Even if it wasn't slower, it's literally worse in every way compared to a modern Linux distribution. We live in the browser these days. The operating system we use should not bother us and control us and treat us like idiots.
That's not to say that those things can't work in Linux, or that some distributions don't work better than others. It is also not to say that windows is without its own problems.
However, most users who aren't willing to become technically savvy will have a better time with windows.
> The operating system we use should not bother us and control us and treat us like idiots.
I fully agree, for experienced users. Sadly the majority are still tech illiterate and are (for a lack of experience) "idiots". Windows had a chance to make an extremely easy to use operating system, and blew it by turning it into an ad platform with a slew of unpleasant other sharp edges if you pull the covers back.
I use both systems so I have good comparison, and it is nowhere nearly as clear cut as "On Windows it just works" vs "On Linux you have to invoke unholy incantations to make it work". In some cases it is surprisingly the other way around, where Linux has some standard driver that just works and on Windows you have to install some damned bloatware just to get a fraction of the usability.
My best example case is a Asus C120 mini projector whose linux driver development I personally helped. When plugged, it shows itself as a mass storage device with a .exe file with the driver for windows 7. The driver doesn't work on recent windows versions, I don't know if you can download a new version. On linux, just plug it and it turns into a monitor. Nothing to do, no command to type. And the best part: I discovered it when I accidently plugged it on an ARM machine. It is very unlikely you could have such a good experience even with supported hardware on windows.
Unknown hardware is a mixed bag, but for printers i love the feeling that they will never stop working due to incompatible drivers. Linux gave my old lexmark printer a new life when the windows driver didn't work under windows 7. I used that printer today. It is over 20 years old, but hasn't worked in any windows version released after 2009.
Edit: and this shit happens to people all the time. I have set up rpi printer servers for 4 people. Proprietary drivers stink.
Most of the times nowadays you don't really need a driver, if your printer has wifi/ethernet capability. Almost all printers with network capability work with generic drivers over TCP/IP, and windows is pretty good with identifying these.
Now if you use USB, or god forbid LPT from the previous millennium - then yes, you need drivers that work with your combination of Windows version, x86/x64 version, etc, etc
I will never buy a network printer if USB printers are available. They suffer the usual IOT problem. In a couple of years security updates will stop showing up, and the bloody things usually try very hard to connect to the internet. Then I'd much rather roll my own with a raspberry pi running an LTS OS.
1. Assign static IP to a printer by its MAC address, instead of dynamic IP in DHCP settings.
2. only allow LAN traffic and disable all WAN traffic for that static IP
3. Disable Bluetooth in a printer settings (you can do it by visiting http://192.168.1.{printer's IP addr}
I have a printer that does wifi, but it is stuck forever at 802.11g, meaning it will degrade my wifi network and add something like a 10ms (best case) latency.
I am just old-fashioned. I understand the comfort of connecting the printer to wifi and being up and running. I will probably never do it if I have the option, since I hate having to replace a printer I like. The only downside of my lexmark is that it is slow compared to modern black and white lasers. But then again it is more than half as old as I am.
Here's another thing you can't do with Linux's driver model: install a new video driver without rebooting.
Only partially true. Linux supports almost all devices, but every now and then some companies refuse to release drivers, so the community resorts to reverse engineering of Windows drivers, and here's where the magic happens: the official Windows drivers are closed, while Linux ones are open, so the day that manufacturer decides to stop supporting Windows version X, or product X because they want to sell product Y, then it doesn't work anymore under Windows, but it will continue under Linux. As for now, there's a fairly big number of peripherals that aren't supported by Windows anymore but whose drivers are still actively developed and improved under Linux. Some hardware, given enough time, is being supported better under Linux than Windows; having Open Source device drivers can make a huge difference.
Regarding old devices, in many cases it just makes more sense to replace it with a newer device, than to spend time figuring out how to make old device work, unless this is a hobby to you (totally valid, but this only applies to a few people.)
Because it happened to me on windows, but never did anything like that happen on linux, where if it works once, it will continue to work.
Also, compared to things like NixOS’s boot into previous working config, windows is lightyears away.
But they are still much better than run this graphical installer that may or may not do what it claims, while littering dynamic libs all around the place.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is that Windows is more compatible because it enables more things by default (that are difficult to turn off), whereas Linux is more efficient because it has less bloat by default (but is difficult to enable what you need).
On both, there have been updates that spin for hours and fail. This has happened on multiple machines in multiple environments and MS "support" is a massive convoluted time suck. Maybe I'd get real support if I or the non-profits I support were Enterprise users.
