now, so I haven't logged into windows for some time.
The clock problem is actually a Linux issue. Linux sets the hardware system clock to UTC and only applies time zones when displaying the time.
Windows sets the hardware clock to local time.
Every time one or the other updates the clock, it's now in the wrong format for the other OS. The fix is to tell Linux to use local time. There are no side effects as far as I can tell
I wouldn't call that a Linux issue or a Windows issue. It's kind of like driving on the left or right side of the road: either way is fine, you just need to have everyone agree on which way they are going to use.
There in an advantage to using UTC: when legislatures change the rules about which time zone is which, or you move your computer while it's off, the time remains correct.
Using local time for the RTC theoretically makes it simpler to schedule wakeups at user friendly times, but that seems less impactful.
The better solution is allow config instead of trying to agree, and the best is auto defect and apply the correct config are the OS level
How do you autodetect the timezone, when the RTC clock doesn’t have one?
On Linux with one command you can switch between UTC or local RTC time to match Windows. On Windows you need to change a bit in the registry if you want it to adapt to the Linux way - i.e. the correct one.
I'd say that's a Windows issue and Linux has a solution to make it compatible with Windows. Why would you want the system clock to be in local time instead of UTC? For example you switch off your laptop in one timezone, fly to another timezone, switch it back on, the time has been ticking the same whether you moved to a different timezone or not, you only need to change the timezone for display, why would you need to save back to RTC a different value based on the timezone? I never tested it but I'd like to see what happens on a Windows desktop if you change the timezone and unplug the computer without giving a chance to save to RTC. On next boot the local time read from RTC will be wrong.
you can also just tell windows to use UTC for the hardware clock
At my last two workplaces Linux has been an alternative for those who wanted it, along with Mac (unlike Linux you have to ask for Mac, but you usually get it if you have a good reason or a couple of years experience it seems) and Windows (the standard).
Personally I have found Linux to be ready for (some) desktops (including mine and several friends) since around 2005 and I have even worked for a company that mandated Linux for everyone who couldn't document a need for Windows only software.
I made the switch a few years ago mostly because the only thing I do on computers is write software for the companies I work for; I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work.
Everything is mostly fine on Linux, minus things like display drivers (pick the wrong nvidia driver and you’ll have crashes), power management (honestly I just use a remote switch to turn off my displays), and random stuff like my gnome classic shell will nearly always crash the moment I try to resume working after a few hours (just kicks me back to the login screen).
But sometimes I go back to windows and I am taken aback as the sheer completeness of the user experience.
Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram. Windows never does that.
Not going back anytime soon either way.
As usual, prepare for Linux suggestions to the papercuts, but...
I use a program called earlyoom. It will monitor RAM and if you cross a level of utilization (default 95%?) it will kill the worst offenders before the system becomes unresponsive. You can layer on sophistication like protecting certain programs or preferring killing others. I find it invaluable when I am doing data science work and do something stupid which explodes in memory. Annoying that something was killed, but usually better than hosing the entire system -if it crossed 95% it was almost certainly going to hit 100%.
For my purposes it works perfectly - only the Python process will be killed, my IDE or notebook will survive.
Thank you so much for proposing earlyoom, that is exactly what I needed!
Default vfs and vm swap related settings are good for I dunno, 1997.
You have to set swappiness to something like 1 or maybe 10, reduce cache pressure to like 50ish and set dirty ratios/bytes to something reasonable (say around 1GB, half of that for background).
If you keep defaults the system will have too much in caches and they may not be able to flush under memory and swap pressure => hang.
It’s actually amazing you need to tweak any of it to get sane behavior. Other OSes do a much better job at good defaults.
Swap is really interesting. The idea of swap sounds super useful - you get more RAM than you have. The reality is that RAM speeds are so important to fast computing that once you start to need swap, what you really need is more RAM on your machine.
If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
Swap is not 'super slow extra memory' (well it is, but that's not useful!), it's a place to temporarily store contents of memory for things less important than what wants to be in fast memory right now. Idle apps can (and are) swapped out to have more file cache even on boxes with large RAM. Memory can also be fragmented and you'll have nominally lots of free space, but in reality allocations will fail; in this case, swap can be used to defragment memory instead of OOM killing stuff.
You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.
I think you really are misunderstanding what swap is for.
If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.
Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")
I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.
The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.
What you should do:
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008336[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
[2] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness
I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for. I've implemented swap for a hobby os.
Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.
You seem to be conflating swaps features with it being anything other than an extension of your physical memory. The primary use of swap is to enable a virtual memory space that is larger than the available physical memory. That can be leveraged for smarter things than "store page with the oldest access time" but fundamentally swap is to enable using more memory than you have more physical memory for. Yes, you can ramp your swappiness and have the OS be more aggressive about paging to disk, this is silly if you have so much unused RAM as the performance implication of a page fault and retrieval from disk is huge.
