When you choose Windows, the computer uses you. When you choose Linux, you use the computer. Stop complaining and start switching. It should be apparent by now that Microsoft isn't going to stop their bad behavior.
If you want Linux to have a chance it needs to play the long game and that won't ever happen. Everything I own except my gaming PC is Linux but it's not even worth trying to convert others. I find pretty immature to suggest "if your job demands Windows, just quit", "just spend 20 hours trying to make this thing that just works in Windows", "you don't need AAA games". I say immature because I was doing this shit a few years ago and I still cringe about it.
In my experience trying to teach people about the importance of privacy is mostly futile. What worked was, and I only did this to a close family friend, to show him what I could learn about him just by showing what was stored in AppData and many other folders. Some thumbnails will be forever ingrained in my mind.
Also my laptop literally cannot have linux installed on it thanks to UEFI.
(I installed Ubuntu 17.10 alongside Win10 few weeks ago on my UEFI laptop.)
Windows 10 is basically malware at this point.
It's not even true in many (most?) cases that Secure Boot must be disabled.
Does it have "secure boot" that can't be disabled/other keys added?
Typing this from a laptop that has an Arch partition. I use it all the time for dev stuff. It sure as fuck wasn't trivial to set up.
Or maybe you want me to convince them they should pay someone else to do that because Stallman was right.
I'm sure some people are lucky enough to have friends and family who would accept your values instantly, learn the setup easily and be glad to pay someone else to do it. I can only speak from my own experiences and they don't reflect that (and as much as I might make a comment here and there I won't ever again try to push "my values" down someone's else throat).
Do you handle all of their Windows-related technical issues?
Are they incapable of learning to do it themselves?
Really?
Are you absolutely sure?
It's all-too-common for people to become dependent on technically-minded friends/family like us, but the fact is that it really isn't difficult for them to do it themselves.
The main barriers they face are:
1. I haven't done this before.
2. I don't immediately see the benefit.
What it comes down to is self-reliance. We can teach people to rely on themselves instead of rely on us.
As the saying goes:
> Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
... something like that, anyway.
For thinkers, problems are an opportunity to learn. Others, they don't see it that way, they want things to just work without making them think. If anyone you're trying to "teach" and "show them the way" ever loses money or have any kind of non trivial issue because "your linug broke my microsoft access" you'll be forever the guy that broke his computer. And he'll hate Linux forever.
"Yes nana, you just have to install linux-headers first"
funny thing is when you install various distros you have a look at what's installed and you go "geeze it's installed a bunch of crap apps"
I used to run dual boot, but then got annoyed with that, then used windows primarily and VM'd linux, and now I use the linux subsystem in windows and occassionally fire up the VM.
Of course, but is it more annoying than using Windows all the time? OP leads me to belive a growing number of windows users might think otherwise. It's also worth noting that rebooting is an order of magnitude faster than it was 10 years ago.
> having to run updates for both
Updates are a pain in Windows, but they are not in any serious GNU/Linux distro I have ever used. This is one of the main reasons that users are frustrated with Windows in the first place.
> having two incompatible filesystems where it's annoying to fetch a document from one and use it on the other
This is a real problem when you are using Windows, but not when you are using Linux. The idea here is to only use Windows when you need it anyway. It's an inconvenience, sure, but is it more of an inconvenience than using Windows all the time? That's up to the user. Personally, the answer is no.
> doubling the amount of setup and configuration you have to do
Not so much, if you seriously use GNU/Linux for everything you don't need Windows for. Besides, configuration isn't a big issue unless you are like me, and want everything exactly your way; although, GNU/Linux is the only way I can get that.
> Every time I've set up a dual-boot system I've ended up just never using one of the options.
That's you, and that's fine. The best setup for you is almost definitely not the best setup for most other people. That is the entire reason to use and promote free software: liberty.
Windows has made dual-booting difficult on purpose, because proprietary software begets proprietary software and control. Thankfully, there has been plenty of work in the other direction for those of us who want to control our computers, as opposed to the inverse.
In a word: yes.
I have at different points used Windows, Linux, and OS X as primary desktop operating systems, so I am not operating from a sense of total ignorance of what other systems are like.
