Major distros are shipping with a better desktop experience than Windows right now, and it has been like that for a while.
If you don't like LibreOffice, try SoftMaker FreeOffice.
If you don't like LibreOffice, try SoftMaker FreeOffice.
I think that's debatable at best. Of course the experience is better because you don't get in-system ads, forceful cloud integration, and all the bad stuff that comes with Microsoft.
But my personal experience of Ubuntu is a constant struggle against randomly occurring bugs, inexplicable performance drops, crashes, and bad design. It's still worth it because it's Ubuntu, but I wouldn't celebrate the UX too much.
Out of the box, Windows is orders of magnitude easier to use for non-technical users.
It's actually orders of magnitude easier for technical users who don't also happen to be Linux experts. I'm using Linux f/t right now, because the ways in which I like it are of high priority enough to me to put up with the negatives. But, damn, the negatives are legion. A couple of weeks in to this particlar OS iteration, and my installation has far more missing than a typical half-day old Windows 10 one. I have written up several github issues and half a dozen forum posts. There are so many little things that don't work, or that I haven't had time to tackle, or which blew up so badly I'm going to have to screw up courage to try them again, or which I'm reconciled to living with.
Which isn't to say that Windows is better overall (I've chosen Linux over it, after all), and there are definitely more desktop-ready distros out there than the one I happen to be using, but I'd be truly loathe to recommend Linux to any non-technical user who wants to do more than browse the web.
Both have their quirks and I had a bunch of randomly occurring bugs under Windows as well. I vividly remember the update process claiming 100% CPU which required extensive research to fix. The worst thing I had with Linux so far was a Kernel update which prevented the Ethernet card from coming up after sleep. Switching back the Kernel fixed that immediately. A bug report later (that's definitely out of layman territory) I got a kernel parameter to add and after a while a proposed fix. That was more support than I ever got for Windows which I paid for.
Windows really shines in games and in corporate (AD/group policies). Not worth the spying for Windows Home.
Even literally double-clicking is pretty much always more painful for me (most pronounced on laptops) on Linux OSes than on Windows, and that's the most basic command on a GUI. Too often the mouse always ends up being too sensitive and moving when you're just trying to click, or the default delay ends up being too short, or the mouse ballistics end up being too awful and unnatural so you can't even aim the damn thing. Or like the window-close button doesn't extend to the screen border, so you have to aim the mouse like a sniper rifle at the close button just to close a window. And forget about many of the multi-finger gestures or other features of your touchpad/mouse; you're lucky if even both two-finger scrolling and edge scrolling work for your laptop.
Now I don't know about your family, but I wouldn't expect my grandma to tell me the mouse acceleration curve sucks or that there's a 3-pixel border that makes it hard to close a window, or that double-clicking turns into dragging when she's trying to click, or that the focus stealing prevention isn't working well, or the myriads of other things that Windows has clearly paid attention to and Linux is oblivious to. She'd just try clicking and get confused why it's not working until it works.
a) Make the mouse slower
b) Use a smaller resolution
c) Increase Window scaling factor or equivalent
d) Use accessibility features
e) Use another mouse acceleration profile
...
I concede that Linux desktops can suck if you are unlucky. But that's the case for Windows as well (I use that daily at work). Every update something changes which forces me to go to Duckduckgo... Another example: I use two monitors at work, a more recent one with high dpi and a really old one with lower dpi. I have to to use a lower than the natural resolution on the new one to get approximately the same font size on both. Although Windows shows up the correct dpi(!) numbers for both it is not possible to scale the font to the same size. Result: the new monitor is blurry whereas the old one is crisp. At home however, I have a 4 monitor set up where one of the monitors has a different resolution as well. No problem for Linux at all.
I stand by my opinion: Both suck evenly well, but one does not spy on me...
You are talking about one of the most observable operating systems ever made. Those claims are very hard to take seriously.
I haven't experienced any of the problems you describe. But if I ran into a problem, I have have debugging symbols, source code, a debugger, profiling tools... whatever is happening would have an explanation.
Which is exactly the problem with talking to linux ideologues. If you differ from them they always claim bad faith. Always.
It sounds like you are far more familiar with OS X and Linux than Windows.
> Installation of Ubuntu is about as easy as it gets
I still have tearing issues on my screen from the graphics drivers that I'm not sure how to fix. Windows has no such issues for me. I know there are issues with Windows too - they just never seem to occur to me.
While I agree this comparison isn't fair to the hard working developers of Linux, it illustrates the point that both operating systems are complex. The more familiar you are, the less problems it seems to have.
Can you provide some examples here? I'm running Kubuntu and it's OK but not Windows level of slick.
Problems I'm having are display scaling and multi monitor support for different display resolutions, shitty wifi drivers and networking needing a restart whenever coming out of sleep.
The only OS that's doing what you're claiming at the moment is ChromeOS just because everything is so wonderfully integrated and _just works_. Even if that comes with handing your life over to Google...
Endemic, I'm afraid (though before long someone's bound to chime in to inform us that these problems don't exist, you just need to read a half dozen Arch wiki pages and spend 4 days compiling things and .. voila!).
Anyway on the different monitor resolutions issue, does Kubuntu support Wayland? It does a better job than X11 for this in my experience.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/875832/how-to-set-per-monito...
I wonder what is their business model. There doesn't seem to be a paid option.
There doesn't seem to be a paid option.
There is: https://www.softmaker.com/en/
But for some reason they make it almost impossible to find from the FreeOffice page.