From your links:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq: "Swap space is used when your operating system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and the amount of available (unused) physical memory is insufficient." -> More RAM for your memory heavy usage. In this case if you buy more physical RAM your programs will run faster.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...: "The swap space acts as an extension to the physical memory and allows the system to continue running smoothly even when physical memory is exhausted." and "Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space." -> More RAM. Slow RAM, but more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness: "Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available." -> Do I need to repeat myself here?
Did you seriously write and link all of that without reading any of it?
>Also Linux always hangs hard if I run it out of ram
disable swap. Programs will crash instead, which may be more useful.
Uhm, no.
Anything what would request memory would just outright die, including even the most basic services.
Source: actually had a system without swap what would just die running `dnf update`. Or quietly die in a week or so if left unattended.
Swap isn’t unlimited, it just delays the inevitable and makes everything slow while doing it. A 4GB swap partition isn’t going to save you if you run your 32GB computer out of memory.
Who the hell would set 4Gb swap for a 32Gb RAM machine in 2025?
A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?
> and makes everything slow while doing it
It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.
And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
It does help. It gives time for the kernel in this situation and also helps in general by allowing to defragment memory. You want to keep a small amount of swap space at all times.
Unless it's some sort of autonomous safety-related process, It's usually better for the process to die so I can just restart it.
Even if it was some sort of safety-related process that had to keep running no matter what, I would probably try to define/control the memory usage better so it wouldn't unexpectedly run orders of magnitude slower.
Programs, including the kernel
I've never had that happen. It usually just kills user-space programs
[0] https://serverfault.com/questions/606185/how-does-vm-overcom...
[1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
[2] https://cutefish-ubuntu.github.io/
> > I don’t game, I try but idk just feels like work. > > I'm surprised by this [...] for the most part, just works
I read that as “playing computer games feels like work” rather than “getting games running feels like work”.
Ah that makes sense. Thanks!
I'm not sure why your quotes got mangled. Maybe it was because when I quote I use two leading spaces? I do that because it makes text verbatim but I think the indentation just helps distinguish the quote better than the > alone. There's also this one that I always forget <https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>
Ubuntu 22.04 user here. Indeed it hangs when out of memory, never had the time to properly address this but i will try to follow the advice provided here in the thread. My servers that run Centos or Debian just do this thing called OOMkill on a ram hungry process, out of the box.
Windows will keep dominating the desktop PC market as long as manufacturers ship it by default. Convincing someone to install an operating system from scratch is a fantastically large ask.
and Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily. For most proprietary desktop software businesses, porting to Linux is not profitable.
There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.
Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.
Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
"Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.", let me add schools here.
The main problem is that Windows comes on laptops.
So how can we fight this? It might be hard to make this illegal as also Apple creates hardware and put's the software on it.
So the only way is to teach people about their options.
I don't see this as the Windows being default on a laptop problem. It is a problem of letting companies grow too big. Google equally abuses their position with Android. We need to force big tech into splitting. No way around it.
Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.
Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.
This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.
Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
> Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily.
Underrated point.
Most Linux distros have historically catered to an ecosystem of open source software with the distro repository model, and cross-distro software distribution is probably the biggest papercut still remaining with Linux today.
Thank goodness things are so much better these days with Electron, Steam, Docker, FlatPak and WINE. But there are still gaps that need filling.
Steam and WPS office work in Linux quite well.
In fact I was able to open some huge Excel files more easily in WPS than in MS Office (I have a work laptop that runs Windows 11).
But, I think you have a point, and that point is that the most stable Linux API to release software is actually the Win32 API provided by Wine. Native libraries treat backwards compatibility like a liability.
> Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily
That sounds like skill issue (i.e the company developing the software doesn't have engineers experienced in developing apps for Linux). There are many proprietary software available for Linux.
> For most proprietary desktop software businesses, porting to Linux is not profitable.
True, but mostly because they see software as a binary number on a disc.
If they saw software as an artefact to build, as Free Software does, this would not be a problem.
A pox on all their (propitiatory) houses. All they are all beneath contempt. They want money, above all. They love money, above all. They care not for their users
Timothy 6:10
The hate Electron apps get is perhaps a good example of this.
Any Electron app is a privacy nightmare as it connects to Google for "dictionary" download. You cannot disable this, unless you block redirector.gvt1.com domain.
I use opensnitch and has always wondered what that was. Thank you!
I have not seen that in signal and element desktop apps. I imagine you can configure it.
I ah haven't looked very hard but Lenovo is the only company I've seen offer Linux (Ubuntu) machines, limited for a very small number or devices though.