I've had update issues on Linux as well to the point where I simply reinstall on a major update. That's easy to do on Linux because it is free, but a pain on Windows because it is not.
Every Windows box I support is eventually going to get replaced with a Mac because time is valuable.
This is somewhat dated, by I've shopped for hardware for Windows by chipset because some worked great out of the box, while some was finicky.
1 the hardware had a mini CD but that PC had now orking CD-Drive
2 Google for the name on the box, I found nothing . Many companies buy a chip, put their packaging on top and they sell a new product
3 Test it on Linux, it works great
4 run a Linux command to find the real chip used
5 Google for a driver for that chip
6 the official website of the chipmaker only deals with companies not random individual
7 there are many other websites where I can download a driver that might be compatible, but fuck me, can I trust sites like "driver.com", "software.com" , "xyz.com" this are random names I created , in the end I decided that I used 10 years ago softpedia.com and back then they had no malware so I ricked it
8 after I get the driver files I Google a tutorial on how to install .sys files (or maybe the extension was different, sorry)
So not all hardware just works on Windows and some hardware just works on Linux.
printers come with ton of bullshit stuff, in Linux was plug and play but I had to change a setting, but I don have the GUI for ink levels and the software that will diagnose the errors with a clear message instead of a LED. This is the fault of printer makers not Linux though...
Printers are a nightmare. They suck on windows and they suck on Linux. I don't often talk about my job when I meet new people, but when I do people ask me for help with their printer…
I have to say I can't remember the last time I worried about a printer on Linux. My current one, a network-attached HP, just popped up when I wanted to print something. I never installed it - it was just there.
Not sure how that would qualify as sucking.
Or they're in a corporate environment with a much more "enterprise" printer. And again, the IT staff will want to image the same proprietary printer software that hooks into Active Directory on all the clients.
Maybe a small percentage of Linux-savvy admins out there would be able to figure out the correct set of drivers and packages to install that would allow a standard RHEL or Ubuntu laptop to print and scan basic PDFs, but unless the company has a lot of users all using the same Linux distro and version, good luck as it will be a game of whack-a-mole to keep separate distros working every time there's a Kernel upgrade.
I'm a single user on a Mac using a well-researched and highly rated Dell Laser printer. It does work on Linux (and Mac) and has great Postscript support, even over the network.
But 50% of my use is to scan PDFs with optical recognition (I believe that allows the PDFs to be text-searchable instead of just scanning a pixel-image of the documents). And I doubt that function works on Linux, as it requires proprietary Dell software to do the enhanced OCR scanning vs just image scan.
Printers which simply do not work are very rare nowadays. Sometimes you still have to google for a package or another to install and things instantly work.
I've seen a cheap epson network printer which advertises no linux support to work beautifully after "apt get install printer-driver-escpr". Its scanner function never needed any special setting.
The scanner part is flaky on Linux, but works flawlessly on a Mac.
It doesn't even show up on the Windows box. I won't bother to fix it.
So the problem is not in Linux, is it?
It's nice to think it doesn't matter, but the competition is the OS everyone writes a driver for and has a support line to fix when it breaks. The problem isn't Linux in a triage sense, but it is in the end user placing blame sense.
However once you introduce power saving, wifi, and self discovery via Bonjour or whatever voodoo Windows uses, they're not much better.
It doesn't help that every printer manufacturer these days wants their driver to be a full blown App with a custom UI and taskbar icon so they can push their consumables on you.
However, I do not do much printing in my personal life, so that does not necessarily say a lot.
Now... previously, I've had printers with multiple hundred megabyte driver downloads... that stopped working when a new version of Windows came out, and they ended up in a landfill. Ugh. But over the past decade, printing doesn't seem to require drivers. It just works.
With respect to gaming, the parent was referring to work done in the browser, so probably not including gaming. We use consoles for all the gaming in our house, so at least for us that's a non-issue.
I have to disagree on printers. My experience with getting printers to work on Ubuntu is that you have to follow these steps:
Plug it in
Start printing
That's never really been the case for Windows. We used to have to mess with driver installation and then reboot. Sometimes we'd have to do more than that based on visiting a website. When Vista was first released, a lot of older printers were not supported, and that included one of ours. The only solution was to use Linux.
Just a few days ago, my (Windows-using) aunt was visiting and told me her printer stopped working. She has no idea how to get it to work and now she'll have to pay someone to figure it out for her. My mother has had similar issues. I don't much care about Linux vs Windows but I don't think printer support is a highlight of Windows.