My experience with Linux was that I needed to do far more configuration because lots of hardware wouldn't work right out of the box and needed a lot of tweaking and digging through Linux forums for someone with the same problem. I'm really not interested in doing that kind of thing on my personal computer anymore.
From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.
And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.
I haven't had any negative experience with CUPS, and if I had, that wouldn't define my experience with GNU/Linux.
I don't have an issue with you sharing experiences. I do get frustrated when those experiences are used to define GNU/Linux to those who haven't experienced it at all.
There are too many people who hear that GNU/Linux is not for them, when it is really a fantastic alternative to windows. There's an attitude that free software will always fail people (which is not true), and I find that attitude not simply unfortunate, but malicious.
The way that things improve is for manufacturers to see demand; and that won't happen if people don't see free software as the viable alternative that it is.
In my experience, NTFS on Linux works very well. Certainly well enough for any average user.
There fact is that you should always backup data you care about.
It's the same as saying they aren't responsible for your computer suddenly catching fire. Is that likely to happen? No.
Is the liberty a free OS provides worth the effort to that user? That's entirely up to them.
It's easy to disregard change as too difficult to approach, especially when coming from such a controling and abusive environment (Windows/OS X). In reality, GNU/Linux is so much easier to use than Windows; most people have simply learned the latter first.
That just isn't true. But don't take it from me; here's esr: http://web.archive.org/web/20180109063613/www.catb.org/esr/w...
The problem we have is that a similar problem in Windows is instantly forgiven, because there is nothing you can do about it; whereas in Linux people expect a higher standard (which is often met) because that arbitrary limitation no longer exists.
Sure windows has gotten a lot better since XP, but it has a long way to go to catch up to circa 2006 Ubuntu.
Even when I got one installed I had problems with getting flat mouse speeds, not being able to adjust mouse scroll wheel speeds, even the frickin clock was even messed up. ( had to dig around for the issue then figure out the two OSes where saving the time in different ways every time each shut down)
I've got pages of notes for fixes to various issues I encountered trying to get dual booting working smoothly.
There's no way I'd recommend this to anyone who wants a computer that actually works without a hassle.
But nobody cares how easy it is to install both. Using both is a huge pain.
Bash is so much more powerful than the Windows shell, and try as I might I just don't like Powershell, so WSL gives me a great shell while running in Windows - no need for rebooting or VMs!
You have your disks listed, each with its free/used space. You click the one you want to install to, and drag a slider to decide how much space to use.
That's how easy it was to install Ubuntu over a decade ago.
[0] https://github.com/vladikoff/netflix-1080p-firefox#with-exte...
Sure, there are some open source alternatives, but they are only rarely as good, and even more seldom better, than their Windows counterparts.
I have gotten around this with a virtualized Windows installation for CAD applications. The Windows VM goes online for software activation only.
With VFIO, a dedicated graphics card, and an nVME SSD I don't feel any performance degradation. The graphics card and nVME drive are passed directly to the VM. Some simple benchmarks show there is ~3% performance decline in the VM vs booting it native, but I don't "feel" it.
Granted, picking VFIO compliant hardware and setting everything up is far outside the ability of the average Windows user.
I'm running my Windows KVM on a GTX 1080, and it took months and months to work out all the little kinks causing system instability... now it runs quite smooth. I could never ever go back.
I've been slowly collecting blog posts and articles with the idea of writing an updated guide to making a completely stable and optimized VM with vfio, hugetables, reduced DPC latency, bridged networking, etc., written for audiences that aren't too familiar with Linux.
It would benefit adoption really well if someone unfamiliar with Linux could visit a single resource that explains everything they need to know.
Once you have hardware, there are lots of resources for pulling it off:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vfio.txt
https://www.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
I'm not saying that open source projects can't get better, that they can't be good, but they will never be as good.
For a corollary: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696
Hah, this is rich. Many open source products are far better than their proprietary alternatives, especially developer oriented products (which is natural considering that developers tend to use open source and tend to improve their own tools).
But...
Gimp is far better than Photoshop and Illustrator?
Blender is far better than 3DS Max and Maya?
Libre Office is far better than Microsoft Office?