Do any other companies do the same?
The bigger players like Dell and Lenovo do and have for a very long time. Maybe HPE? Not sure
Then there are more bespoke vendors that cater specifically to Linux. System76 is probably the most well known, but there are many others.
I'm speaking mainly for laptops/desktops. For servers it's always been you just put whatever on.
Linux gets the most time on servers and containers but the desktop base continues to grow, so expect most problems to be there (bluetooth, wifi, etc.). Accessibility is getting much better.
It depends on your region and models.
> Do any other companies do the same?
Important relevant note:
Some companies offer "DOS" or "FreeDOS" computers. This is notably common in poorer countries.
These commonly do not really run DOS. They run a very old version of FreeDOS in a VM under Linux. HP uses Debian.
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...
1. When you look for Linux machines, look in other countries than your own.
2. Include machines described as DOS machines. They are really Linux machines and will run Linux fine because they in fact ship with it.
Dell does (or did, haven’t looked in a few years).
Pretty much. I could see Linux share peaking at 10% tops until that changes.
One of the companies I'm working for has a b2c retail division. We're still buying the Lenovo all-in-one destkops that are used as POS systems with Windows licenses even though we wipe the machine and auto-install our Linux-based POS system as soon as we deploy the machine. Trying to buy a machine w/o Windows is just too much friction. I call it the Microsoft tax. I really wish that not to be a thing any more.
That’s one way to frame it: Encroaching corporations are a front, trying to subdue the public, and we need to unite and fight back for ourselves.
Myself I’ve moved away from this. Now, I frame it all as just people with the same fundamental nature, that I understand through little rules. Like ‘In the absence of a better more personal and mutually rewarding relationship we end up commoditizing each other which becomes more and more exploitative over time’. Or ‘We choose comfortable, pandering stories that make us feel better about ourselves, avoid situations to better understand others if they challenge our aspirational truths’.
Im confused as to how this looks in practice. Are you saying you embody making the right choices in a relationship as setting an example? or convincing others that this is a good want to go? How do we stop the exploitation of each other in relationships? It seems like its burned into our genetic make up that started a long time ago. We sort of use each other to get what we want. I know there is a higher path, but as you said I don't see how thats possible in commerce as it appears like its exploitable by nature.
I was answering OPs comment, so in practice I’m saying I don’t use these pandering perspectives that provide convenient faceless enemies, and where I’m the good guy. Better to try to improve one relationship at a time, and re-examine ourselves for blame. And that probably we get most leverage out of improving the relationship with our own self first - it has knock on effects to all the others.
I'm wondering if promoting better relationship with each other has the same effect as fighting back against something that is actually harming us?
There’s overlap - I think mostly we harm ourselves, then we harm each other inadvertently, and lastly we harm each other intentionally. So promoting better relationships is a piece of it, but helping each other not harm ourselves (ie reach enlightenment) has the biggest effect. The hard thing is to balance it with our need to make a living, and to also not trigger some landmine of aspirational truth that others are determined to hold onto when we share our perspective.
Its kind of interesting that in the end its RMS style "freedom" that is still winning the day, and not price or even better software.
RMS as a Cassandra?
Absolutely. RMS ultimately is completely right, its just the conditions for it to work are nowhere near right. If anything we seem to be slipping further all the time despite the uptake in users.
Unfortunately there's just no solution for an important part of my life - gaming. If it was completely up to me I would completely ignore games that didn't work on Linux. But I maintain an important friendship group through gaming, and those guys are not going to forgo Battlefield 6 or Dawn of War 4 or any of the many games that straight up won't work. Not to mention the additional effort on my side getting a game to work when it's not officially supported - something I am not willing to put a ton of persona time into.
Yeah I hear you. I also had a similar game that played with friends. PubG. But then when I switched to Linux and I couldn't play it any more. I switched to other games that I could play, some of the joined me and some didn't. I had reached a point that I wasn't willing to justify using software that was not in my control any longer. Relationships change and I chalk that up to personal growth. Some people join you, and some don't.
Not judging you, but for me I just couldn't tolerate it any longer.
Just to add a bit more context, the group of people who I play games with are not people I met playing games. They are my lifelong friends. I'm not willing to walk away from those friendships or my interactions with them for the sake of an operating system.
Yeah maybe in that case, I might have a dual boot setup for just when I play with them. But Im not using Windows as my Daily Drive any longer.
> One day their data was on the local drive and the next it became online-only files that had to be downloaded from Microsoft’s servers.
That is insane. If this happened to me, there is zero chance I would continue using that product. If something like this happened to my parents, I'd make them switch off windows if they wanted help with their computers (which I already did for other reasons, and the result was immensely positive, though the target OS was macOS, not linux.)