But this is not true on laptops though. Right now, my sister is restarting her studies (or rather starting, after working 5 years as a chef), and had to pick up a laptop. I lent my old one, with windows by default, and dual boot to linux. She was only using it for internet, matlab (or scilab, i'm not sure) and dropbox. My brother advised hare to take Joplin for notetaking, tried it on both limux and windows and now, two month after my initial loan, she bought a computer with linux.
Because while on desktop, you might have compatibility issues, on a good laptop you won't.
and it's top of the line dell xps 15 2017 (13-inch version of this laptop even comes with ubuntu pre-installed and officially supported).
on desktops you can choose specific parts you know will work with linux. on laptop you're stuck with a laptop either working or not. newer versions of linux can bring you more issues on both tho.
This hasn't been my experience. Multi-monitor and hidpi only worked out of the box on one distro (pop_os!) and printing to an old brother laser printer only ever worked from Windows.
That said, if I was doing scientific computing via matlab or what not, I would probably grab pop_os over windows too. I still do most of my development work on linux, and video / gaming / home office from the windows partition.
Unfortunately ended right back at Windows 10 since I did want to make use of that device and not keep futzing around with distros and various out of date configuration files and settings.
My experience with vanilla Gnome and Fedora has been excellent regarding these two points. Haven’t had printer issues, either, but I rarely use a printer.
Gaming with Steam and Proton is good enough for me, but still a little more friction than on Windows.
To gain back the linux dev environment, I got a decent laptop (used), and installed linux, but I use the VSCode remoteSSH capability on windows, which works super well.
I dabbled in trying to set up passthrough to a VM, however from research, the chance of getting banned by anti cheat on some games was not worth the risk.
On Windows you will get the manufacturer driver with all the crapware that comes with it. Linux certainly has an inbuilt driver that supports all of it.
About Bluetooth, I never managed to get it working on any Windows computer. Granted that I didn't try very hard before formating them, but the largest difficulty on Linux is discovering that it's already working with everything installed, you just have to stop searching the web on how to set and use it.
YMMV.
(Anyway, I got it to work by searching "bluetooth" on the desktop menu and launching the bluetooth management application.)
Multiple monitors: nope, wayland does it better. The amount of flickering, determining dpi etc is objectively worse than what you get with modern Wayland. The rest may be true, but other than printers, they are quite similar nowadays. Pipewire does close the gap with regards to bluetooth.
And then the other side: for development, windows is strictly inferior. Debugs are exceptionally slow for c++, git bash is cancer with no sane terminal emulator, and for java it is seriously slower for some reason.
Does anyone even use git bash? Powershell Core + standard Git SCM for Windows works perfectly fine for me.
It just works. It just worked (but for these few weeks) since I've been using a Linux laptop daily, which is since 2007 or 2008.
I get how it was useful in 1995 when ACPI didn't exist. But now it's significantly slower to resume from than S3 suspend, which uses <1 watt, and it wears out your SSD. What is it good for?
But the beauty of Linux is that you can take an old machine that barely performs with windows and give it life again under linux
As much as I would love to support system76, this was for a business that needed a physical storefront that could do fast turnaround on warranty services. There aren't a ton of good options at that point, but of those that do, they don't sell system76 laptops.
Yes, but they'd have an even better time with a Mac, and a better time still with a tablet or phone. The days of "windows is easier for end users" are largely at an end. In the modern world, these are *both* enthusiast/professional systems intended for special purpose deployment.
Not if they wanted to game or interact with the windows app ecosystem.
This hasn't been my experience. Printers and gaming are the only two on this list that I think Windows does better out-of-the-box. There is one thing missing from this list that I think Windows does better, and that's power management (suspend/resume) for laptops.
Other than printers, I would say Linux generally performs worse on these things because the companies making the printers, games, and laptops don't support Linux. Printer manufacturers don't support Linux that well, but I also think printer handling on Linux is not as good even when it is supported.
I’ve owned a laptop with this feature and replacing Windows with Linux allowed me to actually use S3 sleep again, safely put the laptop in a bag without worrying about it turning itself on, and it improved the battery life when sleeping by a factor of like 5-10.
Here's what I've observed on this one.
If you put a Linux machine in front of, say, a 15 year old, they immediately figure it out.
If you put one in front of an adult who has been using Windows for 30 years, they get mad at you. Because they already know how to do Z thing in Windows and for Linux they have to figure it out or look it up. Which as a general rule isn't any harder to do on Linux than it is on Windows -- it's often easier -- but they already did it on Windows 30 years ago and don't want to do it again.
That lasts for all of a few hours of use before they've figured out how to do the things they commonly do, if they don't give up.
Until they need to do anything off the beaten track, which can be something as simple as changing the mouse speed (I'm not making this up) and you google it and it's telling you to run terminal commands and update your Xorg.conf file.