Darkroom is far better than Lightroom?
Honestly, I can't even think of an open source CAD one that can even compare favorably to SketchUp, let alone AutoCad.
If you have to, there are many tools available to do a job on Linux, with a backup of VMs and Wine. They are not, however, "far better".
Emacs is more powerful than IntelliJ, say, but it's vastly inferior in terms of learning curve and UX. There are some things I'd rather do in it than in IntelliJ, but it's not what I'm going to use for day to day Android dev, say. Or what I'd point newcomers at.
Depends how you define "powerful;" IntelliJ understands a lot more about your code than most Emacs plug-ins.
Saturn: https://yabause.org/
PSP: http://www.ppsspp.org/index.html
PS2: https://pcsx2.net/
All of these are open source, support Linux, and have good compatability.
With respect, you should be looking these things up for yourself before you make claims like the ones you've been making in this thread.
See pretty much every other reply in this thread for my take on this
>video game console emulators
Wrong, most emulators are open source, support Linux, and work great.
>office productivity applications
"way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.
>document publishing
I don't know what this is supposed to be. LaTeX is pretty good, though.
As I said to the other guy, for a number of systems there's no emulator except the one on Windows.
> "way worse" is a bit harsh for describing LibreOffice. It works quite well in my experience.
Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
The only one that comes to mind is that one Wii U emulator. Xenia doesn't support Linux but it's open source and the lack of support more a reflection of its relative immaturity than not being possible (I'm certain a Linux port will come eventually, I was even working on it myself for a while).
>Yeah, because your experience doesn't involve using the advanced features that have no analogue and you aren't overly concerned that the formatting will look totally different if someone opens it in MSOffice.
If the formatting of a docx looks wrong in LibreOffice that's not really a big deal if you can still read the content, which is usually the case. Writing new documents should use ODF, which MSWord supports fine (often transparently, non-technical users will probably see a file with the same MSWord icon and no file extension).
You sound like someone who never collaborated on an Office file with someone from another company.
If a company wants to be taken seriously, and some of their work involves exchanging and collaborating on presentations, text documents or tabular files, you cannot not use MS Office.
I feel like this is kind of an extreme example of something I see a lot on HN: hackers who literally cannot imagine ways of using a computer that are outside of their experience.
There are plenty of examples where they have done just that. Blender is probably the most obvious.
KDE 3 would have been a much better example. But these days are gone, too.
What about R and Jenkins? Are there paid developers working on these?
I feel confidant in saying that yeah, there probably are. They're being paid to implement features and fix bugs found by their companies, who use R and Jenkins.
How so?
Blender cannot cope with the kind of stuff that is thrown at commercial DCC tools in feature production. Parts of it don't scale, others fall short of what would be required. Many features are kind of there on paper, but are not fleshed out that well.
Blender faces a sort of a chicken and egg problem: if you don't push it, you can't find out what needs fixing. But nobody in the industry is willing to try because they know that it will break too easily.
This is sort of why the Blender Foundation creates these open source movie projects: they are there to figure out what needs fixing. A ton of new features had to be created for each new short. Last time I bothered to check, many of these features were stuff that would have been considered absolutely essential in VFX workflow at the time the Blender developers managed to implement it.
The downside to these projects is that they also lead to the addition of features like compositing and editing workflows that are out of place in a DCC tool (especially the editing part). Blender started to overextend itself and ended up with too few developers to push all of these areas equally well.
Blender is striving to meet the features and capabilities of Maya and 3ds Studio, not the other way around.
A more "business" orientated sentence:
Blender is required to to split its focus to provide a complete movie/game making package including a movie editor, shader editor (i.e. photoshop), and animation editor, an audio editor, a physics editor, a compositing editor, and a game editor; Maya and 3ds Studio do not.
Blender just can't keep up. It's a good tool, no doubt about it, but few professional users will end up using it to make money.
Over the past decade or so, Blender has been on par, and even ahead of "industry standard" tools.
It isn't required to split its focus. It is able to. That is something proprietary software from a company would fail at. It's something that free software and collaboration succeed at.
The biggest benefit is that it has all of these tools in a cohesive environment.