I always seem to end up dual booting Windows to play games. I’ve made it quite a while without installing Windows now. Mostly because I haven’t had the desire to game much, but also because of how good gaming on Linux is now. I will hold out until there is some big multiplayer game with anticheat that my friends get me into.
I've coded on linux for a decade now, but always used windows at home. Just last week I switched from windows 10 to ubuntu on my media computer since it cant upgrade to windows 11.
I open up firefox, go to youtube, and immediately notice that 30% of all frames are gone. Hardware acceleration isnt working.
I put the computer to sleep and go make dinner. When I return my wireless keyboard cant wake it up, I have to hard-reboot the computer to wake it up.
I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems, and it start spitting out terminal commands that end up making no difference.
In my experience, 2025 is not yet the year of linux. I'll try again in 2027.
You ask ChatGPT for answers to questions and your surprised that random terminal commands don't work? If you look at linux forums, all issues always include hardware and software versions. Some problems are extremely context dependent.
Hardware acceleration isn't working -> what GPU? Do you have the right drivers installed (yes for Linux this is a consideration as there are so many display configurations not all drivers cough nvidia work for all scenarios).
You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at. Is this 30% dropped frames at 4k60 or 1080p30? You can argue that this is too much detail for something that should "just work" but given where you are and what you're talking about I would think you would be more nuanced in the troubleshooting. If you want the most seemless and effort free web browsing and media viewing experience just buy a macbook air (good product and also good dev machines for most).
Is it even worth the time searching on forums to fix these issues? I can't speak for OP... but if an OS I freshly installed is unable to watch youtube videos and wake up from sleep, I'm wiping it and installing something else unless I can fix it extremely easily (eg. with chatgpt).
>You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at.
If hardware acceleration isn't working, it doesn't matter which youtube video made you realize the issue existed. It's not as if the method you use to fix the driver would be different when the video you want to watch is 1080p30 instead of 4k60.
I think the issue is how people view their operating system then. If you think an operating system (which for the sake of this I'll allow to mean the distro for linux) should just install and "work" with no configuration needed, then linux on abnormal hardware is not for you. Whether or not a small amount of effort to search for solutions to a problem or to learn more about system configuration being "worth the time" is up to the reader to decide.
I don't know if you're trying to make a rhetorical point here, by giving a sort of worked example of "how to go about this the wrong way and give useless feedback in the form of a complaint."
If not... Well, wow, I really hope you're not "coding on Linux" for anything important.
What did you do wrong?
> I switched from windows 10 to ubuntu
1. What version of Ubuntu?
2. After installing, did you update?
2a. If so, how? Firefox is a snap; doing an update with the "apt" or "apt-get" commands won't touch it.
3. Did you install graphics drivers? Did you even check if you need them?
4. Did you try Chrome? Youtube is a Google product. Test with the Google browser. It's about 2 clicks to install it.
5.
> my wireless keyboard cant wake it up
Well known issue with some wireless devices (especially Bluetooth). Don't use them if you have an alternative.
6.
> I ask chatgpt about solutions to these problems
It's a predictive text tool. Of course it can't. Don't use LLM bots for search. Better still, don't use them at all.
7.
> In my experience
From what you posted, this is scant and poor.
yeah all these "move to linux" posts i feel are virtue signalling. its bad advice for most imo.
I feel it.
If I had control to wipe all machines as start over today, the SMB I work for would have to strongly consider all machines on Linux.
What is it our users do? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, browsers. So right off the bat, I’ve either shuttered the idea, or need to commit my users to be software social pariahs whenever we need to work with another company.
I suggest the battle isn’t the OS. But, rather Microsoft Office.
Trapping user's data in their roach motel formats (the data goes in, but can never leave with full fidelity) is the longest running objection I have to using any Microsoft software.
This is also why they fought so hard against the XML standardization of docs formats, and still to this day docs created by their own apps don't even validate against the schemas they created.
The weird thing is that to a significant extent that battle is really just about the words "Microsoft Office". LibreOffice has some awkwardness and annoyances, but it's quite adequate for probably 90% of mundane office tasks people need to do (and MS Office has its own pain points). A major barrier is just a specific insistence that Word be used, without any reference to functional requirements of the actual document.
People always say this but the 90% doesn’t count. The 90% is easy. It’s the other bit that people hit and compatibility issues mean any non standard approach whether it’s fair or not will always, always get the blame.
Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.
Let's not compare the advanced options of Excel or how Excel bugs annoy me. There are loads of them.
Let's just compare what people do when they need a tool like Excel. That's when the 90 or maybe more % of people will do. That is what I do. Everything I do in Excel can be done on LibreCalc.
So it is true that LibreCalc can replace 90% or more, because not everybody needs those advanced topics.