And this was on Linux Mint, which is meant to be a beginner's Linux distro.
You're parroting outdated false comments.
It was just one example though.
I tried to install a NVIDIA driver for example on Linux Mint and it wouldn't work until I edited some file to use a different kernel module that would start earlier. Spent ages trying to debug it. On Windows the driver gets installed automatically and if I want to update it I just launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button.
One bad example. The problem with examples like this is that some people will believe and repeat them. Some problems are fixed and people don't even check before spreading the word. You can even find in this thread people talking about how Ubuntu included amazon ads.
> I tried to install a NVIDIA driver for example on Linux Mint and it wouldn't work until I edited some file to use a different kernel module that would start earlier. Spent ages trying to debug it. On Windows the driver gets installed automatically and if I want to update it I just launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button.
Good luck trying to use mint. But AFAIK, Ubuntu comes with NVIDIA drivers by default. There's no need to "launch the Geforce Experience and hit one button" to update it.
It feels like you searching for a complicated way to do things and then complain about it.
It comes with the open-source 'Nouveau' drivers which are, in the nicest words possible, unsatisfactory.
It's definitely easier to install them on Ubuntu though through the drivers GUI.
On Linux I simply type pacman -S nvidia to install the drivers on my system. Reboot and it's done.
There is even a GUI to install packages, since that seems like it's important for you.
I'm very competent at using the terminal myself and have installed Arch Linux from the base image before but it's not exactly user friendly.
As I mentioned before though, Windows does install some quite recent NVIDIA drivers automatically via Windows Update. And if you don't want to use GFE, you can just go to the NVIDIA website and install the latest drivers that way.
Having to navigate through Nvidia's website, create an account, and download a bunch of bloatware that takes forever to install is barbaric. Calling Windows user friendly is a meme at this point.
Windows is a joke in comparison.
"The latest version of the friendly operating system is here. Install it on your computer today!"
"It is designed to work 'out of the box'"
"Most of our users come from Windows and they never look back."
"It's very easy to use. It features an intuitive desktop and adopts KISS principles. Anyone can rapidly feel at home and use Linux Mint. User experience, workflow and comfort is key."
Sounds like a beginner's distro to me. I always thought they were trying to go after a more beginner audience also as they pre-install all the proprietary codecs and a large collection of software that you'd most likely want to use out of the box as a beginner (not stripped down like you say).
Good luck if you want to use Google with autocomplete as your default search engine on the preinstalled Firefox though.
A more mainstream distro is what you're looking for if you want a consistent, modern experience.
If Mint isn't mainstream, what is? Probably just Ubuntu, and maybe PopOS?
Top distros actually being used are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse on the desktop, Debian and CentOS (or RHEL if you pay for it) on the server.
Fedora is close but in the end is really just a staging platform for RHEL. If you want to use any proprietary software /drivers you're likely going to need to enable RPMFusion etc.
OpenSUSE I haven't used in a long time so can't really make a comment but I know it's well established in the Linux space.
Debian is really more suited to the server environment & CentOS/RHEL actually are server distros. If the average user tried to install Debian if they managed to install it they'd likely end up with a system with lots of 'stable' (synonym: outdated) software & struggle to get anything proprietary installed (or OSS - does it even have a software store by default now?)
We were talking about two things. What you just outlined, _and_ since you listed distrowatch's ranking I pulled out metrics from a job supporting a very, very large number of Linux systems.
And I'd argue that if you're looking for a consistent, modern, GUI based experience, then that correlates with the distros with an actually decently sized userbase with large corporate installations. They're the ones that are supporting Linux with people who wouldn't try to run Linux on a dead badger.
> then the only one there you mentioned really is Ubuntu.
> Fedora is close but in the end is really just a staging platform for RHEL. If you want to use any proprietary software /drivers you're likely going to need to enable RPMFusion etc.
What users end up doing instead of installing RPMFusion or somesuch is just downloading .rpms and installing them. If that's out of bounds for an average user than so is Windows with essentially the same model of downloading an exe or msi.
> OpenSUSE I haven't used in a long time so can't really make a comment but I know it's well established in the Linux space.
It's big in the European scene, particularly corporate and .gov envs. There's a language barrier at play hence why it doesn't make as much noise. There are millions of people using it as their daily driver though.
> Debian is really more suited to the server environment & CentOS/RHEL actually are server distros. If the average user tried to install Debian if they managed to install it they'd likely end up with a system with lots of 'stable' (synonym: outdated) software & struggle to get anything proprietary installed (or OSS - does it even have a software store by default now?)