Instead of a photoshop/GIMP-like menu of functions, Blender is a cohesive manageable UI.
There are, in fact, a wide variety of professionals using Blender to make money. You don't hear about it, because telling you what they use is not their perogative.
What features to Maya/Max/etc. have that Blender is really behind on today? I can't think of any.
Now, there is at least Neutron as an open source compositing tool that seems to be filling that particular hole now much more competently than Blender ever could.
I do not understand how you can consider Blender's UI "manageable" in any way. There are much better ways to build UIs for enormously complex DCC tools. My go-to example for that has been Maya for a long time, but since a couple of years, Autodesk has bolted on features in a way that spectacularly breaks the internal consistency, logic and general discoverability of features in Maya. Even though, Blender's UI is still an unsorted mess compared to that.
Expanding feature sets is something commercial software fails at? The biggest reason nobody professionally uses the open-source alternatives is they're missing features.
I'm both, and you're definitely wrong. 155 of my 343 steam games have direct native ports. I've just stopped playing stellaris and started playing KSP. I've been a linux gamer for the last three years and it's been a better experience, not worse. I dominate on ballistic overkill because the input lag is noticeably lower on linux.
I'm also a software developer, and with the exception of dotnet development, software development is a considerably smoother and more consistant experience on linux. It grates every day to have to use windows at work, and I do half of my work inside a linux VM.
On the gaming note - I'm glad you enjoy the games available on Linux, and that you were OK giving up some games you enjoyed. Personally, I'm working my way through WoW, with some dabbling in Space Engineers and Subnautica. None of which are available on Linux, without diving into the world of Wine.
Could I give up Windows PC gaming entirely? Sure.Could I dive into the convoluted and not-always-reliable world of Wine? Sure. Could Bob Ross have given up oil painting for acrylics? Sure. But... it doesn't sound like much fun.
On macos, the mac versions tend to be slower than the windows versions on the same hardware.
Here's one really simple example for you of why this Windows software matters to a very large community of professionals: most accounting work is both taught and done in Excel.
Photoshop->Gimp or just run it with wine
Lightroom->Darktable
Here's a few other pretty awesome art tools you might want to know about BTW: Krita Blender Inkscape
If we're doing "what abouts" though, what about:
freely interchangable desktop layouts
native docker support
a user-friendly terminal
an os kernel that is designed to be malware resistant
Like seriously buddy, the GUI desktop is now ~40 years old and windows /still/ can't support uninstalling the default desktop and installing your own. Custom launchers are one of the most downloaded android app categories, don't try to tell me people don't want it. But hey, at least windows finally got multiple desktops by cribbing the idea from linux after two decades of unsuccessfully trying to tell their customers that it wasn't really that good a feature.
If the best you can say about your operating system is "adobe supports it", which is what it seems like you're saying, then oh dear. Like, I get it, photoshop is pretty darn good. But for realsies, we're in a thread where the title post is about microsoft installing random crap on your computer without permission. This is the same company that is showing ads on your lock screen and start bar[1], has been formally chastised by national governments for it's handling of telemetry[2], autoinstalled updates that bricked peoples laptops[3] and then autoinstalled other updates that put other peoples computers in reboot loops[4]. They're gonna keep doing this stuff. For goodness sake, they incentivised peoples "upgrades" from windows 7 by installing nagware with a deliberately malicious UI[5], and attempting to directly cause professional conflict for sysadmins with stability concerns[6].
You're part of an eternal beta of questionable QA control at the hands of a company that has a documented history of behaving unethically. Do they have to send someone round to your house to kill and eat your cat in front of you before you decide you could maybe dig deep and stoop to learning gimp?
[1]https://www.pcworld.com/article/3039827/windows/7-ways-windo...
[2]http://www.zdnet.com/article/french-authorities-serve-notice...
[3]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/08/25/windows-10-...
[4]http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-10-fall-creators-upda...
[5]https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229040-microsofts-latest...
[6]https://www.windowschimp.com/admins-angered-new-windows-10-u...
Using Wine in work is also not an option, it is too unpredictable (although it's improving at a fast pace).
I know Linux has these features and that's why I personally use it. Clearly they're not the focus of other users though.