Same for the other LibreOffice apps, Writer is good for almost everybody. As LibreDraw and others.
I’ve never met a document an office document that wouldn’t have been better as a wiki (if it is intended to be impermanent), or as a something like a LaTeX document (if it is not).
Doesn’t matter what you think (or I). The real world runs on MS Office.
I've found that OnlyOffice has much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I just install it via flatpak, remove the network permission, and go about my business perfectly. While LibreOffice -> LibreOffice works perfectly fine, whenever it opens a .docx file it always wants to save it as a .odf which is a nonstarter. Not because I don't want to support open document formats but because everyone expects a .docx back if they send you one. It also struggles consistently for any type of advanced formatting (as a .docx).
Remove the network permission by what mechanism? I only know firejail or this (iirc)
Please consider checking LibreOffice periodically, every 4 - 6 months Ms compatibility increases at steady pace, it may have solved that issue that was keeping you back from using it (25 years using linux and staroffice)
Libre office has some annoyances though. I cannot for the life of me disable the document recovery model that always pops up on every launch regardless if a document needs to be recovered or not. Also I cant seem to get printing to default to 8 1/2x11 formatting.
The recovery dialog annoys me too.
Functionality is pretty good but the UI is from the 1990s.
That's a good thing. UI design peaked around that era and has been going downhill ever since.
These days you can choose between different UIs, some of which will have the "ribbon" style. I do agree though that it feels a bit dated if you're used to MS' office, but you get used to it quite quickly.
GP probably wanted to say that LibreOffice’s UI is 90s era Linux quality, rather than the beauty of Office 97 and such. Mismatched, not native, terrible stock icons, clunky and frankly ugly.
You haven't checked in a lon time ;)
Maybe it depends on what you work on, but i havent seen powerpoint or .docx file in like a decade. Everyone i know uses google docs.
I'm sure there are users with specialized needs who need something more complex, but i dont think microsoft office is quite the moat it used to be.
Trade one devil for another?
I’ve never looked to see the compatibility of Office to Gsuite.
So unless it is 110% perfect it is a non-starter. The second we have a supplier send an excel with some goofball formula in it and we don’t see some data or can’t open it - it’s over.
This isn’t even getting to the next devil… Adobe.
My employer blocks access to Google Docs as part of our confidential information protection policy. They're certainly not the only ones. I'd hesitate to call on-premises file management "specialized needs" - rather, it's (still) the default, particularly if you take a peek outside of the software bubble.
I suspect that that is more an anti-shadow IT measure than an anti-google docs measure.
Google Office docs are pretty acceptable these days unless you need really specific Excel functionality.
Don't want anyone to use that but that is good to prove that almost everybody can use a spreedsheat that is not Excel. Including LibreCalc. And many others.
The same situation is for email. Who needs Outlook? Nobody! You can do almost everything with Thunderbird. So does Outlook have some "special" things? Maybe, never used it!
I even had my email on clawsmail and it was amazing.
Would the Office 365 in browser work for you?
I've used it for very simple things but I don't thing it even has 1% of the installed Excel program does. It is too simple and buggy.
Few days ago wife opened an excel file on the browser and something was right away wrong, she noticed, can't remember what it was. Had to download and execute local.
I wouldn’t call it simple. It does have Python scripting. Obviously not the functionality she needed, but that’s fairly advanced in the Excel world.
And that’s the issue with every alternative, it lacks 1:1 features/bugs so what’s usable for one isn’t for another.
And games.
Gaming has actually seen the biggest improvement on Linux in the last couple of years, check out https://www.protondb.com/ for just how many titles are playable.
I figured that one is mostly solved now between Steam, Bazzite or even just VM Windows ( if you really have to go that route ).
It definitely isn't solved.
Hmm. I might be speaking from a perspective of a more.. restrained gamer ( my last bigger indulgence was BG3 and, while there were issues after updates, drivers tended to solve those eventually ). Any particular titles you have a problem with?
If you are thinking of permanently online games that effectively put malware on your system, I am ok with that not being solved ( but even for those there are ways to go around those restrictions -- which should not be surprise given the nature of cat and mouse game ).
Battlefield 2024 (and the upcoming 6) and all recent Call of Duty games are the obvious ones. And if you're interested in sim racing then device compatibility is a major problem even before you get to launch the game.
> I am ok with that not being solved
Great, good for you? You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
<< You can't claim a problem is solved and then say "well I don't care" when shown it's not solved.
It is a fair point in that sense so you get full points for argument counter. That said, I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'.
It is not that I don't care exactly. It is that I care too much to allow this crap on my computer.