I literally said "Debian and CentOS (or RHEL if you pay for it) on the server". I was digging into internal metrics so that you could have a better idea of what distros are actually being used by my than 1k people, and which ones have nothing better to do than botnet distrowatch.
You make it seem more complicated than it really is.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=294777
The thread's mental. Why does OP need to figure out the device ID of their mouse and run terminal commands to change the speed of their mouse?
Considering this is from GNOME I don't believe the procedure is different in most popular linux distros.
And here is the TOP google result I search "linux how to set mouse speed": https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/mouse-sensitivity...
That was just one example though. I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which contains 'run this in a terminal'.
That was just one example though. I'd argue like 90% of searches for Linux help have an answer which are easier to apply and fix the problem better than when the same happens on windows.
Why is this even bad if 'run this in a terminal' actually fixes the problem?
I work in development teams (.NET mainly so most are GUI-centric) where full-blown developers get uneasy with PowerShell/CMD.
Same here on XFCE, it will give you the link to mouse configuration.
Yes you are. Here is THE top google result I search "linux how to set mouse speed": https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/mouse-sensitivity...
Linux has become ridiculous in this regard, and that's the reason Linux will never be more than a geek operating system. A place where the tech savvy can praise it's features and crap all over Windows, which is only for the unwashed masses who aren't smart enough to see the obvious inferiority of Windows and the great evil empire that is Microsoft.
Yes, the desktop revolution is here! Finally we are free of Windows. Please... Windows is easier and more user friendly than Linux. Full stop.
It is the screen that shows when you click the top left corner. It is very obvious: there's 'Activities' written right there.
> So I click on 'Activities' and it takes me to a Gnome page. What if I'm not using Gnome?
Most popular linux distros nowadays default to GNOME. If you're not using it, you're probably tech savvy enough to search for yourself and not need this kind of help.
> What if I'm not using Ubuntu?
Read above.
> Is it the same in KDE or Cinnamon? How about different Linux distributions?
Read Above.
> Linux has become ridiculous in this regard, and that's the reason Linux will never be more than a geek operating system.
Linux is no longer a geek operating system.
> A place where the tech savvy can praise it's features and crap all over Windows, which is only for the unwashed masses who aren't smart enough to see the obvious inferiority of Windows and the great evil empire that is Microsoft.
Yes... I think I have to admit that I bashed windows and (indirectly) microsoft in this thread... That was uncalled for and is more emotion and feelings than reason. Sorry for that.
Thinking a little better... I don't regret it. They deserve!
> Yes, the desktop revolution is here! Finally we are free of Windows. Please... Windows is easier and more user friendly than Linux. Full stop.
This one I can't disagree. Haven't been using much windows for a long time.
I guess you could make a configuration GUI that purports to let people click to set every option in the system, because they must never type for some reason, but how easy do you think that is to go actually use? There's always something off "the beaten track".
When it comes down to it, computers are a means to an end, so why make the means harder than it has to be, especially for someone who doesn't work in an IT related space?
Why do you think products like the iPad and iPhone are so successful? They work with no configuration and pretty much anyone can use them without too many issues.
When you make the whole of the world a GUI suddenly only features for which convenient GUIs can be made cheaply and pretty enough are worth supporting.
For professional use, read commercial usw of Office programs, I think Windows is easier, so. I never tried Linux in such an environment so.
I'm running Ubuntu with two 4k monitors, an HP printer, and a bluetooth mouse. All of this works perfectly without any fiddling. I've also played quite a few games on this machine thanks to Steam and Proton.
Manjaro, vanilla arch, deviant and Ubuntu all had some difficulty or other, though my objections to Ubuntu are more related to software decisions rather than hardware support. In that case, it was roughly on par, perhaps slightly behind pop_os in terms of out of the box experience.
How so?
From where i'm sat every application i want works and i can do all my business / leisure tasks with relative ease.
I actually don't know what i'd even want or need to improve my user experience with WIN10
I am confused. Also you can add an extra line break so the formatting of your comment is better with each bullet on its own line.
https://thundercloud.net/infoave/images/2021/time-date-on1.p...
https://www.thundercloud.net/infoave/new/show-or-hide-the-da...
I was also frustrated how much downloading I had to do to compile a simple c program. Chocolaty is what makes me not give up. Poweshell is good too.
I am kind of surprised that its that close to Linux performance!!
Someone should tell that to the hundreds of people at my company that use mostly native apps with no browser alternative.
https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
> I want to make one thing crystal clear - Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it has its own share of critical problems. Off the top of my head I want to name the following quite devastating issues with Windows: <long list of issues>
"a complete debunk". Both OSs have their issues. For many people, the Windows issues are worse than the issues they have with Linux.