If you're building a helicopter, they're not comparable at all. However, the word professional is a rather wider scope than that, and they're excellent for anyone whos business does not revolve around engineering, but has it as an auxiliary. Just as there are whole industries, like banking, that have software developers as a subset of the org chart, there are whole industries that need just a little bit of 3d CAD work.
I would not recommend professional grade adobe editing packages to an independent real estate agent that basically just needs to crop and color-correct photos, and I would not recommend autodesk inventor to a city planner that just needs to 3d print stand-in terrain. Nor would I suggest a $40,000 stratasys printer to them by the way. If you're not going to use the advanced features then the cost is high and the licensing compliance is more painful for no net benefit. GIMP and FreeCAD are exceptional front-runners for these kinds of purposes.
By the way, staying compatible with the industry is a great way to be non-exceptional. I'm not saying linux is the magical bullet of business success (because it's not), but if whatever you're doing is 100% compatible with industry software, then you're not doing anything that someone else hasn't already thought of. If you ever decide you want to move outside the bounds of what others have already done, you'll suddenly discover that open source is a competitive advantage, because it's much easier to extend it to the bleeding edge.
I'm sorry, but that is a complete joke. The distance between gimp and photoshop or darkroom and lightroom is tiny compared to the distance between even base autocad and the open source alternatives. And that's before we start talking about autocad variants like Civil3d and all the third party tools that are built on top of autocad.
Actually, it is worse: you used to be able to replace the default desktop and install your own from the first versions of Windows up until recently. Now you can't and with Windows 8 Microsoft removed a ton of functionality when it comes to customization (e.g. you cannot disable DWM and you cannot use the classic theme - which was the only one with support for totally customizable color schemes).
So these shell replacements I've been using for over a decade don't exist? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...
The only time explorer.exe is running on my computer is when I need some special control panel setting.
Gimp is to Photoshop as Nano is to Emacs.
Most professionals would have no problem using Linux for their needs. What applications are you suggesting aren't up to snuff?
Linux has more gaming than it did 5-10 years ago, but if someone wants to play a game at top performance on PC, you typically need to choose Windows.
You can make an argument about the size of the respective platform's game libraries, but not about their performance. Games on Linux often perform as well as or better than Windows. There's no clear trend that suggests the performance of games on Linux are worse than on Windows.
And even if it were, what good is 70 FPS over 60 FPS beyond pissing contests? You're limited by your display's refresh rate anyway.
This leads to a more responsive and fluid response to your input commands... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjWSRTYV8e0
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Skyrim's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Fallout's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
>Wolfenstein's
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...
I do have a Windows install specifically for gaming, but I haven't booted it in ages.
Edit: my main entertainment IS games.
My 2nd place entertainment activity is reading, and there are few games that can approach a good book in storytelling.
The latest ones you meant?
Cause Wolf3D, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had native clients in early '00s when I played them. RTCW: ET was even completely free (as in beer). I played it for countless of hours!!
Back in those days we had a few people porting games over such as Ryan Gordon from Icculus or Timothee Besset (TTimo) from ID who ported, perhaps sometimes even as an after thought because the original floppies or CD (!!) didn't contain the Linux client.
We've come a long way. These days, you can just have one application to install a shitload of games (Steam, Humble Bundle) and you can find games for whatever platform you run, pay, install, and run it. With far, far more titles. Add to that: WebGL games are going to work on *NIX out of the box. Like Airmash, for example.
That's the only point I was trying to make there.
For instance, apple's sketch. You won't find anything like it even on Windows.
For instance, windows PC. You have a ton of native autohotkey applications for writing macros, powerful 3rd party file explorers like directoryOpus, etc. You can't play video games on it, naturally gamedevelopment is a hassle as well. You can't run CAD programs, etc
Note that you can do that with X11 too using tools like xbindkeys, xdotool, xnee, xrebind, wmctrl, etc.
Inevitably people end up with a requirement for some Windows program that trips up users or administrators in the workplace. Some workplaces (e.g. mine) are fully paid-up committed Microsoft shops where everyone has MSDN.
Baby steps. I don't own a PS4 anyway, but I'm so tired of discussing Windows with people who whine about losing their games that I feel the need to specify an out.