> I personally think gamers, as a demographic, has some responsibility to say.. 'yeah, no. stop being dicks'
Well you don't play online games. Personally I care a great deal more about cheaters than I do about whether a company (who I already trust to install stuff on my computer) installs stuff on my computer. Cheaters absolutely ruin games.
Hmm. What solution would you propose if you were in a position to do that ( change linux in a way that allows you to play online games like new Battlefield )?
I don't know enough to understand what prevents it I guess. I thought it was a matter of game or anti cheat developers not writing software that will cooperate properly. It's a chicken and egg problem, has been for decades.
Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
That's fair. I don't want to sound too cynical with a reflexive 'money' response. As you note, some of it is indeed a question of software not playing nice together. I have zero solutions for this.
Tbh, it sounds like you may be forced to use a Windows VM ( if you want try 'dropping' windows that way ). Last time I was looking at it, VMs were still fair game, but were starting to be identified as a way to bypass some of the restrictions ( mostly because they were only doing a couple of checks for whether OS is in a VM ). That said, few friends were recently sharing pics suggesting those checks were getting more invasive.
<< Believe me I would love to drop Windows.
Just in case it helps, I went through a major system issue at some point with Windows 7 and once it was clear that CPU/GPU passthrough works surprisingly well ( before nvidia started messing with it after 3060 ), I got a way to ease myself in with better fallback position should my linux install fail somehow. This approach ( OS engaged for a specific purpose ) worked better than dual boot, which in practice was never used. There is some learning curve, but nothing excessive or something that is not well covered online.
The two last issues facing users switching are (imo) battery management and track pads. I know there are solutions but they're very complicated to setup properly for the average user.
I was messing around with a Framework laptop about a year ago and was amazed at how awful trackpad support is. If the default acceleration curves are going to be garbage, at least give me an easy way to edit them. Dealing with a config file sucks compared to being able to move sliders and feel the changes immediately.
And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.
Libinput is adding Lua scripting to handle hardware quirks and edge cases without needing to rely on hardcoding hacks into the library[1], which might help the trackpad situation.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-Lua-Plugin-System
Lenovo laptops have good trackpad support on Linux.
Is that really still a problem? I've always had trackpads work straight-off 100%, and find battery life to be way better under linux (perhaps because it's not running a million unwanted services.)
What laptop and which os are you running?
I'm thinking taking an existing laptop (say hp), installing debian variant.
I'd be intrigued what other options are out there as I'm trying to move the whole family over
Trackpads pretty much always work out of the box, but typically do not support more advanced features, and/or they're kind of a pain to set up. I think you and the person you're replying to are talking about different things(?)
Whether these advanced features are desirable is of course a matter of opinion. Personally, I find macbooks very hard to use because the trackpad never does what I want on account of having the motor skills of a spastic five year old. So I don't miss this at all.
I agree they work out of the box but badly. I use non of the advanced features (gestures) of trackpads apart from two fingers to right click. I still struggle with most trackpads on linux.
On mac I disable nearly all gestures, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts.
You are right though, we're probably all talking about different aspects of trackpad usage.
it's funny that a lot of us Linux nuts on comp.os.linux.advocacy back in the 90s predicted this was Microsoft's planned endgame. I personally thought it would take less than 30 years for them to get around to it though.
You were pretty spot on its been about 20 I think
I used Xubuntu and LMDE until Windows 7, because it came with my laptop and I could use Linux on a cloud IDE anyway.
But with the end of life for windows 10 in October, I switched back to Linux and I'm quite happy.
I'm running Manjaro with Xfce on my 4 year old LG Gram and it's really snappy while only using 900MB idle memory.
I run manjaro on a 12 year old Thinkpad and it's the best computer I've ever had. It needed a CPU upgrade, but now I can do all my development work on this ancient beast.
An option if you don't want to deal with dual boot: buy something like a Bee-link SER8 for $499 and use that for Linux. It's tiny and performs well. Use a KVM or swap cables between computers.
(I only game on the weekends so I just cable swap, because my KVM is Mac <--> Gaming PC/SER8.)
Finding a good KVM switch at a good price can be hard. Usually the video output isnt great. what I found works isnusing a USB switch with a monitor that supports two inputs. Switching machines is two operations. First, switch monitors, then switch USB.
Computers are so stupidly fast now, it does seem like this is the future. Thanks to the laptop market, the tiny desktop models have more then sufficient oomph to do everything that 99% of users require. Keep the bulky tower for gaming or workstation loads.
Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
Not a bad idea in principle but I can't justify purchasing separate hardware just for this purpose -- I have an almost perfectly running machine, and I don't want to spend a few hundred dollars on a separate one. If I have files that need to be shared, that makes things more complicated.
Too hard. Just take your original windows license and run up a VM in QEMU. Perfect for dealing with windows only things
Yes, give desktop Linux a try if you are still not using it.
There is a good progress with the likes of Lenovo (who for decades refused to refund Windows tax) selling computers with Linux pre-installed.
If you want gaming on Linux, get an AMD GPU.
Indeed, Linux has improved a lot, but for many people whose main applications are gaming and Office, the adoption cost still feels too high.
That’s my roadblock. I need Office and still want to be able to play Fortnite.
This blog post deserves a good reading. Thank you Scott for sharing this experience.
How interesting.
I thought it was very poor, myself.
My entry drug to Linux was WSL.
When I started at my current job I started with a dual boot machine (Windows/Linux) with the thought of testing Linux as a desktop OS out for a bit. After a year I realized I wasn't booting into the Windows installation anymore so I removed it.
Now 5 years on I am still as happy as ever. I am still struggling with some Adobe Creative Suite replacements, but in those 5 years things have gotten so much better already (and so much worse on the Windows-side) that I can see myself doing this for the long-term future.
There is just something relaxing about working on an OS that treats you with respect instead of trying to trick you into something constantly.
Seeing posts like this upvoted on HN restores some of my faith that we can still be a field of the smart and the professional.
Finally managed to switch everything too. Was probably my 3rd serious try over the span of a decade.
Travel laptop to Mint was smooth so then decided to get ambitious and try Arch/Hyprland on Desktop. Was far easier than expected (cuda, audio, bt etc) and the fiddly parts were mostly because its Arch/Hyprland - fiddling is kinda what you sign up for with that combo
The only 2nd thoughts I'm having is that I kinda want to play the new battlefield and the anticheat makes that a no go on linux
Ever since Steam released in Beta for Linux (proud owner of the Tux accessory for the Demoman in TF2!) I switched to Linux and stayed there. In the beginning I ran Ubuntu 12.04 and used Steam there. I also used Wine to run Diablo 3 and WoW, although performance was bad at that time. All other programs I needed where there also. (Im a software engineer, so using Linux is even better). But Ubuntu moved to slowly and broke here and there.
What followed was a odyssey between a lot of distributions. Six years ago I tried Void Linux (rolling release without SystemD) and finally settled. Then Steam Proton came around and changed the whole Gaming On Linux scene again for the better. Playing retail WoW with on par performance is now possible. Running any game from Steam on Linux is now a breeze, even if not a native game. Open Source office tools are also on par with Windows / Microsoft counterparts. There really is nothing holding me back from using Linux full time. There is nothing I am missing, and the more I read about problems in the Windows world, the more I am glad I switched all these years ago.
Convincing all my friends doing the same is difficult though. They frankly do not care about privacy or freedom to make the switch. But in the end it is their fault, not mine. If someone comes to me for guidance to make the switch, I will guide them. But I won't evangelise anymore.
There's no equivalent to Excel if you need compatability with a proper Excel spreadsheet (anything more than basic formulae), outside of spinning up a VM.
Office 365 in browser + avoiding Excel like the plague.
Want to thank the OP and commenters for this. I am not a hacker, and am hanging on to a Windows 10 and 7 (yes) laptop. I need to make some time and get one of the Linux systems. It would help a great deal if someone wrote or pointed to a blog that has step by step instructions. Something like a Hello World including what to use for common applications like browsing, writing documents, and spreadshees. Thank you.
> if someone wrote or pointed to a blog that has step by step instructions
You still have not answered. That is saddening.
Ah well. Here are 2 of my efforts.
This is my 1st try for my current employer. I still stand by most of it, though.
P1: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/21/reg_linux_guide...
P2: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/23/reg_linux_guide...
P3: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2010/06/24/reg_linux_guide...
My more recent take with some updated de-cruftifying steps:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/linux_nonapproved_lap...
I talked about choosing a distro here:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_l...
Executive summary: use Linux Mint. The latest version, with the default Cinnamon desktop. Anyone who disagrees has an agenda and it's not ease of use, so can probably be ignored.
There are literally hundreds of them. What do you need? What do you want?
In about 2021 I set up dual boot on my Windows PC and slowly ended up using Linux more over time. In 2023 I built a new PC and this time didn't even bother getting Windows.
the only things that didn't run natively were a few video games, and even for these it seems there is a good emulation (?) layer now in Steam (I forgot the details as I didn't game often).
The same applies to GitHub and VS Code, fwiw. It’s the same surveillance-based slow boil.
If you think Windows is bad for the world, stop driving eyeballs to their same strategies in the f/oss world as well.
> GitHub and VS Code
It's impressive how these Microsoft-owned products became fundamental to my daily software needs. I know I have to find better alternatives, move to using Codeberg/Forgejo, Spacemacs/Neovim..