"Well, maybe I would, but this program I use frequently is not available on Linux."
"So? You shouldn't want to use that anyway."
With a sales pitch like this I can't believe the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come to fruition yet.
The amazing thing is that I could already switch it over to Linux via KodiBuntu or some other distro and get 90% of my day-to-day functionality. But then there's the Windows-only library of games that I have on Steam--games that I've paid hundreds of dollars for over the years, that I simply don't have the energy to try fiddling for hours with in WINE. And that damn remaining 10% is what keeps that PC on Windows 10.
As much as I despise W10, Microsoft has the gamer market by the balls, and they know it. I try as much as I can to buy the Remastered Classics of games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment that include proper Linux ports, just to chip away at that dependency, but there are plenty of games that in all likelihood will never have first-class Linux support.
Dev: I'm gonna be a dick and make false equivalences because I personally am not affected by product $X not supporting $Y
User: ...
But the two major differences between what you are talking about and what others are talking about are that a) we have the hardware, it is totally a software issue and b) we are mainly talking for software we already have paid for, not software we may or may not buy in the future.
But hopefully as Linux becomes more popular with gaming (and Microsoft is distracted with UWP and the like), Wine will also see improvements that make gaming better. Already since Valve shown up and rattled things, Wine's gaming compatibility seems to have improved a lot compared to previous years.
A solution for this is to set up dual boot or whatever and use it only for the Windows-only games, until you get bored of them. Then kill Windows and you're free.
And the number of games I'd leave behind in Linux is way more than a simple handful.
Moreso on topic, I actually do much of my gaming in Linux, I only have a couple of AAA titles that I use Windows for (Elite: Dangerous and AC:Origins), everything else is Linux (KSP, X-Com, X-Com 2, RimWorld).
I often try and make a point of emailing a "Thanks for supporting Linux!" to the companies who release the ones I want to play, just so they know we are out there.
I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.
When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.
I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.
Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.
Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.
The truth is that people are shit at using a computer (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/). At some point we need to draw the obvious conclusion from that: users capable of useful contribution to a project are a significant minority compared to the number of users who need or wish to use that software. How many people develop software? About 5%. How many people need to use software? 95% or more? Point being, no matter how important or unimportant your software is, you are guaranteed to have a user base predominantly incapable of contributing to the project.
This is why the constant responses of, "Patches welcome," or similar in response to user complaints is so hostile to users. It's saying to users, "This application is only for experts," which is likely to only appeal to experts. Since experts are so rare, that doesn't seem like a particularly inspiring response. You're just driving users away from your project.
Yes, anybody can contribute to an open source project. No, not everybody is capable of doing so meaningfully. Yes, anybody can recognize a bad design or bug. No, not everybody is capable of recognizing a good or correct design or fixing a bug. If Linux is to ever become an operating system for the desktop, we must accept that the majority of users are not going to be developers, and a user cannot be expected to become a developer just because they want to use a computer. It is no longer 1975.
The only exception to the above is if your project has a user base entirely devoted to programmers. That's precisely why those projects get so much development time.
Yes you're breaking the law but when did that stop anyone?
I do agree with the Linux argument you are making, but you cannot swerve 50% of the global Windows users into Linux. It still doesn't have the best UI reputation (although it gets the job done).
Also, I don't want to hear the UI argument when KDE Plasma exists. I bet 90% or better of Windows users would be comfortable on Plasma.
this is exactly 100% dead on the money
prior to Windows 10 Microsoft was at worst known for producing unreliable mediocre quality software, but they were trustworthy (at least for the end user)
Windows 10 changed everything, at the point you're fighting the company that made the OS to not spy on you, not show you ads, not reboot against your will and not reinstall random crapware you previously removed: it's time to switch
Lack of suitable software can be a dealbreaker for some professions. There aren't many professional video editing suites, for example. But in companies I've worked at, most workers only need a browser and an office suite to do their jobs. Linux would work for them.
I think the real obstacle is training. You have a workforce that's already used to the way windows works. It's easier to hire IT people with windows experience than it is with Linux. Users know how to do their tasks in Microsoft office, and even though Libre office is similar, they might have to learn a few new things.