And programming languages? I like TypeScript, and Microsoft has been a good steward of the project. Similarly with Go and Google. I also rely on VC-funded language runtimes, frameworks, libraries. That's a risk I sometimes question. Ideally I would shift to using FOSS altogether, the whole stack top to bottom.
Even the hardware I'd prefer "open source" if possible.
Using Typescript is not the same as using VS Code.
One is an actual open source free software project. The other is spyware cosplay open source.
I've wanted to switch to Linux. May have to give it another go someday. Currently moving over to macOS. Will see how it goes.
Great. macOS is freebsd so it's not Linux but closer to Linux than Windows. That is good.
The bad is that Apple is just like Windows, just wants to look better. It is not.
Better than Windows? Ok, a little better yes.
macOS is not FreeBSD. It’s Darwin which contains some FreeBSD subsystems built atop Mach, and some FreeBSD userland.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
I did this a few months back and never looked back. Linux failed me in music production and gaming, while the latter isn't important, I have invested heavily in audio VSTs and it's unacceptable that even with Wine, they do not work and no virtual machines are not enough. I hope MacOS treats you well.
The only thing I need Windows for is citrix to connect to my work machine. I'm thinking of getting a laptop just for this one task.
Windows VM in QEMU will solve this problem. I had multiple clients with different VPN or remote access tech and used to keep a VM for each of them.
which vm software do you use? I have had a hard time with vm software on linux no that Vmware got exploited by Broadcom.
QEMU is the one I prefer.
https://www.qemu.org/
I had it set up with a network bridge so that each VM looked like an actual PC on my network.
Thanks, I used QEMU back in the commedore days. Didn't know it was still alive.
This post has come along at an interesting time as it happens...
I was at my mum and dads yesterday and I was asking my dad if he'd seen any messages or nag screens about upgrading his computer from Windows 10? It's ancient and I wouldn't put Windows 11 on it, even though I can burn a copy with Rufus to remove all the requirements. As it happens, he had. In fact, he thought Microsoft wanted him to pay for it, such is their confusing marketing!
Now, my dad is no dumbass. He has a PhD in electrical engineering, all his faculties are still present and correct and he's used computers for years and he won numerous awards as uni for being smart af! Anyway, I put him off the idea of Windows 11 and onto the idea of a Chromebox instead. He seemes keen to try it.
Also, my dad only uses the web, the odd spreadsheet to keep track of his money, the odd YT video and that's about it: he's not a power-user.
My reasoning for the Chromebox is that I can't be about all the time when he needs tech support and I'm worried he's scammed by someone wanting him to "install an anti-virus, quick, before all his money is gone" or something. Plus, he has an Android phone already... it makes sense I think.
Next week I'll drop off my Chromebook and set it up for him to try. I think it'll work out, and if it does, I'll buy a Chromebox for about £300 and that'll do him for ever I think.
On a side-note, I've switched back to Windows 10 a few weeks ago: specifically Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. I used the Massgrave script and it's valid until 2038 or something. I've had it with the latency and general dystopia (and the broken printer... ffs Microsoft!) around Windows 11, which I'd been using for a couple of years until last week.
It may sound trivial but I still can't get over the volume slider latency in Windows 11: When you change the volume slider in the quick launch area and the "ding" sound happens 400ms later, not at the same time, it drives me nuts!
Anyway, my £0.02
> It’s been two years now. I finally weaned myself off of Big Daddy.
There are people that spend less time on a divorce and its aftermath. Maybe I'm jaded, but use whatever makes you happy, fulfilled and productive. The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
> The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?
Back in university RMS came to a neighbor uni in Stockholm for a traditional lecture about software freedoms etc. I think everyone thought he was a bit crazy or idealistic (I guess most still do). But the warnings of how you weren't going to own anything, that you have to ask permission, that your devices can be disabled etc, that sounded like fiction at the time. But looking back to that era (2011 or so), it slowly did change for the worse exactly like he warned.
While a lot of the early internet idealisms have fizzled out, I think today those ideas and passions were much more important than we thought. For instance, I usually say that if the web was invented today, browsers would not be approved by the app stores. We take some things for granted, and a lot of those things came from a different era, arising out of preconditions that largely no longer exist.
Email couldn't be invented today.
If you mean that each company would insist on making their own that won't talk to the others... Email was actually invented that way.
I don't remember exactly what company (I think it was Novel), but one made a fortune bridging them.
There's nothing wrong with, and possibly better, to start out with a protocol only to support an application. But nowadays the pipeline for graduating into open protocols has broken. We have 15 messaging apps and no interop. Even Facebook and Google Gchat used to support open protocols. That's gone. It's actually much worse than before the internet where telephones were all globally interoperable.
But if someone tried, it would look like LinkedIn.